By Isle of Wight Observer
By Peter Harvey
‘An evening without Kate Bush’, a one-woman show starring Sarah Louise Young, came to the Big Top at the Ventnor Fringe Festival last month. The show was a massive hit at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2019 and has been touring very successfully since the Autumn of 2021.
I was mesmerised by the opening sequence, an intimate rendering of ‘And Dream of Sheep’ lit with a single red light inside a gauzy net. Sarah’s voice channelled Kate’s beautifully, and the inclusion of these simultaneously narrative and abstract lyrics suggested that we were in the presence of two skillful artists.
Bursting from captivity with an exuberant howl, Sarah invited super-fans and civilians alike to run with the hounds of love across the moors, up a hill, into the clouds and far beyond.
The audience participated wholeheartedly throughout. A mother and daughter were invited up to sing (very effective) backing vocals on ‘Cloudbusting’, and a married couple danced romantically on stage during ‘Don’t Give Up’.
The show is a love letter to Kate Bush and this is shown in the attention to detail. A voluminous shimmering cape (gifted by a retired Kate Bush impersonator) is used for a show-stopping rendition of ‘Wow’ with wings wide open in front of a blaze of coloured lights.
Sarah and the cape then performed Kate’s ‘top six dance moves’, including the ‘crafty cat’ where the poles in the cape are inverted to make huge pointy-cat ears. Each successive move brought a roar of recognition from the crowd. Another highlight was ‘Babooshka’, sung entirely in Russian.