LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Friday, July 19, 2019

Review: '80 Days - A Real World Adventure' at Underbelly Festival, 18th July 2019

Friday, July 19, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

Over the years I've experienced Jules Vernes' classic Around the World In Eighty Days in a variety of forms. I've seen it told with Fogg as an anthropomorphic lion, as a bad Jackie Chan / Steve Coogan buddy movie, and as an amazing choose-your-own-adventure videogame. Hell, I've even eaten my way through it courtesy of the delicious Phileas Fogg brand of tortilla chips (FYI, I will happily accept a box of snacks for this plug).

And, as of yesterday, I've now run and puzzled my way through the journey. 80 Days - A Real World Adventure is the latest from Fire Hazard Games, who specialise in 'high energy street games', a form of immersive theatre with gaming elements. 

From the press release, I'd gathered the show involved traversing London and solving clues: enough to get me excited. But even after multiple emails from the company I still turned up with very little idea of what I'd actually be doing. So, as simply as I can put it without spoiling things, this is what 80 Days actually is:

Working in teams, you have 80 minutes to solve a series of clues based around locations in the Covent Garden/Strand/Charing Cross area. For example, you will be given a riddle that references a specific place, and you must go there and scour the exterior for the answer. Solving these riddles gives you (virtual) cash. You must use that cash to complete a shopping list of items you'll need for your journey around the world.

This is all done via a web page that you access via your smartphone. It provides the clues, banks your money and grants you access to the shops. Once you have completed your shopping list, you must return to the starting location in order to see how your purchases inform your trip around the world.

It's easy enough to pick up, though a little confusingly explained by actors in character as Victorian eccentrics who profess not know what a smartphone is. Mercifully for a show so built around technology, it all works without a hitch with only a wobbly data signal having the potential to trip teams up. I would advise you make sure your phones are fully charged before beginning though.

Fire Hazard's promotional pictures show smiling teams dashing through alleys clutching maps - a depiction that proved 100% accurate. I had brought a friend along, and we spent pretty much the entire time sprinting around the busy streets, eager to score as many valuables as we could, the time limit cranking up our competitive natures. 

But I can't impress enough how active this show is. I'd advise groups to turn up in trainers and be prepared to dash about (an ability to dodge and weave through crowds is also a bonus). If you have mobility problems, then this show might not be much fun (the time limit discourages taking breaks) and it would be a miserable experience for anyone in bad weather. But for me it was one of the most enjoyable workouts I've had in a long time - the pint I got with my drinks token at the finishing line went down a treat.

Sadly, despite arriving back with a full shopping list and time to spare, my team didn't win. However, now that I know the rules I'm sorely tempted to give it another go and try to improve my time. Being able to play it again (presumably with new clues) is a testament to how much effort has been poured into 80 Days. I had a great time - sign me up for whatever Fire Hazard are serving next.

80 Days - A Real World Adventure is at Underbelly until 29th September. Tickets here.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Review: 'The End of History' at St Giles-in-the-Fields, 7th June 2018

Saturday, June 9, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James

Rating: 

For a person of normal economic means, choosing to live in London is like selecting 'hard mode' in a videogame. Here life is fast, brutal, competitive and overdraft drainingly expensive. Every day brings news stories about fresh nightmares, whether it be skyrocketing crime rates, housing prices beyond the ken of mortal men and women, updates on precisely how poisoned the air is, or the gradual corporatisation of the city and the squeezing out of the general public.

And yet I wouldn't live anywhere else. London is where stuff happens, and that simple fact makes it worth spending your life in a place where you have to constantly fight to keep your head above water or risk being sucked under and spat out into some grey life in a dreary nowheresville. 

Marcelo Dos Santos' The End of History is this process, showing us two Londoners finding themselves "face to face on the worst day of their lives". They are Wendy (Sarah Malin), a middle-aged artist turned charity worker who finds herself homeless and Paul (Chris Polick), a confident gay man working in property who spends a morning dealing with some cataclysmically bad news. 

They meet inside St Giles-in-the-Field church in Soho, which is a fascinating deep slice of London history. Founded in 1101 and given a mission to care for London's lepers, it has continued to care for the less fortunate ever since. The proceeding 917 years have been busy, with the church functioning as a last stop for those about to executed at Tyburn gallows, the burial site of London's first (of many) plague victims, in the middle of the famous St Giles rookery of the 18th and 19th centuries, and now dwarfed by steel and aluminium skyscrapers, with the nursery-school-cute Google HQ just over the road.

Placing yourself within the continuum of London history is a dizzying experience. If you know where to look you can walk down a pavement constructed by the Romans and even apparently innocuous street furniture can be something that has survived a couple of hundred years of history. Despite this, the city is in constant flux, with new towers sprouting like weeds. The End of History understands that all this can lead to a loneliness, that humanity can seem in very short supply in London.

This particularly London headache is percolated through Wendy and Paul's stories - though they occupy the opposite ends of the social spectrum their symptoms spring from the same psychogeographical condition. Each explains their place within the city, with Wendy a native Londoner whose Mum lived in a new long-demolished house in Soho and feels like she intrinsically belongs here, while Paul is proud of his decision to 'choose' London and hurl himself into its style and speed.

After just over an hour in their company we know them pretty well. Though they don't directly interact until the final scenes, we understand them as representing two very different tribes of Londoners: the haves and the have-nots. As they're fleshed out through monologues, songs and fourth-wall bustin' asides their complexities become apparent and the social labels we've put on them dissolve. By the time the curtain falls there's a sense of London community that's formed between the characters, the audience and the creative team, the play having nailed down a particular urban ennui that binds us together.

All that is done through multiple lyrical and performative flourishes that mean there's never a dull moment. I particularly liked how the songs weren't showy vocal displays, the occasional off-note making them seem that much more honest ( all boosted by the church's great acoustics). Dos Santos also effectively switches gears between comedy and tragedy, sometimes within the same line.

Malin and Polick are similarly great, balancing their character's attractive and ugly features effectively. A decent amount of the action takes place very close to the audience - I got lucky and during a pivotal moment in the climax the pair were pretty much sat next to me, the closeness of their performances really cranking up the complexity. Perhaps the only fly I can pick at in this ointment is that Malin's Wendy continually complains about her middle-aged spread - given Malin looks fit and healthy it doesn't quite jibe.

But hey, that's a really teeny fly and that's a hell of a lot of top-class ointment. The End of History feels like a play tailored to my sensibilities - combining an intelligent analysis of urban living, understanding life in London in a historical context and smart and imaginative staging. This is my kinda theatre.

The End of History is at St Giles-in-the-Fields until 23rd June. Tickets here.

Friday, January 12, 2018

Review: 'East' at the King's Head Theatre, 11th January 2018

Friday, January 12, 2018 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

East reviewed by David James

Rating:

The East End of London occupies a large place in the British collective identity. This is the  land of pearly kings and queens, florid slang, Jack the Ripper, Eastenders, the Kray twins, grimy boozers, jellied eels and thinly romanticised poverty. But this East End is quickly fading from reality; its real estate gobbled up piecemeal by its prosperous neighbour The City and its long-term residents emigrating to Essex.

Where does this leave Steven Berkoff's East? First performed in 1975 and based on the playwright's Stepney childhood, the play was billing itself as “elegy for the East End and its energetic waste” even back then. So how does it stand up forty years on - when the life experiences of its older characters have faded from living memory?

Pretty well, as it turns out. The five-strong cast (James Craze, Jack Condon, Boadicea Ricketts, Debra Penny and Russell Barnett) portray a gaggle of characters who feel as if they've congealed out of the collective subconscious of the East End. This gaggle of grotesques speak in a blasphemous yet vivid fusion of jumbled Shakespearian quotes, rhyming slang and a fuckload of swearing.

The striking language is overlaid on top of energetic and lively physical performances. Characters turn into motorbikes and are driven around the stage, fall into a cod music hall mime act, run through about twenty different kinds of dance in a minute or, simply and effectively, arrange themselves into expressive Hogarthian dioramas.

All that muscular propulsiveness pays off gangbusters. Each of the characters brims over with life - be it testosterone-infused braggadocio, indignant femininity or racist bitterness. It feels as if the primordial spirits of the East End are being summoned, spilling their guts in front of a contemporary audience they occasionally perceive through the slats of reality.

Each of the performers gets their own monologue in which to shine. My highlight was Russell Barnett's patriarch nostalgically reminiscing about Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts and the Battle of Cable Street - he was on the side of the fascists. It's just an outright great bit of acting, Barnett gradually building up from a light-hearted introduction all the way to his veins furiously throbbing on his bald head as he flicks baked beans everywhere and overturns the dinner table. As he joyously recounted kicking someone's teeth in I couldn't help but think of the footage from the neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville: this character might be a mouldering pile of bones by now but his spirit remains very much alive.

Though I got the most of out of Barnett's monologue, the rest of the cast all excel. The appropriately named Boadicea Ricketts bemoans her femininity and wishes she was born a man, Jack Condon moons after an unapproachable woman on the 38 bus and James Craze delivers an effervescent, heartfelt paean to every conceivable variety of cunt.

It's difficult not to get caught up in the sheer liveliness of the show: though the characters are off-putting in so many ways they're also palpably alive. You sense that while the neighbourhoods and characters of East are quickly being relegated to the history books, they're not disappearing without a fight.

It's a fantastic bit of theatre and a testament to Berkoff's skill at melding words and motion. Definitely worth the trip - preferably with a seat in the front row.

East is at the King's Head Theatre until 3rd February 2018. Details here.

Pictures by Alex Brenner

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

'London and the History of Videogames' at the Museum of London, 26th September 2016

Tuesday, September 27, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Encountering London in videogames is often winceworthy. Whether it by design or technological limitations, games often present a tourist's guide to London - taking in the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Piccadilly Circus with a couple of badly voice-acted cockneys thrown in for good measure.

It's rare that a game manages to capture even a smidge of London reality; glass and aluminium dominating imperial Portland stone and the vestiges of medieval buildings; that distinctively London psychic mood of short-term impatience and long-term tolerance; the class, religious and racial divisions that carve up the neighhourhoods and the simple Darwinian scrabble for shelter, food and money that fuels the human engine of the city.

At last night's lecture, panelists Jack Gosling, Jordan Erica Webber and Tristan Donovan attempted to pin down what makes London tick in videogames, giving us a guided tour through the city's appearances in the medium, from the bedroom coders of the 80s to modern triple A blockbusters.

Promising beginnings.

Tristan Donovan kicks things off by dragging us back into gaming's primordial ooze with the 1978 text adventure Pirate Island. Our capital's first appearance in the digital medium is the inauspicious introductory sentence "I am in a flat in London". It goes on to explain that you can see a bottle of rum, some trainers and a sack of crackers (now that's a scene I can relate to). Similar text adventures followed, most notably social satire Hampstead, which skewered Thatcherism and set the stage for a continuing theme of gamified London-set class struggles.

Lara explores Aldwych Tube Station

Text gave way to single colour sprites, which gave way to 16-bit colours and parallax scrolling, which eventually ceded to texture mapped polygons. It's here designers and developer first had the irresistible urge to translate some glimmer of London reality into games. An interesting entry is Core Design's 1998 Tomb Raider III, in which the impeccably British adventurer returns home to explore blocky renderings of the British Museum, the (then relatively recently) abandoned Aldwych tube station and the rooftops around St Paul's Cathedral.

Bosh!

This lit the touchpaper for the still-ongoing trend to create realistic virtual Londons to fight, race and generally cause havoc in. A notable entry was Team Soho's 2002 release The Getaway, which is essentially Grand Theft Auto by way of Guy Ritchie. The game itself is a bit of a dog, but it's at least impressive for trying to accurately model central London from Hyde Park all the way up to Shoreditch High Street. Problem is, the PS2 couldn't render the hustle and bustle of the city, leaving the streets sterile and bereft of life - falling into a kind of urban uncanny valley.

I preferred Nanda Parbat.

Most modern games, outlined by Jack Gosling, opt to present a tightly choreographed smaller areas, sidelining scope in favour of attention to detail. A prime example is Naughty Dog's 2011 Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, in which Nathan Drake begins his adventure fighting skinheads in an East London boozer, before descending into an abandoned tube station/secret occult library. Though the game gives us a 'wow moment' with its neon vision of the City of London's skyline, Jordan Erica Webber explains just how much work into virtually recreating the stained urinals of some crappy pub. Though the player will probably be more occupied with the tracksuited thug punching them in the face, the level is crammed with location appropriate graffiti, grotty props and general dank. You can practically smell the stale piss..

Other London set games exploit its history. Countless Sherlock Holmes games have conjured up foggy gas-lit Victorian streets, and other titles offer a smattering of alternative Londons invaded by Nazis, aliens or sometimes alien Nazis. Most prominent is Ubisoft's 2015 globe and time-trotting Assassin's Creed series winding up in Victorian London. The game map encompasses vast swathes of the city, giving people a peek at London past. On top of that, we're allowed to frolic with luminaries like Dickens, Darwin and Queen Victoria - even undertaking missions alongside Karl Marx as a kind of ragged trousered exsanguinist.

It's weird to look at real-life buildings and think "I stabbed someone on top of that thing".

In a perverse twist, a believable virtual historical London is more achievable than contemporary virtual London. For one, we're all tourists in the past, the haze of time neatly sidestepping nitpickers whose immersion might be shattered by a phone box being on the wrong corner. For another, perhaps it is simply impossible to render a believable London in a videogame - and even if you could would the tangled street layout, crammed pavements and neverending traffic even make for a fun gaming space?

For my part, I find encountering London in games fascinating. It's one of the few ways you can explore the city through other people's eyes: finding myself curious as to what neighbourhoods they choose to render, what architecture caught their attention, what litters the streets or simply what dreams London sparks inside them. The duller ones manacle you to the top of a tour bus, but the best come within a whisker of capturing what it feels like to walk these grey streets. And who knows what the future may hold.

An excellent talk and a great introduction to what looks like a fascinating programme.

London and the History of Videogames is part of CITY | SPACE | VIDEOGAMES. More information here.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

'London's Burning: A Festival of Arts and Ideas', 30th August - 4th September 2016

Thursday, September 1, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"A woman might piss it out." These are the immortal words of Thomas Bloodworth, Lord Mayor of London, on viewing the early Great Fire and deciding not to take action to halt its spread. After casting a cursory glance over the conflagration, he went back to bed and presumably had a nice doze. Over the next three days it destroyed more than 75% of the city he was in charge of, consuming 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. 

So, as far as municipal cockups go, it's a biggie. Boris Johnson may have been infuriatingly shortsighted, but at least he didn't destroy most of the City of London.

Martin Firrell's Fires of London

After the Great Fire, most of the City's population were moved into temporary shelter in Islington and Highgate, some remaining there up to 40 years later. With much of the City a smouldering ruin, ambitious architects began to draw up plans of a 'New London', of Parisian style boulevards and grand squares. But tradition (and commerce) prevailed, with the City being built to much the same street plans as before, but with stone buildings and stringent fire regulations.

This leaves us (more or less) with the London we know today. From a modern viewpoint the Great Fire now seems like more of an opportunity than a tragedy; historians paint 17th century London as a tinderbox just waiting for a fire to hit it, so it had to burn sometime. In addition, it's often theorised that the fire helped stamp out bubonic plague in London. There were repeated epidemics prior to 1666, but none after. 

Now, to mark the 350th anniversary, events coordinator Artichoke are laying on an arts festival across the Square Mile. It's a kaleidoscope of installations, performances and lectures - from eye-catchingly ginormous set-pieces to sober academic talks on the cultural, political and social interpretations of urban disaster.

I attended the press launch last night, getting a taste of what's planned for the City over the weekend. 

Most obviously eye-catching is David Best's 'London 1666', in which a huge 120m wooden replica of 17th century London will be towed between Blackfriars and Waterloo bridge and incinerated. The structure is the work of London schoolchildren and young carpenters on a work experience programme. I've just seen it on video, but it's a hauntingly pretty skeleton, crowned by the lost spire of Old St Paul's.

Of All the People in All the World

I was lucky enough to get a preview of Of All the People in All the World, by Stan's Cafe. Set in the fascinating surroundings of Inner Temple, the exhibit is watched over by the stern faces of the four judges who settled the many legal disputes following the Great Fire. Essentially, this is art meets infographics - all based around the principal that a single grain of rice represents a person. 

So, for example, you can compare the population of London in 2016 and 1666, see how what portion of the 1666 population was made homeless and then compare it to other great conflagrations. Reducing each person to a grain of rice is both darkly amusing (especially when notable people like Charles II are represented by a lonely grain) and also strangely moving. It's a strange feeling to gaze down at a heap and realise that somewhere in there is a grain that represents you.

So, the festival is on from the 30th to the 4th, with full listings here: http://www.visitlondon.com/greatfire350

My personal picks are:

London 1666: Watch it Burn - 20:30, 4th September on the river.

"London 1666 is a collaboration between American "burn" artist David Best (Temple) and Artichoke to create a once-in-a-lifetime event. Built with a major learning and participation programme that has engaged hundreds of young Londoners over the course of several months, an extraordinary 120-metre long sculpture of 17th-century London skyline will appear on the river Thames and be set alight, in a dramatic retelling of the story of the Great Fire of London of September 1666."

Of All The People in All the World - 30th Aug - 4th September, Inner Temple Hall

"Of All The People In All The World brings historical and contemporary statistics to life using an unusual medium: rice. With one grain representing one person, this performance installation will explore London from 1666 to the present day, linking the City with the world: triumph and fire, travel and trade."

Fire: Threat and Saviour - 19:00, 2nd September, 280 Bishopsgate

"Why are we so fascinated by fire? From the Fire Brigade’s highest-ranking female officer, to historians and an archeologist, hear five unique perspectives on this topic as part of the London’s Burning programme."

When Things Go Wrong: 21st Century Responses to World Trauma - 14:00, 3rd September, Barbican Cinema

"The London’s Burning programme explores contemporary crises, and the different responses to disaster and devastation. How do figures of authority manage the public’s concern and distress? In this talk, the panel will examine the rhetoric used to discuss catastrophe and the psychology of crisis and mass emergency behaviour."

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

'Clapham South Deep Level Shelter', 31st July 2016

Wednesday, August 3, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The asphalt of London is but a gateway. Under the streets lie a chaotic warren: from the familiar rumble of the Tube, to sewers, power lines and gas lines. Somewhere within this is nestled more anomalous creations: disused Post Office transit systems, long-buried underground rivers, the 'Pindar' military citadel and the mysterious top-secret 'Q-Whitehall' complex that reportedly begins under Trafalgar Square, spans Whitehall and ends at King Charles Street.

Knowing all this is going on underfoot makes London feel more magical, and that's on top of the 2,000 years of random stuff that we don't even know is there! For example, just a couple of years ago Crossrail excavations turned up a plague pit down the road from my house.

The shelter in its heyday, 1944

And last Sunday, courtesy of a birthday surprise from my very lovely girlfriend, I got a taste of of subterranean London history. The marvellous Hidden London, run by the London Transport Museum has been hosting tours of places the public doesn't usually get to go. Way back in 2012 I went down into the disused Aldwych Tube Station, but now they've expanded to run tours of Down Street Tube Station, the 'lost tunnels' of Euston, London's first skyscraper at 55 Broadway and the Clapham South Deep Level Shelter.

Entry is by an fat pillbox now unobtrusively subsumed into a modern apartment building. Within it lie 180 stairs, spiralling down into a wonder of 1940s engineering and a frozen slice of Blitz era London.

Areas named for British Naval officers

From a contemporary vantage point it's difficult to imagine life during the worst months of the Blitz. Just how are you supposed to fall asleep when you know high-explosive bombs are raining down over the city? You might wake up with most of your neighbourhood destroyed, friends and family blown to bits. Hell, you might not wake up at all. The whole city must have been sleep-deprived and pretty goddamn miserable.

Faced with that, and against the wishes of the government, many sought sanctuary in the Tube. It might not be particularly comfy bedding down on a platform, but at least you'll survive. Except you might not. In October 1940 a 1400lb bomb slammed into Balham High Road, penetrating the street surface and exploding underground. Many of those sheltering in Balham Tube station were killed instantly by falling debris. They were the lucky ones. A broken water mains then flooded the station, meaning who survived the debris were drowned in pitch darkness "like rats in a cage".

The northbound platform at Balham, October 1940

Furious protests followed, with demands for deep-level shelters be constructed immediately to prevent disasters like this happening again. The government listened, reversedits policy overnight and ordered the construction of accommodation for 100,000 people in ten shelters: five in north London, five in the south. During construction two shelters were abandoned, one at St Pauls for fear of damaging the cathedral and the other at Oval due to poor ground conditions. The remaining eight opened in 1942, though weren't pressed into full service until the advent of the 'doodlebug' in 1944.

Most have now been sold to private companies, used as archival storage, homes for telecoms equipment or, more recently, hydroponic gardens. Yet the Clapham South shelter, left under the auspices of TfL, remains largely intact, allowing for what feels like a trip back in time.

Essentially the shelter is two long underground tunnels, bisected horizontally to create an upper and lower floor.Triple-tiered bunk beds stretch off into infinity, the guests jammed in with each other like sardines, not exactly the Savoy. It must have been a hell of a weird place to fall asleep, the air filled with a fug of sweat, cigarette smoke and farts, soundtracked by the clickety-clack of passing trains and the muffled thump of bombs far aboveground.

A blocked off exit to Clapham South station.

Then again, if the choice is between that and getting blown to smithereens, then I'll take the tunnel. Things weren't all austerity down here, there was a canteen that was 'off-rationing', allowing for as many meat pies and jam tarts as you could afford. Similarly (and deeply emblematic of how living conditions improved in the postwar period) there were chemical toilets which might have been somewhat of a luxury for those forced to trek to an outhouse at night.

A not particularly comfy looking bed.

Aside from actually sheltering the community, the shelters also functioned as an effective piece of propaganda. Newsreel was shot showcasing their security and safety; a way to reassure Londoners that they have a safe haven and also to stick two fingers up at the Nazis to show that they can't be beaten no matter what hi-ex horrors they toss over the channel.

But the story of the shelter doesn't conclude with Hitler blowing his brains all over a bunker wall. For about a decade afterwards it was used as temporary accommodation; postwar refugees travelling through London; visitors to the 1951's Festival of Britain; and, most fascinatingly, to house those who arrived on HMS Windrush in order to assist with the reconstruction of bombed out Britain. Eventually, after a damaging fire in the Goodge Street shelter, Clapham was mothballed in the 60s and largely remains so to this day.

Windrush passengers spending their first few nights deep under London.

It isn't hard at all to imagine past visitors' reactions to seeing this weird, wonderful and obscure corner of London. The place feels as if it's essentially the same as when war-tired Londoners trooped down to escape the Luftwaffe. I found myself wishing I could spend a night down here, tasting the creosote and plaster tang in the air, and rocked gently to sleep by the rumble of the Northern line meters away. 

Graffiti by bored Belgians.

Though places are limited on the Hidden London tours, word is the shelter may be opened to the public in the next few years as a Blitz museum. So watch this space. In the meantime, if you're spending a quiet summer's day dozing on Clapham Common be sure imagine the thousands of people who once huddled in safety deep below your head. Who knows, the way things are going we might be thankful that these bomb shelters remain in working order...

Hidden London tour details here.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Tannaz Oroumchi: 'Hectified' at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street

Saturday, May 3, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Mapping London is a fool's errand.  Sure you can catalogue the rough geometry and index off street names, but this doesn't get you any closer to understanding what the city is. London is 2000 years of wonderfully gunked up, unplanned human muck; Saxon hunting trails made permanent by imperial Roman road builders, streets spiralling out from them like bacterial growths, a million tangled pissy alleys growing out of that.  Capturing all this on paper is madness.  Your Google Maps and your London A-Z merely diagram out the space, trying hard to boil down fuzzy anarchy into comprehension - but these maps can't capture the mood of a place; the baked in sleaze of Soho; the cool authoritarianism of Kensington or the enterprising fragility of Brick Lane.

Tannaz Oroumchi obviously understands these limitations, her work exhibited in Curious Duke Gallery chopping and screwing the streets London to brilliant effect.  Under her eye the street layout twists into spider-webs, computer generated graphs, bacterial infections and micro-printed circuit boards. London transforms into a pulsating, electric organism, the apparent permanence of concrete and steel revealed as flexible, temporary and, above all, manipulable.

Reading the Rosetta Stone of the City, transforming static into fluid motion and exposing the psychological layers and contours of urban life, is an idea (if you'll excuse the pun) very much up my street.  This field of thought is known as psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals."  Planting its roots deeply in the Marxist anti-authoritarianism of the French Situationists, the discipline of psychogeography seeks to chip away the 'taught' methods of navigating urban space, underlining the importance of deviation from established paths, exploration and reclamation of restricted spaces and the ability to emotionally analyse architecture and street layout.

In Oroumchi's work the city is stripped of its labels, the tangle of London streets revealed as a crazy mandala - the product of thousands of years of unguided, unconscious human endeavour.  The work reveals the biological nature of London, and how it frustrates attempts at applying systems of order to it - something that makes this city more human and honest.  The grids of New York, Los Angeles et al are designed for efficiency and ease of commerce; maps of capital.  They're efficient and slick in a way London can never be -  foe example barely a quarter of central London's streets are used for traffic circulation, as opposed to 90% of New York's.  

That London is a knot inevitably means planners are tempted to untangle it; notable candidates being Christopher Wren post-Great Fire of London with his vision of a London subdivided into grand Parisian boulevards and Corbusian post-war architects, whose ambitions to wrestle London into becoming a 'car city', with the Strand pummelled into a motorway and any extant pedestrians frowned upon as a vestigial aberration.

It's a nightmare vision, imagine the entire city in the style London Wall and Upper Thames Street. The maps on display in Hectified elegantly refute the ordering of cities, finding  beauty in the snaking, sinuous lines, and throwing up their own subtle analyses of the motions of people around the metropolis.  Focal points quickly become apparent; St Paul's Cathedral has a peculiar gravity, it's historicity sending ripples into the street plans around it.  Similarly, the parts where the tangle doesn't intrude become marked out as pure, sacred spaces.  The reality of Smithfield Meat Market is a grubby place of smashed pallets, bloody smocks and bald, racist men, but here it's appropriately revealed as an oasis of permanence - after all meat has been sold here for a thousand years or so.

When you see these maps your first instinct is to try and place yourself within them. Usually the easiest way to start is with the Thames, counting the bridges across, then winding your way up through the streets until you find yourself.  It's irresistible, and this simple act makes the work almost auto-analytical. My barometer of appreciation of art involves finding something of yourself in the work; an echo of your individual passions and philosophies in it. In pinpointing your location you are you have to think about your personal relation to the city, to divorce yourself from boundaries, districts and names and analyse the layout of the streets around you.  That this occurs instinctively makes the work a success, achieving its aim of throwing new light on London without any prodding explanation or lecture.

What Oroumchi demonstrates with Hectified is the mystery and joy of London; an anatomical study of a city achieved without killing it.  She lays bare the maze of gloomy side-streets, bustling arterial traffic routes and semi-abandoned leafy squares that give London its vibrancy and character.  When you walk through the streets of London, seeing imperial Portland Stone give way to the stained clay of London Stock Bricks, enjoying the dichotomy of 16th century churches abutting the glittering green glass of 20th century finance, marvelling at something so bizarre as a Roman pavement sunk in a secret crypt, or a 3000 year old monument bristling out of the Thames, you should understand that London as a whole is a manifestation of humanity, a patchwork blanket created by the consensus of millions upon millions of human beings for thousands of years.  

Oroumchi's Hecitified lays all that this out simply, clearly and without ego.  I very, very much enjoyed it.

Hectified is at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street until May 31st

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

'Vendetta' (2013) directed by Stephen Reynolds

Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Vendetta is a deranged, racist piece of shit with the morals of Richard Littlejohn and the collective intelligence of an EDL march.  This is a film so vicious, sadistic and unabashedly racist that it beggars belief - it's essentially the cinematic adaptation of the manifesto of Anders Breivik.  Ordinarily, when faced with your standard revenge fantasy you can console yourself by assuming that far-right politics are a natural consequence of the subject matter.  But Vendetta is a film that has something to say about Britain, something so bizarre that it's going to sound like I'm making it up - without one word of a lie - Vendetta sincerely argues that life in Britain would be improved by maniacs torturing and murdering people. 

That sounds like satire right?  It's not.  Here's how it goes down: Danny Dyer is Jimmy Vickers, a special forces soldier who is returning from a tour of service in Afghanistan.  He's been locked up for torturing to death an Afghan prisoner, a fact that gets the ladies in the film all wet and confers a grudging respect from every man he meets. But things are not good in London tahhhhhn.  His Dad witnesses a robbery, intervenes and proceeds to beat a teenager to death with a bat.  Later the gang breaks into his parent's house, tortures his Dad, rapes his Mum and then burns them both alive. Danny Dyer isn't happy.  Putting paid to the notion that two wrongs don't make a right he proceeds to torture and murder a bunch of teenagers while running from the police and reconciling with his ex wife.  

The only remotely positive thing about Vendetta is that it there are moments where it regurgitates far-right ideology so sincerely that the film briefly devolves into parody. Titters fill the cinema as Dyer mumbles "There was a time when I would have bled to keep the red in the Union Jack.".  You wrinkle your brow in bemusement when, standing over an unfortunate victim, Dyer gravely intones "Sorry? Sorry is a castaway word on the breath of the hopeful.." eh? You smile with astonished disbelief at the tin-eared dribbling lunacy of dialogue about walking tall and standing up for your own honour by... torturing teenagers.  Say whaaaat?

But, by and large the film is so goddamn banal that you can't even enjoy it as a piece of exploitation.  If the film kept a tight focus on Danny Dyer torturing people to death in increasingly creative ways then perhaps it could have succeeded as 'just' being tasteless.  No such luck.  Vendetta is eager to have its say about the state of modern Britain - painting a insane picture of a chaotic wasteland populated by irredeemable criminal gangs and uselessly effete, bureaucratic police officers. 

Writer/director Stephen Reynold's solution to this problem is fascism.  That sounds blunt, but blunt is right for a film has neither the time nor the smarts for subtlety.  Cringeworthy military fetishism isn't exactly surprising in action cinema, yet Vendetta takes it to a horrifying logical conclusion.  Jimmy Vicker's backstory is that he tortured an Afghan prisoner to death - an all too realistic plotline considering the recent trial of a Royal Marine for sadistically murdering a wounded man.  What's astonishing about Vendetta is that it goes to some lengths in dialogue to reassure the audience that being willing to torture and execute are what makes Vickers "a hero".

As Vickers ties people up, burns them alive, pours concrete down their throats and rips them in two it gets a bit difficult to sympathise with him.  Compounding the nauseating politics of the film is that this is largely about a white soldier torturing and murdering black teenagers - though I suppose if you're going to be so transparently fascist you may as well go the full hog.  There's some very telling use of language where, to excuse Vicker's war crimes, a Colonel explains that "those people are different from us, they don't fear death".  Later we get a snatch of dialogue explaining that "these people don't deserve justice".  It's telling that in order to justify the atrocities meted out by its protagonist, Vendetta needs to define the victims as another 'type' of person; a intrinsically and irredeemably violent degenerate; a subhuman fully deserving of pain and death.

There's lip service paid to the idea that maybe stopping crime by allowing maniacs to torture kids to death isn't actually such a great idea - though this is voiced by a ridiculous caricature softy detective who winds up humiliated and knocked-out.  What we walk away with is the suggestion that with the police unable to beat confessions out of suspects and the streets of London awash with crime ("this country’s changed, the riots were just the start of it")- the moral thing to do is sit back and let what amounts to a serial killer murder with impunity. I can't deny it's a bold philosophy. Really stupid obviously. But bold - certainly.  

I like to moob it moob it.  I like to moob moob it.  I like to.... moob it!

Leaving aside the scary politics for a moment, the film itself is objectively pretty crappy cinema.  Dyer  is stuck in neutral, perhaps convincing as a peevish cashier, but never remotely believable as a terrifying Special Forces expert.  At one point there's a tight close-up on Dyer's cute little moobs, a shot that's held so long and framed so carefully you suspect that the crew is having a giggle at the star's expense.  The rest of the film is passionless, formless cinematic sludge, constructed with as little effort as possible.  By way of illustration there's a moment where a mocked up newspaper appears in full shot - the prop was so bad that hushed giggles broke out in the cinema.  Screwing up something as simple as a newspaper is a sign that nobody is really giving a shit behind the camera.

So who is this film for?  Ordinarily I'd conclude that a cinematic rant arguing that Britain has gotten too soft, black kids are taking over the streets and soldiers need to rise up and wipe them out would be the territory of The Daily Mail and right-wing Middle England.  But it's not Mail readers that this is aimed at (the Mail is at least smart enough to veil its latent fascism behind the cloak of manners).  No, Vendetta is a film custom-designed to appeal to the English Defence League: realising on the silver screen their slavering, psychopathic race-war power fantasy.  

Fuuuuck that.  Fuuuuuuuuuck them.  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this film.

No stars.