Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak is the new show from Victoria Melody, whose whole thing is like being a madder, lower budget Louis Theroux, who embeds herself in unusual hobbies and professions for years on end, eventually making shows about them. Undertakers, pigeon fanciers, competitive dog shows and on her last out – 2022’s Head Set – the amateur stand-up circuit. Although she deftly plays it up – she’s always had a terrific sense of comic timing – there’s no denying she is ‘a character’, and she’s fully aware of this. ‘I often make excruciating but relatable errors’ she observes, accurately.
The headline hobby here is English Civil War reenactment. Kind of. As the show begins, Melody describes how, in the wake of her recent divorce, she turned up at an isolated reenactment via public transport, without knowing anyone there, much to the bemusement of the assembled armies (who all knew each other already and had come by car). Still, she found a warm welcome and was given a musketeer’s uniform by a kindly group happy to turn a blind eye to the fact she was rubbish at musketeering.
One problem: she’d actually joined because she’d fallen in love with the idea of the short-lived Civil War-era dissidents the Diggers, who advocated living off the common land of the country. But she’d fallen in with a group of Royalist re-enactors, who had nothing to do with the Diggers, a Parliamentarian concern. But as they’d been so nice, Melody simply stuck with them.
This is all good fun and on the evidence of Melody’s body of work it’s probably entirely true. But it’s not really what the show’s about. Instead Trouble, Struggle, Bubble and Squeak largely concerns her work with the Brighton council estate of Whitehawk, an impoverished and somewhat maligned community on the fringes of the coastal city. She is attached to the community centre as an artist in residence – and helps out in other ways – and the show details her volunteer work there and various hijinks, notably the time a chunk of Whitehawk was saved from development by the discovery of an entirely new species of beetle, aka the Whitehawk Soldier Beetle.
In the end, for Reasons, she gets her Royalist mates to swap sides for one day and stage a reenactment of the expulsion of the Diggers, who are played by the Whitehawk locals, and it all gets quite agreeably out of hand.
It’s an entertaining show that’s directed by veteran leftwing comic Mark Thomas and bears some of his agit prop hallmarks, albeit heavily filtered through Melody’s own eccentricities. I didn’t love it like I’ve loved some of Melody’s other work - it’s a thoroughly rousing yarn but her own journey in it and the insights she gains from the reenactors are relatively cursory. Even her obsession with the Diggers feels underexplained - not at any point acknowledging that they were a religiously motivated organisation feels like it’s ducking some messiness in order to create a neater narrative, which is quite un-Melody.
Good fun as ever and there’s every chance that its more strident, socially conscious tone will bring in a new audience hitherto put off by her extreme whimsy. For me it wasn’t vintage Melody - but it’s always a pleasure to spend time in her company.
