We have signed up for a 12-week course in vehicle maintenance. Our workshop leader is Natalie Spanner, her blue overalls and pink heels setting her somewhere between The Repair Shop and pantomime dame. All those pistons, crankshafts and dipsticks keep the innuendoes flowing, but in this delightful solo show, written and performed by Matt Miller, something more sober is lurking.
The course, Natalie explains, is about “holistic car care”. In part she is sending up the cliches of self-help therapies – we are, inevitably, on a journey – but in part, she is in earnest.
For all its camp jollity, Fixing is an extended metaphor about life’s crashes and breakdowns. For maintaining a motor, read looking after your relationships. If you neglect your classic car, leaving it in the garage where the components seize up, it will amount to nothing more than a nostalgic memory. The same is true of the loved ones you take for granted.
So while the audience is taking on the roles of ignition, starter motor and alternator in vaguely educational but mainly daft participation games, Miller is weaving in bittersweet childhood memories.
Swapping overalls for a Mars Attacks! sweatshirt, they jump back to the 1990s when a young Matt and their sister Ruby weighed up the trauma of their parents’ divorce against the excitement of weekends with their dad in a ramshackle Crookhill home with no floor in the kitchen and a bath in the bedroom.
Miller is thinking of broken family bonds glued back together with visible scars, like Japanese kintsugi pottery. And they are thinking in particular of the relationship with their father, a man not given to expressing emotion but who could communicate through a mutual love of machinery. The 1954 Sunbeam Talbot the family named Black Beauty was both a means for leisurely days out and, in its upkeep, a shared hobby.
Co-created with director Peader Kirk, Fixing is a novel collision between queer culture and mechanics. The reflective moments could be darker and the happier moments more exuberant, but Miller is as sharp in audience interaction as they are precise as an actor, taking us on a tender, funny and diverting off-road adventure.
• At Alphabetti, Newcastle, until 23 November
