REVIEW - YOU KNOW WE BELONG TOGETHER

You Know We Belong Together is a heartwarming, touching variety production showcasing the passions and dreams of people living with an extra chromosome.

Julia Hales creates a deeply personal, warm, and somewhat, educational show. It seems more of a performance than a fully-scripted presentation. We observe Julia invite and chat with her friends on the stage, involve a couple of audience members in the gig, and watch pre-recorded interviews that touch on the topic of love and heartbreaks.

All of Julia’s friends – performers appearing on the stage, have a thing in common – they are all people with incredible passions in their lives (for painting, acting, or dancing). They also live their lives with Down Syndrome. Together, they create a performance that exposes topics around Down Syndrome, including the historical and current medical attitudes and reactions (such as the approach to abort babies with diagnosed Down Syndrome), challenges, the importance of family support, and limited expectations of broader society.

Julia starts the story with an explanation of her love for acting (she has over 20 years of acting experience), and her passion for Home and Away, an Australian soap opera, is second to none. Most of the production includes references and puns related to this TV classic (playing since 1988 with 7,000+ episodes).

That’s where my issue with the show arises. It’s very Australian – to the core, I would say. I was not aware of Home and Away at all, until seeing You Know We Belong Together (I’m just not a TV fan). I did some quick google research and a lot of things started to make more sense. Saying that some of the jokes related to the TV show were pretty straightforward even to a person like me. But some others were just too specific to be enjoyed by people not familiar with the plots of the soap opera. It would be great to get a quick introduction, in the beginning, to make the performance more inclusive for the non-Australian audience.

Talking about inclusion though, I have to applaud the You Know We Belong Together creative team for making it as accessible as possible. The Purcell room at the Southbank Centre has a wheelchair-accessible audience space, and throughout the show, there was a sign language interpreter on the stage.

Hales encourages audience participation and even invites a couple of people from the front row to act out roles from the script and become part of the production. It’s a risky choice, depending on the audience’s attitude and willingness to play along. In the case of the opening night at Southbank, Hales hit the spot with the audience picked for participation – all 3 people looked like they were comfortable with their roles and enjoyed the experience.

The stage setup is a dynamic one – as the performance progresses, more chairs and tables are added, in front of a large screen. The setting is meant to resemble a diner, a classic meet up spot for Home and Away characters. Here, instead of a soap opera cast, we get to “hang out” with the performers, who are introduced to the audience one by one, they then take their seats and start drawing, writing, and sometimes – continuing the dialogue with Hales. This creates a space that respects the performers’ attitude and preferences. It’s clear that some of them are more comfortable being on the stage, while some others are more introverted. The open, freestyle form of just hanging out in a diner together felt very natural and candid for everyone on the stage. As a concept, I found it very respectful and open.

The show is successful in achieving a long-lasting impression – especially in breaking the stigma surrounding Down Syndrome, and what people with this diagnosis are like. One fact that will stayed with me after the performance is that 1 in 5 Australians is a person with a disability. Knowing that the level of representation on TV and in films does not exist, performances like You Know We Belong Together not only fill that gap but also deliver a fantastic, emotional but also funny experience for the audience.

You can catch You Know We Belong Together at the Edinburgh International Festival from 24th – 27th August.

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

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