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Showing posts with label Ovalhouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ovalhouse. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
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Reviewed by David James
Rating: 
Who could resist a title like Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva the Young Woman Applauded Herself? Written by Bella Heesom (and performed by her and Sara Alexander) the show is about a woman's relationship with her genitals and finds its subject perched on the intersection of biological urges and societal pressure.
The basic structure is an (I assume) semi-autobiographical tale which begins with Heesom's earliest sexual awakenings and takes us to the present day, stopping off along the way at key moments that shaped her sexuality. That's overlaid with a dialogue between her brain and her clitoris, through which we observe how societal conditioning has messed up her capacity to experience true pleasure.
The show wears its heart on its sleeve, at times preaching directly to the audience about feminine empowerment, anger at patriarchal expectations and an often incandescent sense of fury that the centre of a woman's sexual pleasure is stigmatised, mocked and belittled. The rear of the stage is taken up by a gradually evolving projection that sums up the status quo they're battling against, showing slogans like "Female Genitals are Gross", "You Are A Sex Object" and "The Female Orgasm Is A Bonus"
The show is aimed squarely at cis women (at straight Western cis women if you wanted to get precise), with the majority female audience cheering and clapping at the more insightful lines of dialogue. But, and I cannot stress this enough, Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva... is so good that audiences of all genders and sexual preferences can and should check this out.
The quality of the writing is superb, the structure of the show is tuned to perfection, the production values are well above average. Best of all, it's absolutely hilarious. Heesom's cerebral and nervy character is in a classic straight-man/comic partnership with Alexander's innocently and (adorably) upbeat clitoris. The show is funny to a level that the pair often have to wait for the audience to finish laughing before they continue - always a good sign.
Beyond the laughs, the show has an emotional core which transcends a simple polemic against the miseries of the patriarchy and becomes something more universally uplifting. I don't want to diminish the show's laser-precise focus on female sexuality, but no matter who you are you'd have to have a heart of stone not to feel a rush of emotions at the show's remarkable climactic scenes.
These theoretically are sex-positive times. Open a glossy lifestyle magazine or Sunday broadsheet and you're likely to find columnists espousing sexual freedom and female emancipation. But though things are undeniably an improvement on the past, there's still a huge culture of prudishness and shame caked on top of the ways we approach sex and specifically female genitalia - I mean, why is a "cunt" the absolute worst thing you can call someone?
Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva... (and other similarly inclined cultural objects) are gradually chipping away at all this. Late in the show, the title is explained: it's a line from a poem about 4000-year-old Mesopotamian sex goddess Inanna, whose vulva was widely revered as a holy place. It's a story reminds us that the stigma we see all around us isn't inevitable. Changes like this don't happen overnight, but this production is contributing to a slow shift in perception for the better.
Perhaps there's an argument that shows like this are preaching to the converted. Judging from the audience when I was there, people attending this will be politically switched on and smart women. The people actively promoting the status quo wouldn't go near a fringe show with a name like Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva the Young Woman Applauded Herself in a million years. But, Heesom argues that women must not just defeat the misogynist leering at them from a building site, they must also evict the one society has lodged in their own heads.
I had a great time. Heesom is a genuinely insightful writer (I similarly enjoyed her previous show My World Has Exploded A Little Bit), her partnership with Sara Alexander fizzes with comic chemistry and Donnacadh O’Briain’s direction is fantastic. It's the full package and is a show destined to go far.
Rejoicing At Her Wondrous Vulva the Young Woman Applauded Herself is at Ovalhouse until 25 May. Tickets here.
Friday, March 22, 2019
Friday, March 22, 2019
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Loretta is ten years old and cannot understand why she would want to take a photo that isn't a selfie. What on earth would be the point of a photograph without her in it? This is the core of Mike Kenny's Random Selfies, a show that tries to understand how social media has altered the way children perceive the world, their relationships and themselves.
The show is firmly set within Loretta's world. Christina Ngoyi plays every role, altering her tone and body language in order to quickly convey her teasing mother, older neighbour Mrs Thing and her new friend Maya. A meandering narrative takes through a typical couple of days in Loretta's life in which she meets a new friend (asylum seeker Maya) and worries about whether she's going to be invited to the popular's girl's birthday party.
Though the set is a broadly realistic ten-year-old's bedroom, Rachana Jadhav's digital projection mapping allows it to become various other locations, as well as introducing hallucinatory depictions of Loretta's life and feelings. Memories of old posters fade into view on the walls, a wall becomes transparent and astronauts float lazily through the night sky.
Nothing particularly dramatic happens in Random Selfies, but then the whole objective appears to be to create a play that mirrors the lives of any children in the audience. I'm sure they can empathise with Loretta when she protests her mother temporarily confiscating her tablet, annoyed at the invasion of privacy and worried that her secrets are going to be revealed. Similarly, there's a nicely pitched eternal angst about fitting in, with Loretta fretting that her name isn't amongst the most popular names in the country.
Running through all of this is a theme about fear of invisibility, a metaphor for loneliness. First introduced when Loretta and her brother are discussing which superpower they'd have, her brother sees it as a ticket to doing whatever he wants and learning secrets. Loretta understands it as a kind of existential threat: her world is governed by visibility and microscopic kernels of praise, the worst case scenario her fading into life's background and forever going unacknowledged.
This is all very relevant stuff. You can't open a broadsheet without reading some columnist fretting that children these days are being made miserable by their exposure to social media. I'm generally pretty sceptical of this sort of thing: every generation is 'ruined' by some new technology that adults are suspicious of: be it social media, texting, videogames, the internet or television.
But there is definitely something dramatically worthwhile about getting to grips with the unique ways that online interaction affects children. The best moments of Random Selfies are when Loretta is curating a new identity for herself, trying to rebrand herself 'Lola', with a fresh personality at odds with her true self. Watching children promoting themselves within a competitive marketplace of personas is a great way to show how a hyper-capitalist society unconsciously warps those within it, and the musings on this are when the show is at its best.
But - perhaps because the play is short and aimed at children - there is simply not enough time to properly work through this complex topic. Throughout the show, there's a tension between keeping it accessible for children in the audience and including enough meat for the adults to chew on. The end result is a show that's too dull for younger audiences (I heard bored whispering) and too lightweight for adults.
I'm with the kids on this one. Though I appreciate that the show shies away from talking down to younger audiences by dramatising their lives without condescension, it struggled to keep my attention. And when the show is a mere 55 minutes long, that's a problem. At least in this form, Random Selfies lacks energy and rhythm, moving at a trudge when you want it to sprint.
Random Selfies is at Ovalhouse until 7 April. Tickets here.
Friday, February 23, 2018
Friday, February 23, 2018
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Derailed reviewed by David James
Rating:
It's been a year and a half since the referendum and Brexit continues to feel like a suffocating pillow jammed onto my face. The process is set to economically cripple the United Kingdom and restrict the ambitions and freedoms of generations of young people. The over-60s that voted for it in droves can go to hell - they've sabotaged millions of lives due to their senility and the vague belief that the EU produces far too many Muslims regulations.
But I'm a bit biased. My partner is Italian and that fucking referendum tore up any plans we might have had for a secure future. After all, how can you settle down when the government can't even confirm she won't be shoved in a Home Office van, transported to Dover and bunged on a ferry back to the Continent? Even you think that that's unlikely, the outright xenophobia powering Brexit hardly makes Britain a welcoming place for continental Europeans.
All this is why theatre company Little Soldiers (Mercè Ribot & Patricia Rodriguez) are picking up sticks and decamping back to Spain after 12 years in the UK. To mark their departure they've teamed up with Dan Lees and Keir Cooper to throw a going away party - Derailed. The show is a semi-improvised autobiographical reflection on their time in the UK, figuring out whether anything they did here made any difference, how they changed whilst in the country and the usefulness of activism.
All this is stretched over a charismatic, high-energy and very funny 75 minutes, involving a lot of audience participation, group hugs, the creation of Gazpacho, guest appearances from the performers' relatives and a number of scrappy yet kickass punk rock songs. It's a whirlwind of emotions: from anger at closed-minded assholes to a melancholic resignation to a giddy happiness in the connections between us all.
Though chaotic by design, Derailed is studded with moments of powerful drama. My favourite was exploring their reactions to someone shouting at Mercè and Patricia to "go back to their own country" during a 2011 anti-austerity protest - the pair then imagine what they should have eloquently shouted back. Britain (and especially London) can seem superficially welcoming and tolerant, yet lurking deep under the surface is an abiding core of suspicion and hatred of outsiders, stoked to white-hot fury by the fascist press of The Daily Mail and Express.
The show feeds into the dislocating sense that things might not be all that they seem to a continental European living in the UK. The sense that rather than being welcome they're merely tolerated and, no matter how many Rich Tea biscuits they consume, they can never truly call this country home.
This is explored a great song called Blame Game in which we see how blame for what's gone wrong in a country is shunted onto someone else. The late arrival of a letter is blamed on the postman, who blames the government for cutting services, who blames immigrants for parasitising the British economy, who blame the need for a job and money as the reason they're here.
By the end, it's painted Brexit as the conclusion of a government realising that the best way to force through austerity was to demonise those least able to fight back - the disabled, benefit 'scroungers' and, above all, immigrants. And now we're reaping the consequences.
Brexit is going to impact our lives in an infinite number of horrible ways, limiting opportunities, curtailing ambitions and lowering living standards for generations to come. Perhaps the departure of a very funny devised theatre duo isn't the most crushing effect it'll will have, but it's symptomatic the gradual exodus of talented, creative and passionate people. We'll be poorer without Little Soldier, and everyone like them.
I might be making this all sound a bit grim, but Derailed is straight up good times. Despite not having seen a Little Soldier show before it took me about 30 seconds to like the pair, and I didn't feel even a twinge of doubt when they gave me a hairpiece and had me dancing on stage in front of the audience. Please check out this awesome show - it might be your last chance.
Derailed is at Ovalhouse until March 3rd. Tickets here.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Thursday, February 1, 2018
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Medea Electronica reviewed by David James
Rating:
Revenge is sweet. Revenge that involves a couple of dead kids and an incinerated lover? Maybe that's a touch on the savoury side. Pecho Mama's Medea Electronica retells Euripides 431BC tragedy Medea as a 1980s synthpop concert, making the wronged Medea (Mella Faye) as relatable, empathetic and as kind as possible and then seeing how far the audience is prepared to follow her down a disturbing, bloody path.
Euripides' play tells the story of a wife and mother who finds herself threatened when her husband Jason leaves her and her children for another woman. Medea's vengeance is brutal: she kills the other woman and then her own children, and scarpers to Athens.
Pecho Mama shifts the story to the late 1980s, with Medea and her family moving away from London to follow her husband's career. In the wake of his Dad's death, her husband Jason suddenly cuts all contact and moves out without explanation. Struggling to understand why he's acting so callously, Medea tries to maintain normality for her confused children. But, as she realises the depth of her husband's cruelty, she bends and finally snaps.
When I first heard about Medea Electronica and its ambition of fusing Greek tragedy with 80s era synthpop, my reaction was more curiosity than outright enthusiasm. I've been to some seriously wanky concept gigs in my time, in which bands with limited theatrical ability disappear up their arses and produce something that's neither a good gig nor good theatre.
It quickly becomes apparent that Medea Electronica isn't going to be one of those shows. Pecho Mama (Mella Faye, Sam Cox and Alex Stanford) match their musical skills with restrained but enormously effective stagecraft that narrow and intensifies the focus on its lead. Every other character is represented by pre-recorded voices, which (no doubt due to intense rehearsal) is technically flawless.
Throughout the show, narrative seamlessly bleeds into song. These effectively communicate Medea's fractured mind: the textured vocals, moody synth lines and warped samples combining into muscular, moving soundscape. It also helps that these are just damn good songs: I felt a strong Brian Eno influence in Into the Ocean Parts I and II and glimpses of Portishead in Manta Ray, all of which pushes my musical buttons.
But all this would be for naught if it weren't for Mella Faye. It's been a while since I've seen a performer so emotionally and physically committed to her role. She's magnetic perceptibly 'acting' her way through the songs rather than merely singing them. Medea's journey from caring mother to child murderer is a tricky one to get right, yet Faye's gradual unravelling is horrifyingly plausible - her final transformation into fire-wreathed avatar of fury and righteous destruction sending shivers up my spine.
The show feels designed to push its audiences' buttons. It's impossible not to sympathise with Medea's plight and understand the roots of her rage. You see a woman being gaslit, manipulated, isolated and victimised: on paper practically a case study in misogyny. But just because someone is a victim doesn't mean they're not capable of terrible things, the show essentially asking us to sit as a jury and decide whether she's culpable for the atrocity she commits. These are questions that kept me awake last night and were on my mind while commuting to work: classic signs of a complex, memorable piece of theatre.
To put it simply, Medea Electronica is the kind of show I wish I saw more of. It's expertly crafted, performed to the highest standards, thematically fearless, smart as hell and cool as fuck. I can't recommend it enough.
Medea Electronica is at Ovalhouse until 10th February (tickets here). Then on tour (details here).
Friday, November 24, 2017
Friday, November 24, 2017
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Rating: 
“A whore must always be a whore,” said Giuseppe Verdi about Violetta, the sex worker heroine of his opera, La traviata. Since then opera (and, to be honest, pretty much all of performing arts) hasn't been particularly kind to sex workers. The best case scenario is that they get whisked away from a 'life of sin' by a knight in shining armour, but in the vast majority of cases they meet a depressing end via disease, drug addiction or under the knives of male serial killers.
This all contributes to the intense stigma against sex work, which despite being the "world's oldest profession" is widely considered a demeaning and disgusting way to make money. Trying to understand the facts of the situation involves squinting through a cloud of moralistic judgment, negative stereotypes and buttoned up prudery. Fortunately, Experimental Experience's Sex Workers' Opera is here to clear the air and educate us on the practicalities, pitfalls and joys of sex work.
The show consists of a series of musical sketches performed by the cast, composed partly of performers and partly of sex workers (we are never told who's who). These sketches are formed from countless true accounts of what this job is like, with contributions from 50 individuals over 17 countries.
We progress from a lighthearted story of an Argentinian streetwalker giving her client marital advice, an amusing song about the draconian bans on what you can depict in porn, right through to a harrowing depiction of being arrested and brutalised by the police. Running through all this is a narrative throughline of sisters divided by one's choice to engage in sex work, a narrative that provides a mouthpiece for the anti-sex work arguments about safety, coercion and criminality.
The sceptical sister's position is less malicious and more sympathetically ignorant, giving the characters an excuse to defend themselves and explain what sex work entails. Naturally, the show is largely very positive about sex work: each participant explaining that they have made a reasoned choice to do this for a living, that it suits their personality and lifestyle, that they are smart enough to keep themselves safe and, most simply, that they enjoy it.
The core of the show is the mantra "listen to us". Much is made of the law around sex work: with the show taking a particularly strong stance against the UK adopting the 'Nordic model', in which the clients rather than the sex workers are criminalised. Their arguments against it are so convincing that you can't work out why it's being considered at all - but then you start to wonder exactly how much consultation the government does with sex workers when formulating new laws around the profession (I'm guessing not much). So, "listen to us" works as a minimalist and powerful argument for taking into account those with boots on the ground.
But while Sex Workers' Opera successfully tackles some of the stigma and misconceptions about sex work, it shies away from responding to legitimate criticism. The sceptical sister character is a bit of a strawman and her objections are summarised as boring and repetitive. To be fair they mostly are: the cast easily dismissing stereotypes that most sex workers are forced to do this, that they're addicted to drugs, that they're petty thieves and that they'll be somehow tainted by an invisible stain for the rest of their lives. But it's disheartening that the argument that sex work promotes the objectification of women is also tossed in the pile of things not worth debating.
Surely there's room for a legitimate debate over whether literally commodifying women's bodies contributes to societal misogyny? I'm not coming down on one side of the debate or the other (after all, there's decades of feminist argument on the issue that I haven't read), but it feels like the show dodges a pretty important question. It's not as if there isn't time to spare: while the majority of sketches and songs are great there are a couple of duds (primarily the prerecorded video shorts) that could be trimmed in favour of putting a bit more philosophical meat on the show's bones.
I don't want to sound too down on the show: Sex Workers' Opera is an imaginative, well conceived, well performed (Emy Fem in particular has a magnetic stage presence) and it's downright interesting piece of theatre. It will continue to have a positive impact on the world as long as it's staged: these are stories that need to be told and points of view that need to be communicated. If you're a legislator then buy a ticket and listen to this show.
Sex Workers' Opera is at Ovalhouse until 2nd December. Tickets here.
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Thursday, June 22, 2017
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It's Wednesday evening and London has been sweatily stunned by a nuclear heatwave. A thick haze oozes from the asphalt, the tube has become a temporary sauna, London Zoo's resident penguin colony is wishing they could change out of their tuxedos. So what better place to be than in a sweltering bombed out church with a corrugated iron roof, where sucking in a lungful of humid air takes real effort?
I'm a sticky mess, fanning myself with a programme, sweat stinging my eyes and my bottle of water quickly depleted. But if I'm roasting, how on earth must the dancer dressed like a giant vulva feel?
Ovalhouse and BraveNewWorld's Trinity is a bit like being trapped in a really good music video - but one in which the star is mysteriously absent. It's an abstract procession of bizarre & beautiful costumes and ritualistic dancing set to some extremely monged music. Taken purely on its own merits it's a trip. Nightmare nuns troop across the stage with spotlights shining out of her face, a mutated pregnant monster woman clumsily wobbles through the crowd, a woman made out of charcoal crumbles before our eyes. It's dead cool, if you're into the whole pretty weirdness thing.
But what does it mean? I think that a successful piece of theatre should be able to communicate what it's about without the audience having to resort to supplemental material. With that in mind, I purposefully didn't read the supplied programme before going in.
I worked out pretty quickly that it was about the historical subjugation of women. The play is stuffed full of yonic imagery, with the highlight being the 'nun' costume transforming into a giant flapping vulva with the nun's hood becoming a clitoral hood. There's also a tonne of religious imagery, all amplified by the religious setting. It's easy to glance up, past the plaques of dead Victorians, and see the stained glass, lily-white Jesuses peering down at us, bemused by what's going on in his Dad's front room.
So, what I got from it was a critique of how Christianity has oppressed and objectified women over the centuries, stealing the essential power of the matriarchy and enslaving women as biological machines whose function is to cook, clean and pump out the next generation of misogynistic zealots.
How did I do? The programme sez: "Trinity explores the aesthetics of gender and the idea of sacredness in our visual culture, challenging the objectification and iconification of the female form, from the Venus of Willendorf to the Virgin Mary. The performance questions the ethics and politics involved in the representation, mutation and transformation of the body in our collective visual consciousness..."
Well, I guess I was in the right ballpark at least. Trinity is one of those shows in which you get out precisely as much as you're willing to put in. Some people will probably dismiss it as a load of pretentious/portentous bollocks, but give it a fair shake and try and think about what you're seeing and it kinda, sorta, nearly comes together in a satisfying way.
And at least it looks and sounds great. Guoda Jaruseviciute, Valentina Ceschi and Kate Lane are all talented, committed performers (and they must have been literally cooking in those costumes), and the technical and artistic design doesn't put a foot wrong.
But, despite the fact that I did genuinely enjoy myself, I suspect that the show is being deliberately obscurantist to camouflage that, for all the top notch visuals, there's a bit less going on under the hood than the programme claims.
Trinity is at the Peckham Asylum until 27 June. Tickets here.
Trinity is at the Peckham Asylum until 27 June. Tickets here.
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Sunday, October 9, 2016
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Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight walks into the room swinging its big dick all over the place. The poster features a completely kickass drawing of a horrified person with their guts exploding all over the place (see above). The flyer promises "a 120 decibel suicide note. a linguistic kaleidoscope of caustic cartoons, crackpot fantasies and demented erotica." On your way into the theatre they hand you a pair of earplugs and make sure you pay attention to a warning that:
I'd saw this flyer a couple of months back and figured "yeah, this is the show for me". Lately I've been crushed under a truckload of syrupy theatrical shite - shows about cheerleaders learning to love and anti-drug PSAs masquerading as shitty rock musicals. It all left a bad taste in my mouth, and I was craving something aggressively fucked up - and Christopher Brett Bailey sounded like he was going to provide.
So I parked myself in the front row centre and prepared myself for not only blown out ear-drums but a blown mind.
I didn't get either. What Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight turned out to be was an okay post-rock gig. Maybe I should have lowered my expectations given the flyer we were handed on the way in, with the punchy punk advertising copy amended with annotations to point out that all that awesome sounding demented erotica stuff had been deemed "not relevant", the show had been reduced by about a third (from 100 minutes to 70) and that apparently, we were in for a concert "sprinkled with words".
What's more disappointing is that the sprinkling of words we did get were awesome. I'd heard that Bailey was a fantastically lurid poet, and his intro and outro didn't disappoint. It sounded like a fever dream of crushed limbs and unnecessary surgery, like a watching an old David Cronenberg film with a beak full of ketamine. As the lights dimmed, Bailey's voice ominously repeated "This is a helldream. This is a helldream. This is a helldream."
Oh, I wish it was man. I wish it was. What it actually is is a series of fuzzed out guitar, bass and violin led sound pieces layered over with synths and tapping away on smashed up bits of pianos. It was decent post-rock stuff, kind of a sub Godspeed! You Black Emperor pastiche, but nowhere near as musically aggressive or experimental as I was hoping for.
Perhaps most disappointingly, it wasn't even particularly loud. Sure, there were loud bits, but being handed earplugs gave me the masochistic hope that I was in for something that was going to leave a bruise. But the little cellophane packet remained resolutely unbroken and, despite assurances, I didn't even get to take home a tinnitus whine.
On top of that, the show ran into a major technical problem about mid-way through which took half an hour to fix and necessitated clearing the theatre. Part of the fun of these intense experimental pieces of music is losing yourself in the hallucinogenic lighting and music, sinking into a dreamy trance state and letting it wash over you. Having to retreat to a striplit theatre lobby to awkwardly stand about waiting for the show to get back on its feet is a straight-up atmosphere killer.
Also disappointing is that Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight isn't particularly theatrical. Sure, the triptych of musicians backed by 'piano corpses' is a striking image, especially when they're powerfully backlit through a haze, but everyone remains confined to their little area on stage throughout the night. It makes for a curiously static affair, with a huge unused space in the centre of the stage. If this were actually a concert it wouldn't be so bad as you'd be able to have a dance (well, a dazy sway), but being sat quiet and still, watching musicians posing in front of spotlights isn't the most dynamic experience.
Maybe if I hadn't have been to a tonne of actually ear-drum splitting bonkers 3am concerts I'd have reacted a bit more positively, but Bailey's show just made me fondly remember those other, better, gigs. Not quite theatre and not quite a concert, Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight ends up in some unhappy and awkward no-man's land.
I wanted Bailey to take a fucking hammer to my skull but sadly, it was not to be. Oh well. Better luck next time, eh?
★★
Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight is at the Ovalhouse until 11 October, then on tour. Tickets here.
Thursday, September 8, 2016
Thursday, September 8, 2016
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Wowsers what a show. It's funny how life turns up coincidences - in this case two shows in two nights about female relationships. Yet one, Vanities the Musical, was the theatrical equivalent of jamming a fork in my eye, while the other was gobsmacking from tip to toe.
Born Mad's Sister is a conceptual, verbatim piece about the relationships between sisters (and wider family), taking the form of an hour long sound collage led by two fantastic performers, Daisy Brown and Nia Coleman, who sing, act and move in perfect synchronisation with one another. Writer/director Rebecca Hanbury condenses their dialogue from countless hours of interviews of nearly fifty women and girls from across the UK, cutting, pasting and overlapping snatches of interview into a smoothly constructed tapestry. On top of this there's live musical mixing from Alex Groves, weaving just recorded loops over the live vocals and.. and... and...
Okay, it's a toughie to explain. But you've got to trust me on this, it's awesome. At the outset we're thrown into the deep end, but after ten minutes or so you begin to tease out story strands. Three stand out; an Algerian woman's guilt at abandoning her younger sisters to civil war whilst she raises a family in England; the shifting relationship of twins; and a young pyromaniac who accidentally burns the family home down. Other characters rear their heads and disappear back into the melee - each person brilliantly delineated by the two performers' body language, accents and cadences.
There are moments in Sister that gave me chills: the dialogue and singing building to stupendously shiver-inducing emotional crescendos, underpinned by powerful direction, lighting design and a crazy-good soundscape. For example, during the 'burning down the house' scene, the performers are slowly backlit by orange spotlights, dry ice begins to fill the room and we hear the soft crackling of burning wood. It was so effective that I swear I could smell smoke.
Sister is undeniably emotionally and aesthetically successful, though it also functions as straightforwardly impressive feat of performance. Brown and Coleman sing and act in perfect synchronisation, every micro-expression and verbal tic replicated exactly. It's like watching a high-wire act - the slightest wobble and the whole thing falls apart. But the duo never put a foot wrong, displaying a faintly unnerving confidence in each other's abilities and their own I shudder to think how long it must have taken to rehearse a thing like this, not to mention the sheer commitment and concentration required to sustain perfection for an hour.
In a way Sister is a gently paradoxical experience. The major stories feel completely distinct from one another; for example in many respects the story of a guilt-ridden Algerian woman has very little to do with the life experiences of the twins. Yet, the performance and sound design bind them into a whole, blurring the edges of each interviewee until we're experience them as members of a richly textured choir, each interviewee weaving themselves into a universal femininity.
I don't really have much more to say without spoiling things too much. This is an experience like little else I've seen in theatres of late. It's sonically, visually and textually beautiful; able to make you laugh and feel in equal measure; and Daisy Brown and Nia Coleman's performance skills are through the goddamn roof.
If you have even a glimmer of artistic adventurism, or a desire to see emotion being transmuted into art, Sister is the show for you. It's leagues beyond everything else on the stage right now - you should be running, not walking, to the ticket page. Go go go!
★★★★★
Sister is at Ovalhouse until September 10th. Tickets here.
Friday, July 22, 2016
Friday, July 22, 2016
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Henry Cyril Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, was pretty damn rock and roll for a Victorian peer. Born into incredible wealth and privilege, he blew it all on outrageous outfits, mountains of jewellery and ill-advised theatrical extravaganzas - becoming known for his "sinuous, sexy, snake-like dances". He died penniless in Monte Carlo at 29, having drained the family fortune.
Outraged by his behaviour and reputation, the surviving Pagets conspired to erase the 5th Marquess from history, burning his papers, any photographs of him and generally airbrushing over his existence. The only monuments to his memory are some faded (and fabulous) photos that escaped the incinerator, a questionable tell-all interview with The Daily Mail and a summary of his life from the Complete Peerage that concludes:
"[The 5th Marquess] seems only to have existed for the purpose of giving a melancholy and unneeded illustration of the truth that a man with the finest prospects, may, by the wildest folly and extravagance, as Sir Thomas Browne says, 'foully miscarry in the advantage of humanity, play away an uniterable life, and have lived in vain.'"
Now that is a goddamn memorable memorial.
And so to How to Win Against History, a jaunty little musical biopic that attempts to explain that, despite dying in ignominy and being airbrushed from public knowledge, that the Marquess actually came out on top after all. In a way.
We follow Paget, played by writer and composer Seiriol Davies, as he progresses through the rigid class militarism of Eton, into the world of experimental theatre and then makes a beeline for death "of some lung thing". Accompanied by his manager/co-performer Alexander Keith (Matthew Blake) and Dylan Towney's keyboard, the trio approach history with playful irony, the relatively minimal stagecraft making sure things bounce along in a decent rhythm.
The obvious centrepiece is Davies' Paget. He approaches him as a naifish and innocent, convinced that he is outrageously talented yet completely unable to understand what audiences 'want' to see. Davies makes Paget easy to like: his performance a cocktail of one part pleasant Father Dougal-ish idiocy, one part delusional grandiosity served with a twist of concentrated camp. At times his wide-eyed enthusiasm and utter refusal to engage with reality gives him a touch of otherworldliness, making him feel like an angel gradually corrupted by exposure to cruel reality.
He's aided by a bevvy of tunes that allow the Marquess to fully emerge from his chrysalis. These performances reminded me of openly gay 70s popstar Jobraith, both eccentric performers out-of-step with the societal norms and both tragically dying young. There's a real punch to the music as Paget lets his freak flag fly - the slightly awkward young aristocrat unfurling his feathers like a peacock and giving in to his desire to shine and shimmer.
Thing is, though the Marquess is marvellously fabulous, he remains a cypher throughout. Granted, his erasure from history doesn't leave much to build a character upon, but by the time the curtain falls we feel more like we've seen a caricature rather than a human being beneath, and, subsequently, we never quite feel that we understand him. There's a bluntness to the character, and I'd have loved just a little self-reflection from him.
But perhaps there just isn't that much to understand about Paget - perhaps he is really was just a clueless popinjay who came a cropper at the hands of debtors. Is it more useful to view him as a precursor of camp culture, a man confident enough to cross-dress in public, strut around with a dyed poodle and modify his car to spray perfume from the exhaust? Here we find a more substantial morsel to chew on - a reflection on how the rigidly stratified Victorian aristocracy could produce a creature as curious and rare as Paget.
How to Win Against History is undeniably entertaining; the songs bounce, it's funny as hell, the costumes rock and the performers are enjoying themselves as much as the audience. Still, it's one of those shows that sends you running off to Wikipedia - frothy and slightly shallow one - but deeply enjoyable show.
★★★
How to Win Against History is at Ovalhouse until 23 July, then heading to Edinburgh. Tickets here.
How to Win Against History is at Ovalhouse until 23 July, then heading to Edinburgh. Tickets here.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Thursday, April 23, 2015
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The most perceptive line in Dead Royal comes when Diana Spencer is hunting for the 'Windsor Pearls'. She muses on the appropriateness of the pearl as symbol of royalty: a piece of dirt gradually encased within multiple layers of luxury until there's a perfectly glistening sphere. Yet deep within the dirt remains.
Chris Ioan Roberts' one-man play is an attempt to winkle out that dirt, to try to understand the psychological and social pressure exerted on an individual as they're crowbarred into the royal mould. He takes on two subjects; the elderly Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson; and Diana Spencer, fiancee to Prince Charles and angelic media darling.
We meet Simpson living in parasitic, Parisian stasis. With her husband dead, her life apparently consists of watching Gone With the Wind and gobbling down luxury truffles. But novelty is on the horizon; the fresh-faced Diana has been dispatched to the Simpson residence in advance of her wedding. Ostensibly there for her hen night, she's also on a secret mission to recover jewellery 'stolen' by the Duchess. Though two never meet (as they're played by the same person), both extemporise at length on what it's like to sacrifice your personality, ambitions and social freedom for a life of "expensive trinkets".
The pastel shades, dodgy wigs, 80s powerfrocks and diva mannerisms drive Dead Royal inexorably towards camp. But this isn't some preening exercise in aristocratic fetishism, more a critique of corrosive privilege. His portrayals function as an autopsy of these two women, peeling back the calcified public image and revealing the pissing, shitting and puking human being underneath. This drags us towards John Waters-ish trashiness; so the stage floor quickly being coated in a gross layer of goopy neon pink puke, and his Diana explains how she had to urinate in the back of a limousine.
Eventually Royal life begins to sound like a straitjacket, the slightest deviation from conformity resulting in a barrage from the press and disapproval from those higher up the ladder. The most obvious demonstration is Wallis Simpson's life in exile, shuffled out of the picture and supported on a stipend. Throughout, Diana's future woes lurk at the back audience's minds. She fantasises about hurling herself down the stairs at her wedding and, given the Paris setting, we can't help but think of her violent death.
Even so, it's a hard to muster up too much sympathy for two women who spent their lives living it large at our expense. Their Marie Antionettish fixations on style, sugary treats and image quickly begin to rankle, as does the low-level bitching about their incompetent servants. In a neat bit of staging, Roberts casts the audience as these underlings, Simpson in particular yelling orders out at us in a practised, privileged nasal drawl.
By the end of the play, the dresses, wigs and body language gave me vaguely insectoid creeps. Wallis in particular dresses in a carapace of thick black designer material, crowned with an imposing Imelda Marcos beehive. She's the endpoint of this process, yet we detect the first inklings of it arising in Diana. The insect comparisons make you think of a Queen Bee. Bloated and immobile within her birthing chamber, a life is devoted to squirting out offspring - a chilling endpoint for these ambitious woman.
This meaty little psychological tangle is never less than enjoyable to watch. Roberts' performances tiptoe between caricature, drag and sincerity. They're grotesques, but grotesques we can just about empathise with. There's also a breezy brevity - at about an hour long each line of dialogue and motion feels important.
As a committed republican I'm no fan of the Royal family, but as with the recent King Charles III and The Three Lions I confess to curiosity as to what's going through their minds; how they justify their life of luxury, the limits they place their behaviour and what life inside the Royal bubble does to a person. In Dead Royal you get a tantalising peek behind the curtain - and it confirms every dark suspicion.
★★★★
Dead Royal has three more performances, the 23rd, 24th and 25th (returns only). Tickets here.
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