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Saturday, October 31, 2015
Saturday, October 31, 2015
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I'm going to chalk this down as something I just don't 'get'. The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London was originally written by Spike Milligan as a one-off TV special that would reunite him with fellow Goons Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. It was never recorded, but later reworked as a Two Ronnies sketch.
Now it returns as a staged 'radio play', adapted by Lee Moone and directed by Dirk Maggs. Sometime in the 90s I was given a cassette copy of Maggs' award winning Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, reworking 'lost' Marx brothers Radio shows for a modern audience. I loved it - a freewheeling comedy improv that seemed to move at a million miles a minute in surreal directions.
The Phantom Raspberry Blower thus comes with a fine comedy pedigree. Even better, the show is performed by a seriously talented cast: David Boyle, Lee Moone, Steve Elias, James Petherick and Jodie Jacobs, all of whom make this incredibly difficult performance task look effortless.
Very loosely plotted, the show follows a comedy Jack-the-Ripper-a-like as he terrorises the aristocracy of Victorian London with a series of wet raspberries. First the Lord Mayor's butler is struck dumb by a particularly fierce "Twffttttt", then an elderly dowager and eventually the Prime Minister. As he works his way inexorably up the social ladder his ultimate target proves to be Queen Victoria, the prospect of her being raspberried possibly bringing down the British Empire.
It is, to say the least, silly. The humour is lies in typically Milligan-esque word games, puns and segues into surreal confusion. Problem is, though it frequently raised a smile it never properly made me laugh. This, I think, is a generational thing. Simply, Spike Milligan's humour just doesn't do anything for me. I've always been reticent about admitting this - most of my favourite comedians mark The Goon Show as the Mozart of British comedy but despite my best efforts to appreciate it, the humour leaves me cold.
Not helping is that the show runs for two hours (including an interval). That's an awful lot of time for a show that relies on you finding the blowing of raspberries downright hilarious. Last night was even a charity night for the Prince's Trust, resulting in a room packed with BBC luminaries, all in a good-natured mood and wanting to enjoy themselves. But soon the laughter became restrained, even the best gags drawing polite titters rather than belly laughs. By the time the second half rocked around there were some newly vacant seats, I suppose figuring they'd showed their support and could go home.
Leaving mid-way through was perhaps a little unfair of them. It's a testament to the skill of the cast that their Herculean efforts to wring every single drop of comedy from the script. It's entirely on their backs that this even remotely succeeds; each throwing every performative trick and comedy beat they can into the pot.
Even this occasionally got a bit dull, at which point I began watching the amazingly talented Jessica Bowles doing live sound effects. It's like a little magic show on stage right, clopping coconut shells together; scrunching up paper; tramping on gravel and playing weird musical instruments.
It's not that The Phantom Raspberry Blower... is particularly unenjoyable - but it's extremely dated comedy that will appeal primarily to an older audiences with fond memories of Spike Milligan and the Goons. If you're a fan then you'll be delighted: this is a slick, personable and friendly production. If not, then, like me, this will leave you cold.
★★
The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town is at the St James Theatre until 1st November, then on tour around the country. Tickets here.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Friday, October 30, 2015
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Death row is an alien concept in Britain. We're familiar with its rhythms and rituals from cinema and television: the last meal, the visit from the priest, the long walk to the execution chamber and finally that big final moment. It's so monstrous that it's almost surreal, that their government has the right to put a human being down like an animal.
The State vs. John Hayes takes us inside this process, inside a cell and inside the mind of a corpse-to-be. She is Elyese Dukie (Lucy Roslyn): double murderer, media monster, seductress and apparent sociopath. We're privy to her final confession and thoughts - her last chance to say who she really is.
This is the epitome of a performance-centred character piece. With no need for complex staging or razzle-dazzle, all eyes are locked on to writer/performer Roslyn. From minute one you're drawn into Dukie's magnetic grip via her precise language and calculated physicality.
Elyese's clipped Southern tones display her tight personal control and fierce intelligence: lapsing into clever little word games almost out of habit, playing up the sensationalism of her situation and taking a distinctly sadistic pleasure in toying with audience expectations. Throughout the piece Roslyn scans the audience for eye contact, occasionally seeking emotional support but more often picking someone to haughtily bombard with accusations - taking offence at the idea that we could ever truly 'know' her.
Complementing this is a rock-solid grip on the character's physicality. Completely androgynous, Roslyn never lets us rest on firm ground when trying to pin her down to one gender or the other. Often she's a scary social chameleon; especially when she lapses into 'playing' another woman during her monologue. As if shuffling a deck of cards she slides into stereotyped femininity; voice, mannerisms and personality all turning on a dime to eerie effect.
We're never completely comfortable in Elyese's presence; just as we think we've worked her out she throws out something new that changes everything. As we reach the end of the play this process intensifies, her cool exterior finally cracking with frustration. Underneath all the mind-games, the tortured past and playful eroticism lies someone that, simply, is scared to die.
Throughout, the piece maintains a firm control of emotional tone; knowing precisely where and when to ramp things up and down, ensuring that we know what Elyese is feeling. Where there's less control is in the actual narrative. To some extent we must play detective with her statements, silently piecing together the jigsaw of her social network, history and relationships.
Doing is proves to be quite tricky. Elyese is one hell of a complicated character: an androgynous bisexual, (possibly) split-personality sociopath with a knotted past that involves at least one child. This dips a little bit into sensationalistic Jerry Springer territory and thus requires the audience to suspend their disbelief a tiny bit. And that's if you can keep up: the fractured narrative and delivery - you've got to be attentive and alert to piece this together.
I think I got everything, though on leaving I was still a tiny bit unsure of the precise ins and outs of Elyese's tale. But if I have to choose between narrative clarity with emotional resonance I'll pick the latter every time.
Watching this is like spending an hour in a lion's cage, at times you can almost smell the disinfectant and feel the dread of death row...
★★★★
The State vs John Hayes is at the King's Head Theatre until 22 November. Tickets here.
★★★★
The State vs John Hayes is at the King's Head Theatre until 22 November. Tickets here.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Thursday, October 29, 2015
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"Invisible Treasure is an interactive digital playspace, an electrifying exploration of human relationships, power structures and individual agency." - fanSHEN
I was sold! As I spend most of my nights sitting quietly in a darkened room watching theatre of varying quality, something a bit different always excites me. I love interactive events and some of my all-time favourite theatrical experiences have been in these kinds of productions. Expectations were high.
Invisible Treasure involves the audience (maybe 25 people or so) being herded into a large, minimally designed room with nothing in it except a gigantic plush rabbit. A computer screen high on the wall soon starts giving cryptic clues as to what we're to do. These are miniature puzzles: trying to make music play, doing dance moves, forming shapes and so on. This lasts about an hour or so, then you leave.
I respect the ideas and ambitions behind Invisible Treasure. It's admirable in the way it forces participants to let their hair down and fosters co-operation between strangers. It's also psychologically interesting; exploring submission to authority, leadership roles within groups and how different personality types interact with one another. Similarly, the eventual finale, when we head 'backstage' works nicely.
But the main problem is simple: Invisible Treasure isn't fun. Being ordered around by a impersonal video screen gets old fast and the individual games drag on and on - and then repeat themselves. Structurally the show emulates videogames: but though it successfully recreates their aesthetic it doesn't understand their design.
The first flaw is that the players/audience are often never certain what they're supposed to be doing. There's a couple of moments where this is clear - we're told to form ourselves into simple shapes. But largely we're given cryptic hints like "Make the sound stop." We do, but the game proceeds to repeat itself over and over with flash of red light and angry buzz - apparently we've failed. We're never guided on what we're supposed to be doing or why we're failing. Eventually someone apparently decides we're never going to solve this and the game moves on.
On a similar tack, there's a part where one of the players is summoned to a small room. We're told that she knows something. She emerges and a timer begins - with the enigmatic message: "You know nothing." (you can say that again, Invisible Treasure...). I guess we're supposed to question the summoned player but she seems as baffled as us. The timer ticks down to zero, nothing happens and the game perfunctorily moves on to the next thing. You're left wondering what the point of any of that was.
Without clearly defined rules, goals and rewards there's no sense of achievement or progress. This is literally the foundation of game design - and appears to have been overlooked.
The other main problem is technological. The room is equipped with sensors and microphones that respond to the movements inside. These are a bit glitchy - and it's often difficult to tell whether what you're doing is being picked up by the sensors. In a 'Free Play' session we discover that by waving our arms we can 'paint' the ceiling. Leaving aside that this isn't exactly cutting-edge (EyeToy on the Playstation 2 was doing this sort of thing 12 years ago) it's never actually clear how much impact we're having on our environment
There are bits that do work: though I strongly suspect these are built around the simple method of having someone watching a videofeed of the room and deciding whether we've met the criteria. I don't have a problem if the show wants to play Mechanical Turk with us, especially if the illusion's convincing. But if it's going to do for a few things just go the whole hog: ditch the iffy tech and fake the entire show.
As it stands right now, Invisible Treasure doesn't work. There's the germ of a good idea here, but neither design nor the tech is up to task. I grant that we were warned that the show was in its teething stages and glitches were to be expected; but in my opinion there are deep design flaws that go way beyond opening night jitters. This really needs a rethink.
★★
Invisible Treasure is at Ovalhouse until 14th November. Tickets here.
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
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I can't fault The Boat's ambition. Theatre N16's new home in Balham (they were priced out of Stoke Newington and can't afford to rebrand) turns the top floor of the Bedford Pub into the open ocean. A white boat sits in the centre of the room, surrounded by an undulating sheet of plastic wrap that laps at the audience's feet. Inside are two young girls (Pia Laborde Noguez and Cristina Catalina), their only companions Turtle (Matthew Coulton) and Gull (Gabriele Lombardo).
Told episodically, we follow the girls on an epic "odd-at-sea" as they head towards an unstated destination. As events proceed our protagonist philosophically ponders the nature of reality, belief and trust as she spirals into psychological breakdown.
The production busts down the fourth wall in the opening minute, where the 'Jellyfish of Sound' invites the audience to imitate the swoosh and wash of the ocean, sounds that'll be looped throughout the production. This deconstructionist tendency is felt through the entire production: characters' slipping into various foreign languages for a couple of lines, the gradual destruction of the set, the 'animal' companions dissolving into men in costumes and so on.
The show blurs the line between theatre and performance art; its best bits some genuinely interesting visual ideas. The best is death conveyed by the genuinely creepy image of smearing grey clay over a character's face. It effectively obliterates their features, creating a creepy idea of depersonalisation. The wet, malleable clay also conveys decay and decomposition alarmingly well - which combined with Cristina Catalina's top class corpse performance sent shivers up the spine.
But though individual moments work well enough, as a whole The Boat really doesn't. My main beef is that the entire show is written in brain-numbing prolix: I was paying attention (and taking notes) and I found much of the experience largely impenetrable. Narrative is jettisoned in favour of, for example, long-winded allegorical arguments about the nature of the moon that have the distinct whiff of stoner philosophising.
Reading up on the show after I'd seen it I was disturbed to find that The Boat was, according to the company: "dealing ... with personal experiences of assault and the horrific human trafficking industry that plagues our world today…." This issue is one of the tragedies of our time and a red-hot political button - precisely the kind of topic that contemporary theatre should be tackling. Unfortunately, swaddling the issue in layer after layer of suffocating metaphor and experimental staging sucks away the forthright anger and call to action that any piece touching on this topic should contain.
Frankly, dealing with the migrant crisis by having people hopping about pretending to be friendly turtles and mischievous seagulls, delivering enigmatic dialogue is straight-up gimmicky. The result is stilted, emotionally retarded theatre that revels in inaccessibility. This is an important topic - just give us the straight story and a clear message please.
The (admittedly uncharitable) conclusion I eventually reached was that all the cutesy lo-fi avant-garde trappings are there to disguise that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes. A disappointing debut for Theatre N16.
★★
The Boat is at Theatre N16 until 5th November. Tickets here.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
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With Spectre Daniel Craig surpasses Connery and is now officially the best James Bond ever. Save for
the stumble of 2008's Quantum of Solace,
Craig's films have delivered CPR to an ailing franchise that was in
serious danger of disappearing up its own arse in a flurry of crap
jokes and crap CGI.
For
my money Skyfall was
an all-time series high; a critique on the very idea of James Bond,
not to mention being sumptuously gorgeous and brilliantly performed.
Three years later we're back with the same director, screenwriters
and aesthetic sensibility. So, is this as good as Skyfall?
No.
But
don't get me wrong, it's a very, very good movie. The conceit is that
the actions of the three previous Craig Bond villains have been
orchestrated by globe-spanning ultrasecret organisation SPECTRE.
Beginning with an astonishing set piece action sequence in Mexico
City, Bond travels to Italy, Austria and Morocco in hot pursuit of
the organisation and its shadowy director (Christoph Waltz).
Meanwhile
back in London M16 is facing big changes. They're being merged with
M15 and are now under the command of Whitehall wonk Denbigh. He's
masterminding a global, multinational surveillance network that will
combine the intelligence gathering resources of the world superpowers
into one system. The individual agent is, as Denbigh puts it,
"prehistoric",
arguing that whatever a lone gunman can do a drone can do cheaper,
safer and more efficiently.
This
is a post-Snowden critique of intelligence work; shrewdly pitting the
'old-school' of M, Moneypenny, Q and Bond against their modern
counterparts. Given how much quasi-illegal snooping these characters
usually do dividing everyone up into good spies and bad spies is a
teensy bit hypocritical, but seeing Bond essentially going toe to toe
with modern GCHQ is so fun so I'll allow it.
Naturally,
the globetrotting story takes us to some gobsmackingly pretty
locations; all shot with a compositional rigour that's the equal of
anything in modern cinema. It's a cliche to say that every frame is a
painting - but seriously - every single shot stuns. Whether it be a
monochrome Bond framed between Brutalist pillars and giant cross, an
abandoned desert train station, a low-lit Roman garden or a gently
jangling luxury train carriage - it's the movie-going equivalent of
sipping fine wine.
The beauty is evident from the first couple of minutes; Mendes orchestrating a
brainmeltingly complex, Scorsese-bothering one-shot that zips through
a busy Dia De Los Muertes parade, through a packed hotel, ducking
into a elevator, through a hotel room, out the window and along the
rooftop. It's a dizzying statement of intent; the film eager to
impress us the audience first with its cinematic credentials, then
with its explosions, collapsing buildings and easy sense of style.
A
cinematic bounty like this is nothing to be sniffed at, and in
combination with Craig's magnetic Bond, an excellent supporting cast
(with particular credit to Léa Seydoux's cool-as-ice Bond girl) and
a graceful yet tense score by Thomas Newman, makes for 148 minutes
that fly by in the blink of an eye.
Yet
it's not quite as good as Skyfall.
That film had something important to say about Bond; dissembling him
into his constituent parts and trying to figure out what makes the
character still popular 50 years after Dr No.
It boldly met the character's latent imperialism, misogyny and
establishment credentials head on, ending with a character boiled
back to his essentials and stronger than ever before.
But
you can only pull that trick once every couple of decades. Spectre
finds itself with comparatively little to add to on its central
subject. There's a thematic line that runs about three-quarters
through the film of Bond as the walking dead; a man thats immersed
himself in violence so long that he has become a figurative angel of
death.
After
all, he opens the film dressed as a skeleton, casually (and
repeatedly) states his profession as 'killer', is referred to as a
relic of the past and is continually shot in monochrome, Craig's
scalloped features lit to give the impression of a skull.
Disappointingly this imagery peters out in the final act with no
symbolic resolution - something Skyfall managed
in spades with its low-key Highlands church showdown.
This feeds into the nagging feeling that the final act isn't as it should be. Belief begins to strain a bit as Bond enters a bizarrely convoluted puzzle/bomb sequence that never quite gels as well as it should. It ends on a perfunctory note, quickly wrapping up its ambitious story of global surveillance networks and omnipotent crime gangs and zipping off in a swanky car as if everything's hunky dory. That said, it's never dull - it's only when you sit back for a moment that you spot the fraying in the narrative seams.
One
element of Skyfall
that Spectre does
successfully develop is exploring classic Bond imagery. Christop
Waltz' baddie has a genuine straight-up evil lair, complete with
needlessly complex torture device and legions of uniformed goons. He
even wears a Nehru collar and pets a white cat! You'd think that
Austin Powers would
have conclusively rendered this stuff laughable, but Spectre
plays it straight and pulls it off beautifully.
This
era of Bond is the best the series has been in 50 years. Craig has
surpassed Connery, delivering a Bond that's vicious, erotic and
empathetic; able to make us laugh and switch to utterly menacing at
the drop of a hat. In Mendes we have a director who can successfully
marry dramatic pathos and things going kaboom - who treats the
material with intelligence and style. Together they've made Bond a
series that's not just respected for its action credentials and
inbuilt cultural cachet, but a genuinely exciting cinematic event.
If,
as he insists, this is Craig's final Bond, then he's left the series
in better shape than it's ever been. This is top flight movie-making.
★★★★
Spectre is on general release now.
Monday, October 26, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
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Swaddled in fairy lights, tiara-clad and wound up into roll of fabric; you're not going to mistake anyone else for Silvia Ziranek. She was performing at the Bloomsbury Festival, which marks the International Year of Light 2015, taking 'LIGHT' at its theme.
A little light was desperately needed - this was a rather gloomy day: London squatted under a corpse-coloured sky that couldn't make up its mind whether to properly rain or not. Worse the performance took place inside a big beige tent on the grounds of Mary Ward's house. She was President of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League: who vociferously campaigned against the suffragettes on the basis that: "constitutional, legal, financial, military, and international problems are problems only men can solve" as women have a "disability of sex".
Jeepers, talk about being on the wrong side of history...
Anyway, underneath this oppressive weather, inside an uninspiring tent and within the grounds of a house with unpleasant historical reverberations, Silvia was a bright core of light, giving us a performance that consisted of her miming a poem in semaphore, reciting it, explaining what it all meant and finally performing it again so we can view it through 'new' eyes.
Silvia's approaches language like a topiarist approaches a particularly tangled hedge, pruning and snipping away anything extraneous until some carefully shaped beauty emerges. In her case it's usually clipped and cryptic semi-sentences delivered with perfect enunciation and confidence. The end result is, for example:
"culture couture to some dressy dream / a frock come true / can ask advice on shelving / for a castle zoo / can buy the Mai Tai / as I wordly rhyme in lovement with in sock and in soul / wool wash"
Her language is so dense it all but requires the audience do some mental legwork to get anything from it. I love it: you can sense a core of meaning, but this is poetry as Rorschach test, any insight you glean the product of an invisible collaboration between yourself and Silvia.
That said, it's not for everyone. A couple of times I've taken friends along to these performances and they've ended up largely baffled. So it was with some surprise that she spent much of the performance explaining precisely what her actions and words meant, revealing that the piece was originally intended for the 'Art For Africa' campaign - being originally performed at Sotheby's.
She gradually unravelled her language, pointing out references to Tilda Swinton's "The Maybe", in which she slept inside a glass box in the Serpentine Gallery, castles in which she'd been invited to perform at, references to photographic work and so on. I've always suspected that Silvia quite enjoyed being an enigma, so I was surprised to see her go all Rosetta Stone on us.
Then again, it makes my job a hell of a lot easier when an artist explains precisely what they're up to. Additionally, watching the same performance twice, once without context and once with is genuinely transformative. Some people seem to assume that performance art is playing Emperor's New Clothes; being obscure and difficult to disguise that there's nothing underneath. This piece disproves all that - getting under the skin of a piece and communicating a straightforward (but no less satisfying message).
Aside from the lights sprinkled about her torso, the explanation was the true illumination - lifting Silvia's bonnet and shining a torch on the pistons and gears that thrum away under her lid. A pleasure as always.
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Saturday, October 24, 2015
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The Loris is a tricky bit of theatre to review. It runs on pure-grade surprise, sending participants pinballing around underneath UCL while hearing some very strange stories. The audience will spiral down staircases into the earth and see some of the Georgian industrial machinery that used to power UCL, all given context by a melancholy physicist and some excellent puppetry.
Much of the piece is set in and around UCL's colossal Senate House, once described as a "static, massive pyramid obviously designed to last for a thousand years". Critics dubbed it Stalinist and totalitarian; something George Orwell obviously agreed with when he based the Ministry of Truth on it in Nineteen Eighty-Four (the excellent John Hurt film adaptation also used the location).
The monumental design combined with ominous cultural associations give the building a spookily atmospheric pull on the neighbourhood. I quite like it, especially when viewed under typically London slate-grey overcast skies. It's all to easy to pause, stare up at it and think "Big Brother Is Watching You".
The Loris toys with these feelings of ominousness; plunging us deep inside the building to chambers we're assured are "extremely deadly". Our guide is the melancholy and reclusive Dr Snow (Gráinne Byrne), who has become wrapped up in her work to the exclusion of all else. She confidently stalks the backstage labyrinths of the building like a ghost, leading us down unprepossessing corridors that open out onto gigantically impressive rooms.
Assisting her is a security guard, Darren (Aaron Gordon). His Dad worked down here, allowing young Darren to play in the warrens of tunnels and pipes that snake underneath the building. He provides the humanity to offset Snow's aloofness, chipping in with little cheery comments when things get a tiny bit too heavy.
The Loris isn't exactly an uplifting tale - it's studded with betrayals, tragedy and death. Even the initially uplifting Darren gets his moments of regret in his past. As you leave you're not entirely sure what the moral was, though there's some irreducible core of sadness lurking at the heart of the piece. This enigmatic tone dovetails beautifully with the truly special places in which these scenes take place.
Going 'backstage' was the absolute high-point for me: I love being led beyond doors with pictograms of men being electrocuted and signs that read "DANGER OF DEATH" and finding myself amidst gigantic old machinery. I've unwittingly been mere meters from many of these places - there's a thrill in staring up from underneath the pavement and watching the footsteps of the students up above you. By the mid-way point I felt as if the building were some gigantic organism and I were a germ inside. Every surface bristles with pipes, gargantuan tanks squat under the ground and dark tunnels wind off into infinity.
I've always had a passion for subterranean London and though we're teased with the promise of tunnels so secret that we can't possibly go in there - it's still hugely satisfying. The Loris fills these naturally atmospheric places with a keenly conveyed sense of longing, using the disused spaces to underline some moving psychological truths..
It's a hell of an experience, beautifully performed by Byrne and Gordon, and one I'm unlikely to forget in a hurry. As I post this there's only two performances to go, both today! So hop to it!
★★★★
The Loris has just two performances left at the Bloomsbury Festival - today at 16:00 and 19:30. Tickets here. Chop chop.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Friday, October 23, 2015
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Shakespeare famously wrote that revenge is a dish best served cold, though his alternative suggestion of serving it inside a great big pie works for me too. Titus Andronicus has always been my Shakespeare guilty pleasure; not his best play but probably his craziest. Apparently written while in a Tarantino kind of mood, it's a non-stop whirlwind of death, mutilation and sadism - so ludicrously over the top that it's difficult to take seriously.
Many didn't, to the point of declaring the play a failure as a tragedy as audiences can't help giggling at lines like: "Bear thou my hand, sweet wench, between thy teeth." The Victorians, so offended by the violence, judged that the play so uncouth that nice Mr Shakespeare couldn't possibly have authored it. The upshot is that while top dogs like Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and so on usually treated with dramatic reverence, you can be a bit silly with Titus Andronicus.
Company Arrows and Traps realise that, making the promising boast that their production will be an "unrelenting carnival of carnage". They more than live up to this; serving up a Titus with lashings of stage blood, heads in bags, lots of stabbings and some slit throats galore.
The tone is set from minute one, where characters enter to the theme from Terminator. It opens a show that skips freely between impromptu audience participation, expressionistic use of masks, dance-like fight scenes and the blackest of black comedy. Some of it doesn't work: a sequence where the Andronicus clan settle down for a communal game of Skyrim confuses (not helped by a slightly dim projector). Some of it does: the use of wooden masks when Tamora and her sons are disguised as Revenge, Rape and Murder is striking and genuinely creepy.
Further iffy choices come in eclectic soundtrack. One minute we're listening to Marilyn Manson, the next a Kate Bush cover and maybe a dab of Radiohead. These are all good songs, but it's difficult to draw any connection between them and what's going on - as if the stage manager's iPod has been left on shuffle.
But at least you can't accuse Arrows and Traps' Titus of being boring. These little flourishes may vary in effectiveness but they keep the audience interested - even if it's trying to anticipate what the hell they're going to do next.
Thankfully this 'everything including the kitchen sink' approach is underpinned by a confident, charismatic cast. Standing out are Alex Stevens and Will Mytum's Chiron and Demetrius realised as feral punk villains with a touch of A Clockwork Orange. Mytum and Stevens are physically similar to one another - which cranks up the creepiness as they scuttle around the stage with Joker-like smiles carved across their faces
Also fantastically fun is Spencer Lee Osborne's Aaron. In a play full of murderers and rapists, Aaron stands out as particularly despicable: "I have done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly / And nothing grieves me heartily indeed / But that I cannot do ten thousand more!" It's a cackling supervillain speech and Osborne delivers it with the appropriate levels of gusto, stomping about and bellowing his lines in the manner of Brian Blessed.
Matthew Ward's Titus also impresses. Ward has to travel from sturdy militaristic patriarch all the way to demented chef - not exactly a well-trod dramatic arc. You have to bear in mind that this isn't a subtle play and Titus isn't a particularly subtle character. Even so there are moments where we see the cracks in his mind beginning to widen - the best being when he's confronted by his mutilated daughter. The best moments are the giggles that involuntarily escape as madness sets in, all which eventually leads to themania that overtakes him in the final scenes.
Compared to Shakespeare's usual fare there isn't a huge amount of profundity in Titus Andronicus. If I take anything away, it's to be deeply suspicious of giant meat pies served by your smiling nemesis. But this is a damn fun, visually exciting and physically dynamic show - all the bloody spatterings and severed heads making it an excellent fit for Halloween.
★★★★
Titus Andronicus is at the New Wimbledon Theatre until 14th November. Tickets here.
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Thursday, October 22, 2015
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Playground is a group of interesting characters in search of a plot. Set in east London's Victoria Park, the story revolves around a book club studying the Enid Blyton's Famous Five novels. They are; the fidgeting and childlike Danny (Richard Fish), ardent young Communist Tamsin (Laura Garnier), neurotic and sexually repressed Carolyn (Josie Ayers) and nervous abuse survivor Stuart (Simon Every).
Tamsin and Stuart are patients at a psychiatric hospital, Danny is a former patient and we meet Carolyn on her way to commit suicide in Regent's Canal. Bubbling away in the background is a serial killer whose modus operandi is to lure children away from their parents and swiftly decapitate them. Investigating this are caricature detectives Mitchell (Dan MacLane) and Birch (Christopher James Barley). Also there's the cake-selling Bella (Sarah Quist), who is largely extraneous to proceedings.
A dark comedy, I can't deny that Playground succeeded in wringing a decent amount of genuine chuckles from me. The lion's share of these came from Garnier's excellent Tamsin, a pitch perfect parody of an ardent young Communist who's read a couple of books but has no actual experience of life. I never got tired her her haughtily quoting Trotsky as she consigns ideas to the "dustbin of history" or trying her hardest to align herself with the somewhat perplexed working class Stuart.
Everyone else gets a little moment to shine. Occasionally the comedy is rather broad, as with the outrageously campy drag queen detective with a Thatcher fetish. Sometimes its more subtle, as we gradually piece together the erotic fixations of the severely repressed Carolyn. Everyone bounces well off each other; the play cycling between combinations of different characters just to see how they react to one another.
The only problem is this: I have no idea what the hell this play is about. I'm generally fine with plot being a secondary concern in theatre, but Playground barfs up a big pile of apparently disconnected plot elements and just lets them sit there, confusing everyone. Theoretically the off-stage serial killer provides narrative thrust, but none of the characters appear to care a huge amount about it and some don't even comment on it at all.
That plot element is contrasted with the works of Enid Blyton; characters brandish copies of Famous Five books throughout the play and four huge book covers adorn the set. That serial killer is even leaving copies of Blyton books on his victims, always opened at page 100. It's a nice nostalgia hit to hear people talking about Kirrin Island, Aunt Fanny and Timmy the dog - but I'll be damned if I can work out what thematic connection there is.
To me the Blyton connection seems suspiciously like a vestigial element from an earlier draft of the play. If you squint you can just about imagine Playground as a contemporary satire of The Famous Five. Theoretically our characters could be a group of people teaming up to solve a mystery, yet where Blyton used gleamingly moralistic British kids, Playground uses the mentally ill. Hobbling that interpretation is that Playground's characters don't actually do any mystery-solving, they just sit around wrapped up their various individual dramas.
There being no obvious connection between the two major elements means Playground just doesn't work. The end result feels like a group of sketch comedy characters crowbarred into a flimsy narrative that quickly sputters out. It's a shame - there's some neat writing and performances here, but without any connective tissue it's completely wasted.
★★
Playground is at the Old Red Lion Theatre until 7 November
To me the Blyton connection seems suspiciously like a vestigial element from an earlier draft of the play. If you squint you can just about imagine Playground as a contemporary satire of The Famous Five. Theoretically our characters could be a group of people teaming up to solve a mystery, yet where Blyton used gleamingly moralistic British kids, Playground uses the mentally ill. Hobbling that interpretation is that Playground's characters don't actually do any mystery-solving, they just sit around wrapped up their various individual dramas.
There being no obvious connection between the two major elements means Playground just doesn't work. The end result feels like a group of sketch comedy characters crowbarred into a flimsy narrative that quickly sputters out. It's a shame - there's some neat writing and performances here, but without any connective tissue it's completely wasted.
★★
Playground is at the Old Red Lion Theatre until 7 November
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
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"Boats. Big boats. Big men on big boats. Also, prostitutes."
Read the full review at We Got This Covered.
★★
Monday, October 19, 2015
Monday, October 19, 2015
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"Sadness and hope intertwine in Todd Haynes’ Carol, where a couple are caught in each other’s gravitational pull and the universe tries to tear them apart.
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s much-loved 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Carol chronicles the romance between Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a young New Yorker working in a department store, and Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a married society mother. Set in the early 1950s, lesbianism (and homosexuality in general) is regarded as a mental disorder – even a hint of same-sex reaction inspires loathing and disgust."
★★★★
"“Disgusting”. “Perverted.” “The British Judiciary should hold him accountable for what he’s doing.”
These are just a handful of reactions to Dougie Wallace’s new body of work: Harrodsburg.
Lauded for his documenting of the puke-tinged hedonism of Blackpool in Stags, Hens & Bunnies, the “total fucking chaos” of Shoreditch Wild Life and the Bombay cab driver portraits Road Wallah, Harrodsburg finds Wallace on the hunt for richer prey.
For Harrodsburg, Wallace prowled the pavements of London’s richest post-codes, flash and camera primed, waiting for a suitable subject. When he spots one, he approaches, snaps a quick close-up and is gone before they’ve had time to process what’s happened."
Friday, October 16, 2015
Friday, October 16, 2015
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"It was in the woods near Halicarnassus that Hermaphroditus fatefully
encountered the nymph Salmacis. Resting in her pool, she was overcome
with lust for the beautiful boy and tried unsuccessfully to seduce him.
Later, Hermaphroditus, finding himself alone, decided to take a bath.
Spotting her chance, Salmacis dove in with him, wrapping herself around
the struggling boy. In ecstasy she yelled “Gods! May we never part!”
Gods were paying attention, fusing male and female bodies into one form.
It’s in this pool that we meet the nineteen year old Arianna (Ondina
Quatri). Worried that she hasn’t menstruated or developed breasts, she’s
been on hormone therapy, resulting in small breasts growing but with
few other signs of puberty. Worryingly, she also hasn’t felt any sexual
pleasure – both masturbation and experiments with boys leaving her
unfulfilled. Plus, there’s that mysterious scar above her genitals that
her parents assure her is from a childhood hernia operation.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out where this one is going."
★★★
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
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The Lobster is about as high concept as it gets. In a mildly dystopian future, any singletons must report to a hotel. Once there they must fall in love within 40 days, if they fail to do so theywill turned into an animal of their choice. Most choose dogs. Colin Farrell's David chooses a lobster because "they're blue-blooded like aristocrats, they live for hundreds of years, are fertile their entire lives and I like the sea very much".
But crustaceanhood is not inevitable. He can extend the amount of days he has left by hunting down free-roaming singletons with a tranquilliser rifle, or try his best to find a compatible partner amongst the rest of these sadsack singles. Gradually Lanthimos expands the borders of his world: exploring the world of forest-dwelling militant singletons and their guerrilla activities in a society only fit for happy couples.
The film is strange from top to bottom. On top of the animal transformations, Lanthimos shows us a society composed of adult children who suffer a life under byzantine rules, peppered with bizarre punishments and sudden acts of extreme violence. English is spoken in a faintly slurred monotone, as if the speakers are slightly drugged. What they actually say is honest to point of being surreal - the characters generally saying exactly what's on their mind at all times.
As a cinematic experience it's strangely hypnotic, like being stuck in a dream that's constantly on the brink of curdling. I can only really find two points of genuine comparison; the first are the monologues of satirist Chris Morris, the second is playwright Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros - about the population of a town slowly turning into rhinoceroses. Both these pieces and The Lobster fit into 'theatre of the absurd'. This is drama exploring the idea that human existence is unguided and ultimately pointless. It argues that if there's no meaning or purpose to life, then logic begins to dissolve, being replaced with the irrational and bizarre.
In The Lobster, Lanthimos applies this philosophy of meaninglessness to romantic relationships, reaching fascinating conclusions. On one hand there's an obviously satirical examination of people 'matching' with each other for the flimsiest of reasons. Lanthimos' couples define compatibility with each other by both sharing maladies; for example short-sightedness, limps and propensity for nosebleeds. There's clear parallels in the way we use Tindr, OkCupid and Match.com - searching for people who we can connect with on a completely superficial level.
Within the narrative this mode of thinking eventually infects even true love, Lanthimos characters unable to distinguish the superficial from the genuine. I think it's a little too neat to summarise The Lobster as an allegory for online dating, rather that it intends to expose how expectations of romance have been warped by technology, media and identity politics. In an age of where ego rules the roost, the modern singleton merely seeks a carbon copy of themselves to love, or tries their best to cram themselves into someone else's pre-existing mould.
Thing is, The Lobster is so opaque that this is just one of a thousand valid readings. I suspect that interpretations of what's really thrumming away in its emotional core will be strongly individual romantic experience.
That said there's some things that can't be quibbled with. For one, this is an unambiguously beautiful film. The inside of the hotel has a The Shining-esque creepiness to it, all repeated geometric patterns and shots of long, telescoping hallways. The latter half of the film takes place in the forest, where luscious tangled greenery bristles with dark Edenic eroticism recalling Lars von Trier's Antichrist.
Though the two 'halves' occupy opposite aesthetic poles, the film finds a visual unity in its framing. Keeping us on our toes, Lanthimos sticks with painfully long still takes with the aim of unnerving us. In one memorable shot we gaze at the twitching body of a suicide jumper. A halo of blood slowly grows around her head while in the upper right corner of the frame a character calmly sips tea. We gaze impassively alongside her, incriminating ourselves in the process. Another awesome moment is, a bravura slow-motion hunting scene, where we watch the character's flesh jiggle on their bones; faces alive with the fear and thrill of the chase. This slow motion highlights their animalistic behaviour - entirely appropriately given the story.
The quality extends throughout the performances, all of which seem to display the satisfaction you sometimes sense in actors when they know they're in a good film. Farrell is excellent as the protagonist, exuding a confused, hangdog innocence that makes even the weirdest events palatable. Rachel Weisz also seriously impresses, turning in a performance that grows increasingly heartbreaking. Ably supported by such luminaries as Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, John C Reilly, Léa Seydoux, Angeliki Papoulia and the wonderful Michael Smiley - the film is performative pleasure.
One of the best of the year and certainly my current favourite of the London Film Festival, The Lobster is a work of twisted genius. Though high concept, it speaks with intelligence and clarity about the human condition and is beautiful, funny and exciting to boot. A hell of an achievement in cinema and one that'll be remembered for years to come.
★★★★★
The Lobster is on wide release 16 October
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