She has been given 60 minutes out of her audience’s day and Kate Ireland won’t waste them, she promises. Her show riffs on the Friday afternoon reward for schoolchildren of an hour’s golden time – but only for those who have earned it by being good all week.
The initial vibe is club meets classroom. We take our seats to thumping dance music and Giulia Grillo’s production grows akin to a lesson with a favourite teacher as Ireland asks for our memories of those Fridays. (No need for hands in the air.) There’s a blackboard of sorts, used for projections as well as creative captioning, still rare at the fringe. We are given a quick history lesson on the concept of “better behaviour through golden time” devised by education consultant Jenny Mosley and Ireland remembers how she was denied the reward, left staring at the blackboard in a purgatorial state.
A performer who shines … Kate Ireland. Photograph: Beckett Guimaraes-Tolley
When she returns to primary school as a teaching assistant, Ireland identifies with a vividly drawn neurodivergent pupil placed on “amber” in the class’s traffic-light system for golden time. Ireland takes us through a week in the job – she may be grown up, but the school system drains and confines her in the same ways as when she was young. Her bond with the young girl helps them both get through the days.
All of this is captured with some lovely image-making: pupils with hands in the air “like windscreen wipers”, her unnamed young ally’s bloody knee, resembling a teacher’s red cross; the time-loop scrawled by the child when asked to depict their future. That last one leads to a head-rush flow of performance poetry that ties together, a little too explicitly, the show’s themes. By then Ireland has deftly conveyed the shortfalls of one-size-fits-all thinking, the march of productivity, ranking and targets not just in school but wider society.
A dose more of that poetry would be welcome and balance out what sometimes feels like a workshop. But you leave feeling lighter, thanks in part to an exercise where the audience are encouraged to remember for themselves carefree times without constraints and then share those memories with Ireland. The room fills with afternoon scenes of dancing with siblings, playing football and talking to pet guinea pigs. Properly golden hours, conjured by a performer who shines too.