Elisabeth Flett
You must become the fragile, dependent creature that nature intended you to be.
Hannah Rose Platt’s new show is a stripped back performance of her concept album Fragile Creatures, Platt leading us both through the songs and through discussions around the themes of medical misogyny – historic and present – which resonate throughout this body of work. Join her as she takes the audience on a journey from seventeenth century miraculous escapes from the dead and unlawful herbalism to the horrors of ‘rest cure’ and the farcical pageantry of Dr Charcot’s ‘hypnotism’ demonstrations, all whilst standing next to the very building in which the historic inspiration for one of her songs took place.
Dressed in a shimmering dress and stood behind a flower-wound mic, Platt introduces listeners to the sound world of Fragile Creatures with an ominous voice over.
Remember, the important element in a man’s happiness is admiration from his wife. Admire his superior strength, his manly courage, his sense of honour and duty in men’s affairs.
We’ve barely digested this nauseating piece of advice before we’re off into the theremin swooping, insistently percussive rhythms of Ataraxia, both the first song on Platt’s album and in the live performance, and it is immediately clear that Fragile Creatures is a highly accomplished piece of musical ingenuity and creative imagination. Initially inspired by the book Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn, Platt’s research into the area of medical misogyny led her across several centuries, through the lives of countless women and through the pages of many, many more books.
The uneasily dreamy Curious Mixtures is inspired by Emilia Hart’s novel Weyward. The growling, grinding rage of Yellow Wallpaper is named after Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famed novella, Platt railing against the cruelties of ‘rest cure’ as she repeats, “do nothing, they say do nothing, they say do nothing, but I need something” on a furious loop. The Sick Rose was written in reference to William Blake, Platt singing of the way women still have to fight to be heard against the engrained sexism found within the medical profession.
Could you believe her when she shows you where it hurts?
Magdelene, a song full of quiet heartbreak and one written about the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, gives us one of the more haunting lines sung throughout Fragile Creatures.
women like us/we never win
Hannah Rose Platt is not interested in giving us a show about suffering alone, however. Accompanied by bassist and husband Freddie Draper, she holds space not just for pain, sorrow and anger but for defiance and triumph, too. Her song The Edinburgh Seven celebrates the nineteenth-century women who campaigned for the right to practise medicine, defying social outrage and even suffering through physical violence to sit their anatomy exams in 1870 at Surgeons Hall. It is a strangely profound twist of fate that Platt’s album contains this song, and therefore she and her audience can honour the legacy of The Edinburgh Seven as part of this show as they sit gathered here, right next to where the Seven pushed their way through a baying crowd throwing mud and shouting curses. Sometimes time isn’t linear. Sometimes it is a windingly unknowable loop, the world clicking into place with a powerful sense of something coming into alignment. To listen to Hannah Rose Platt’s ode to The Edinburgh Seven sung in the same street where they showed so much bravery and resilience feels powerful indeed.
Fragile Creatures is that very best of concept albums: a work of true imagination, and genuine feeling. It is an excellent record. It’s even better live.
Rest in Persistence, Platt sings. This show reminds us to Live in Persistence, too.
You can catch the final performance of Fragile Creatures at Haldane Theatre, theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall, on the 16th August at 18:25 (45 mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Jake Mace
Phoebe Bakker
Jasmine Silk
