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Showing posts with label Rough Haired Pointer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rough Haired Pointer. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
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Well that makes two plays in the space of a week where a guy fucks a corpse. Even aside from that, my entertainment diet for the last fortnight has consisted of dead wives, paedophilia, a double dose of suicide, stabbings, infanticide, incest and (foulest of all) the Warcraft movie. I hereby partially rescind any comments I may have made about the London fringe lacking teeth.
Christie in Love is a 1969 work by Howard Brenton, written with the intention of creating a "short, nasty little play" that would awaken theatrical audiences to an impending social apocalypse the playwright was sure was just around the corner. Rough Haired Pointer's revival wonders whether we might, finally, be in appropriately apocalyptic climes.
The subject is serial killer John Christie, who murdered at least eight women in the 1940s and early 1950s (in another weird coincidence he rendered them unconscious with house gas, making that two plays in two nights about that). Their rotting bodies ended up buried in his back garden or hanging in concealed alcoves in the walls, cementing the terraced house in London's criminal history and making the otherwise unassuming address - 10 Rillington Place - synonymous with horror.
Christie in Love is a slow-paced, darkly comic imagining of the police investigation of Christie's murders, together with a sustained analysis of the man himself. Strikingly staged, we enter to find a Christopher Hone's set: a swimming pool size open topped box. The edges are wooden and the sides wrought iron lattices. The inside is filled with crumpled up newspapers that conceal... well, who knows what nightmares could lie within?
Digging through this mess is a sweaty, unhappy Constable (Daniel Buckley). He huffs and puffs as he turns the earth down, knowing that each spadeful he moves could reveal a pungent and unjustly snuffed out young woman. To take his mind off the task, he slowly murmurs his way through a series of limericks ("There was a young girl named Heather/ Whose cunt was made out of leather / She made a queer noise,Which attracted the boys / By flapping the edges together." At the conclusion of each one he pauses, gives the horizon a thousand yard stare and repeats it slowly, as if visualising the reality of the joke.
He's soon joined by the shouty Inspector (Jake Curran), who asserts his authority by bullying the hapless Constable, before descending into a lengthy rumination on the horrible but necessary nature of his job. The two stare into the abyss below them, pondering the kind of warped mindset that would lead a man to hunt, murder and bury women - English women - and dump them in the back yard. We eventually learn this and meet Christie (Murray Taylor), but the precise details of what happens next are perhaps best left to surprise.
Brenton's technique reminded me a lot of Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, in which Adams reasons that to solve a crime, you need to 'solve' the entire society it occurred in and understand it as a symptom of politics and economics. Christie in Love, goes some way to doing this; Brenton zeroing in on ingrained societal misogyny and teasing out a throughline of male objectification of women. In its most harmless form its expressed as the Constable's limericks, which find unsettling future echoes in the stiffened, semen-stained bodies of the victims, or Christie's collection of their pubic hair.
Eventually the men work through a kind of roleplay, using a dummy of a woman/the corpse of one of Christie's victims as a prop to explore what drives this nasty little man. Here, we witness each of the men's perspectives on women - the Constable gradually panicking as he gets a faint comprehension of their vulnerability and defenselessness, the Inspector underlining his disgust with the 'sewers of the human mind' and Christie outlining, at length, his disgust of everything feminine.
At this juncture I should point out that Christie in Love is, broadly, a comedy, and a remarkably funny one at times. You don't get laughs much darker than this, but (mercifully) Brenton steadfastly avoids trivialising Christie's crimes and treats his victims with the respect that they deserve. I was personally a little leery of a comedy about John Christie - as I would be about any real-life murder - it's difficult to summon up many belly laughs when you imagine the terror of being simultaneously throttled and raped. But you somehow don't feel guilty laughing at Christie in Love.
I don't know if I'd say I 'enjoyed' this per se. I certainly appreciated it. I'm familiar with Buckley from Lardo and Curran from Diary of a Nobody, and each of them more than lived up to expectations, demonstrating admirable comic timing, fine control of their body language and, most importantly, a very good sense of balance. But most memorable is Taylor's Christie, a twitchingly hateful and amoral monster lurking behind a microthin veneer of respectableness.
Christie in Love provides a startling, oppressive and disturbing hour at the theatre, compressing the wide-ranging horrors of Christie's crimes in a lump of burning coal that should be held at arm's length. It's great, IF you're into this sort of thing.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
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In 1953's Duck Amuck, Daffy Duck is tormented by an offscreen animator, his physical appearance, clothing and voice are sadistically screwed with. The duck collides, violently, with his limitations as a fictional character, despairing as he realises he cannot escape his creator. In Peter Barnes' Noonday Demons a similar process occurs.
Standing in for Daffy is St Eusebius (Jordan Mallory-Skinner), a medieval holy man who's spent the last 13 years living in a dank cave, subsisting on a daily handful of olives and sips of stagnant water. He lives a life of lonely torment; spending his time contemplating his own misery as rotting skin peels from his emaciated flesh. Theoretically, by rejecting every single comfort, his intense asceticism will bring him closer to the suffering of Christ, and therefore closer to God.
For the most part, his only company has been a steadily growing heap of accreted human waste, yet he's soon spiritually attacked by the devil (taking the form of a mischievous vaudevillian dramatist) and later physically battled by rival ascetic. This develops into a classically sitcom-ish scenario, the new spiritual recluse Pior (Jake Curran) and Eusebius trying to undermine each other's miracles to gain control of this shit-caked cavern.
Both Curran and Mallor-Skinner are top notch, their eyes glistening with demented fervour as they repeatedly debase themselves. With their matted hair, filthy loincloths and diseased looking skin, they emanate a real aura of religious intensity, even when they're being ridiculous you can sense their sincerity. Their Gollum-ish body language gives them a bestial intensity, their sinews straining as they try their best to escape their sinful flesh.
This is all accentuated by some wonderfully textured stage design. With the only piece of scenery a disgusting looking heap of shit, it's down to a large bag of dust, dry ice and lighting to convey a sense of place. At times it's almost choking how thick the fog gets, which, in combination with spotlights at the sides of the stage casts jagged shadows on the men, leaving them looking increasingly skeletal. Even better, in the moments of genuine transcendence, where Eusebius is backlit by a spotlight, the arcs the shadows of his arms make through the mist begin to look eerily like angelic wings.
Though this is broad farce and slapstick, there's a core of existential misery to the whole affair. Though about two would-be holy men, Barnes' play is written from a materialist, atheistic perspective. The misery of these men becomes a cosmic punchline, the external force they're humiliating themselves for isn't God, it's us. This makes their ordeal a a trial by theatre, with the playwright as cruel interrogator and audience as jury.
Highlights are when, to the Eusebia's dismay, Barnes (taking the form of Peter-Cook-as-Satan) assumes control of his body, tempting him with a multitude of sins - eventually demonstrating his power by putting the two men through a surreal soft-shoe-shuffle song and dance hall. Though Eusebius claims to be spiritually tough enough to withstand any demonic revelation, not even he can cope with the suspicion that he's a fictional puppet designed to entertain a modern audience.
This eventually comes to a head as two saints compete to have out of body experiences. Pior pretends to fly over the desert and witness the sinner's city of Alexandria, breathlessly describing the crimes against God going on under his eyes. Not to be beaten, Eusebius undergoes his own vision. He also flies to Alexandria; but our Alexandria. With horror he regards a world of municipal parks and general godlessness; eventually swooping over the terrifying neo-Babylons of London and New York. True horror comes not from his observing open sinning, but from a sedate, uncaring areligiousness: nobody cares enough about God to consciously disobey him.
Eventually the wool completely falls from Eusebius' eyes, resulting in him being granted the spiritual ascension he desperately craved. But in a cruel twist, all this does is propel him into being a member of the audience, staring in traumatised disbelief as his doppelganger soaks up the applause and leaves the stage.
It's a pretty marvellous night at the theatre; spinning some impressively powerful comic gears, the minimal staging used to fullest effect and the whole production infused with an earthy physicality that perfectly complements the themes throughout. Colour me impressed.
★★★★
Noonday Demons is at the King's Head Theatre until 2 August. Tickets here.
Monday, June 9, 2014
Monday, June 9, 2014
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First published in 1888 as a serial in Punch magazine, The Diary of a Nobody shows us the humdrum domestic life of Charles Pooter, clerk in a non-descript, vaguely Dickensian finance firm. Orbiting him are his loving wife Carrie, his dissolute son Willie/Lupin and a gaggle of comedy grotesques. It's a farcical comedy of manners that satirises the preoccupations of the Victorian middle-classes: Pooter is man on a quest for respectability, pitting himself against a capricious fate that takes a sadistic pleasure in hurling obstacle after obstacle into his path; from a raucous and randy bride-to-be for his dim son, to an Australian spiritualist determined to conduct a seance, to the comings and goings of his friends; Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing.
It's pun-laden names like these that reveal all too quickly where The Diary of a Nobody's comedy heart lies; in the silly, the groan-worthy and in all too painfully accurate English self-deprecation. This is the kind of comedy whose natural home is on Radio 4 on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps sandwiched between I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and Just a Minute. They're polite laughs that come from a bourgeoisie gently satirising itself, a comedy that, at worst, ends up staid, static and toothless.
Thankfully Rough Haired Pointer's style immediately assuages most of these fears. Though the setting is mannered and stiff, this production (like the actors within) is loose and gangly. a flail of limbs, wobbling scenery and action that amounts to just barely controlled chaos. It's a show that feels on the verge of collapse. As props skitter across the floor, scenery wobbles and costumes fall apart the show threatens to collapse like an overambitious souffle. It never does and this unpredictability goes no small way towards injecting life into material that has the potential for comedic arthritus.
The serial nature of the original material means that the stage adaptation becomes, essentially, sketch comedy. Carin Nakanishi, set and costume designer, seems to have grasped the sketch concept quite literally. The entire set and most of the costumes are rendered in monochrome with the details picked out in a way that echoes the original illustrations. It's an exceptionally well-realised aesthetic that's not only visually pleasing, but works beautifully in creating a Victorian setting on a (presumably) limited budget.
It's a little difficult to review the performances as we were informed at the start of the night that Shelley Lang was unable to make the show due to "an incident" (a rather ominous choice of words, I hope she's okay). The brave and admirable solution was for the rest of the cast to cover for her at short notice, playing not only their bevvy of characters but hers as well. I figure that things are jumbled up on stage when she's here, let alone when the rest of the cast is skating on thin ice.
As it turned out I only evers noticed one script on stage and it somehow worked within the ramshackle context of the rest of the play. The lack of female presence gave proceedings a Pythonesque tinge, a group of men who know precisely how best to deploy their various personalities and physiques in the service of comedy. The most obvious stand out is Jake Curran as the lead, a performance benefiting from his only having to play one character. He's got a marvellous 'period-face' - his facial hair and bone structure making him look convincingly Victorian - something which, in combination with a killer deadpan stare, makes him a compelling lynchpin of sanity upon which to hang all the calamity.
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| Would love to live in a house decorated like this. |
Jordan Mallory-Skinner is similarly excellent; playing Mrs Pooter with a waxy skinned, lizard-like demeanour. Through razor-thin lips and narrowed accusatory eyes he plays the role as a woman frantically trying to suppress her feral urges. Pleasantly, the Pooter marriage has a bedrock of genuine affection to it and the couple mostly enjoy each other's company - reminding me of a 19th century Homer and Marge Simpson.
The only problem I have is with the length of the show. I've never read the book, but it seems this adaptation takes in the whole 15 months covered in it. When first conceived this material was designed to be consumed in bite-size chunks; each day a snapshot of life. As there's no compelling narrative throughline and as things are so cartoonishly pitched it's difficult to really care about what's going to happen to these people. As I said before, this makes the show essentially a series of comedy sketches and, as funny as they are, watching this many sketches featuring the same characters left me a little comedically exhausted. Perhaps instead of a very funny two acts and an interval, the adaptation would have been better served as an extraordinarily funny, shorter one-act show.
That said, it's a minor criticism - and something 'merely' being very funny isn't really so awful. This is an insanely talented group of individuals, all of whom click together on stage like clockwork. It's fascinating to see them move around, paying close attention to how the others move and reacting to their jokes, mistakes and microscope decisions in each scene. At best, it's almost as if this 126 year old material is being improvised on the spot.
The Diary of a Nobody is at the White Bear Theatre, 138 Kennington Park Rd
SE11 4DJ - 3rd - 21st June in the evenings. Tickets available here.
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