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Showing posts with label The Vault Festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Vault Festival. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
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Reviewed by David James
Rating: 
Last summer I spent a seriously enjoyable ninety minutes running around Covent Garden during Fire Hazard Games' 80 Days - A Real World Adventure. The show combines technology, puzzle-solving and orienteering, inviting audiences to immerse themselves in a story that plays out on the streets of London. Now they're back with Jekyll / Hyde, so how has their "high energy street game" style been refined over the last six months?
The skeleton of the project remains the same. You register a team before the event, then access a personalised web page on your phone on the night. This, in combination with a paper map, funnels you around a neighbourhood as you solve riddles using the powers of observation. For example, you could head to a location and be asked something like "I have a crown, a sceptre and what else?". You would find an object nearby that fits the bill, examine it and input the answer.
In 80 Days you were competing against other teams to purchase equipment for your trip, with your choices contributing to the eventual success of your journey. In Jekyll / Hyde you're trying to figure out what happened to you last night after you consumed a mysterious serum, following a trail of destruction around the city. So, basically a Victorian gothic take on The Hangover.
Fire Hazard has hit upon a winning formula with the format. I love the way their games encourage you to pay attention to the urban environment, guide you to unfamiliar places and make you see things in a new light. Their attention to detail is astonishing, the quality of the writing is top-notch and they have near-perfectly nailed combining narrative and puzzle-solving.
However, I can only compare this to 80 Days, and it feels like there's been a conscious effort to simplify things. For one, the system of collecting money in order to buy items has been completely ditched. In Jekyll / Hyde you simply answer riddles and then pick a multiple choice answer that contributes to a very simple psychological profile.
Similarly, you no longer get a summary of how your decisions affected the story. As the show finished I was anticipating an 80 Days style run-down of what happened to me based on what I'd chosen to remember. Instead, you get a collection of newspaper headlines that felt pretty generic.
Finally, the teams are no longer in competition with one another. This isn't clear from the start, but there are no rewards for the team who completes the most riddles and covers the most ground. I'm naturally competitive and knowing that I'm facing off against other people gives me the impetus to solve things as quickly as possible. Realising that I'd been wasting my time dashing everywhere in an effort to maximise my points and beat the clock was disappointing.
Finally (and this is a little more nitpicky), beginning the show in the Leake Street tunnels makes for a bad first impression. For one there's so much visual overload from the graffiti that it makes the opening 'tutorial' riddles much harder to solve than anything that follows. For another, being in a subterranean tunnel meant the phone signal needed to play the game kept dropping out.
It feels like Jekyll / Hyde was put together in response to criticisms that 80 Days was too complicated. But, for me at least, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
Don't get me wrong, I (and my plus one) had a great time traipsing around Waterloo solving riddles, but surely there's a satisfying middle ground between the complexity and competition of 80 Days and this?
Jekyll / Hyde is at Vault Festival until 22nd March. Tickets here.
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Thursday, January 30, 2020
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Rating: 
There is no way I was going to pass up seeing a show called Something Awful. The title of the play is derived from a dinosauric comedy website and internet forum. Once upon a time the site was on the cutting edge of online comedy. Now it's slowly dying, having transitioned into a safe space for depressed middle-aged men to swap Simpsons memes, pose as Third World Maoists and hold purposefully contrary views on Star Wars.
Though the site has bubbled away at the obscure corners of popular culture for two decades, its biggest contribution to date (aside from maybe dril) is Slender Man. Created as part of a contest to create paranormal images, the spooky character transcended the site and went viral, spawning movies and games.
It was all fun and games until two twelve-year-old Wisconsin schoolgirls took Slender Man a touch too seriously and attempted to stab their friend to death with a kitchen knife. Now Tatty Hennessy has taken that story, transplanted it to the UK and given it a psychosexual spin.
Here our characters are Jel (Monica Anne), Soph (Natalya Martin) and Ellie (Melissa Parker). They're into spooky stories online, finding themselves attracted to a creepypasta thread on Something Awful. The site is described as one of the most vicious places online, where the comments are impossibly cruel and the posters depraved gore-hungry lunatics.
At first, the girls won't even register to post, fearful of the reactions their contributions might receive. But slowly they get drawn in, with a mysterious tale of a supernatural homicidal woodsman striking very close to home. They're lost in the story, and their only way out... is murder!
Thing is, much of Something Awful isn't really about the supernatural at all. Instead, it seems to be a coming-of-age story in which young girls explore their sexuality and self-image. The non-horror scenes that get to grips with this are the best things in the play, with the highlight a sleepover where one girl has her first period and the others attempt to assist her in inserting a tampon. I don't know what the hell teenage girls actually speak about these days, but the dialogue rings true and all three actors are very believable as 13-year olds.
But squeezing all this into an hour means that what should be the core story of the girls developing a deadly obsession with spooky stories online gets squeezed into the margins. What I'd think would be the meat of the play - the bit where two of the girls decide that the third must be sacrificed - is quickly skimmed over.
And so we're funnelled into a murder scene where the killers' motivations haven't been established. The final bloody moments should be an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. Here they're just a confusing ellipsis.
I'm usually all about brevity in theatre. Most stories can be told in an hour and its a rare play that wouldn't benefit from a bit of editing. But Something Awful gets very cramped trying to squeeze everything into an hour. It'd benefit from a lot more room to breathe.
Something Awful is at the Vault Festival until 2nd Feb. Tickets here.
Something Awful is at the Vault Festival until 2nd Feb. Tickets here.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
Thursday, February 21, 2019
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Carrie Marx kicks ass. Over the years I've seen her both perform in and devise a whole bunch of great theatre, from Death Ship 666 way back in 2013, the epic Cosmic Trigger and last year's incredibly cool and spooky Unburied. She has a fantastic stage presence, has a rare understanding of horror and is super into arcane countercultural philosophy.
Reviewing April is a tricky proposition as there is a big change of mood at one point. I can't not write about it, but if you want to go in blind (which I very much recommend) just be assured that it's amazing and read the rest of the review later.
Anyway, for the most part April behaves like a comedy show, poking fun at egocentric self-help gurus and teeth-grindingly annoying positive thinking vloggers. But these laughs are the velvet sheath around a particularly jagged and nasty blade. Marx is an expert in horror, but despite laughing more during this show than I do at most comedies, April is easily the scariest show I've seen since uh, Unburied.
Anyway, for the most part April behaves like a comedy show, poking fun at egocentric self-help gurus and teeth-grindingly annoying positive thinking vloggers. But these laughs are the velvet sheath around a particularly jagged and nasty blade. Marx is an expert in horror, but despite laughing more during this show than I do at most comedies, April is easily the scariest show I've seen since uh, Unburied.
April would be great even if it was just what it bills itself as. Marx somehow both satirises and makes a decent case for the power of 'positive thinking', smartly weaving fuzzy mainstream self-help techniques with punk occultism. This is carried forward in her demeanour and aesthetic: the blindingly white dress, jet-black wig and beatific smile making her look half Goop aficionado and half cult leader.
Part of the show consists of the audience writing down their problems and putting them into a box, with random ones being drawn out and 'solved' by April. Somewhat predictably mine was one of the ones picked (I dunno why I keep ending up on the stage of shows I'm reviewing but hey-o), so I ended up standing opposite her gazing into her bottomless eyes. I felt like a deer staring down an 18-wheeler as she interrogated me, a process which ending with her angrily ordering me out of the room (fortunately I was allowed back in).
Then there's the jaw-dropping video sequence in which she talks about God's position on unbelievers. This is a five-minute monologue performed (as far as I could tell) without blinking in which April tells an increasingly nightmarish and surreal story about how God deals with non-believers. It contains some truly bonkers/horrible imagery that later invaded my dreams and made for a restless night's sleep.
Marx gradually transitions from poking fun at dippy YouTube personalities into a genuinely scary cult leader - which leads the show down a darkly funny path. Along the way she succinctly and accurately sets out the principles of chaos magick, which she paints as a postmodern ritualistic tool that allows individuals to bend the universe to their will. The highlight of her lesson is the initially ridiculous observation that Noel Edmonds is one of the most important mystical thinkers of the modern age and that Mr Blobby is a demon conjured by him that outgrew his master. This gets some of the biggest laughs of the show... but she's right.
But then comes the gut punch. What April is actually about is (spoilers) the subarachnoid brain haemorrhage that Marx suffered soon after I saw her in Unburied last year. This has seriously damaged her short term memory, which would be intensely frustrating for anyone, let alone a professional performer. Worse, her neurologists say there are no signs of recovery and they cannot predict whether things will ever improve for her. Seeing her talk about this as Carrie Marx rather than 'April' is absolutely devastating (to the point of the woman sat next to me beginning to weep).
The revelation throws the rest of the show into context. The 'positive thinking' that April preaches is what well-meaning people have encouraged her to do - but I know full well that you cannot simply positively think your way out of horribleness. Chaos magick is perhaps more useful, its framework of personalised ritual and symbology at least a way to zero in on what you want to achieve and how to do it. But the sense is that these are waves crashing against a granite cliff - the philosophically subjective unable to overcome the physiologically objective. And that, beyond what Marx has achieved before, is true horror.
April is one hell of a piece of theatre. That Marx devised and performs this while suffering from neurological damage is impressive in a way that word doesn't quite cover. Huge kudos must also go to her Hermetic Arts partner Chris Lincé, who directed and was responsible for the excellent video design.
Right now this is my pick of the festival, and I don't see it being knocked off that perch anytime soon. I will treasure my amethyst for a long while yet and I can't wait to see what Hermetic Arts does next. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Carrie Marx kicks ass.
April is at VAULT Festival until 24th February. Tickets here.
Friday, March 9, 2018
Friday, March 9, 2018
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A Hundred Words For Snow reviewed by David James
Rating:
My advice is to bring a hanky. Tatty Hennessey's A Hundred Words For Snow is one hell of a monologue, transporting us from suburban London to the frozen Arctic and guiding us through the depths of grief. I'm generally suspicious of sentimental shows - I get annoyed when someones waving an onion at me in an attempt to coax out a tear. But this does things honestly, exploring misery, loss and adolescent uncertainty with sincerity and wit. It's brill.
Our heroine is 15-year-old Rory (Gemma Barnett), who is attempting to process the sudden death of her father. In the wake of his death, everything feels muted: she's alienated by the thoughtless platitudes at his funeral and the jarring return to humdrum domesticity. It's only when she ventures into her Dad's study and sees his never-fulfilled holiday plans that she realises what she must do: steal her Mum's credit card, stuff her Dad's urn into a backpack and head to the North Pole to scatter his ashes.
It's a pretty bonkers ambition, but Hennessey goes out of her way to make Rory's attempt plausible. It sets the stage for a journey that takes her via Tromsø in Norway to the island of Svalbard and to the frozen infinity of the Arctic. Along the way we really get to know Rory, delving deep into her insecurities, mindset and awe at the epic polar scenery. She's one of the more complex and likeable characters I've seen in a long time, and though the show is just an hour long, we understand her.
Laying on top of all this is that the majestic and stark Arctic is a deeply satisfying metaphor for Rory's unresolved grief. Hennessey doesn't treat grief as something unpleasant to be conquered, but something starkly beautiful in its own right: profound sadness shouldn't be swept under the rug, it should be explored and understood. Rory's fearless journey into the ice accomplishes this, it's only when she's stared down the blizzard that she can process her father's death.
All this is making the show sound a bit morose. It is, but the tears are leavened with a tonne of laughs. Hennessey's writing is peppered with very funny insights, borne of Rory's idiosyncratic viewpoint on the world. Though we never completely forget the weight of her Dad's ashes, the load is lightened by some very funny facts about the history of Arctic exploration and some well-observed asides about human behaviour. A particular highlight is a beautifully written segment about a sexual encounter, which manages to be both hilarious and movingly poetic.
Writing this good demands a great performance to do it justice, and Gemma Barnett delivers in spades. She gives Rory a gawky physicality and energy that goes a long way to making her a believable teenager, frequently locking eyes with people in the audience to make the show, for one brief moment, a two-person dialogue. Barnett has charisma to spare, her delivery seamlessly transitioning from light-hearted sarcasm all to shiver-inducing emotional nakedness.
What else is left to say? A Hundred Words For Snow is a brilliant bit of writing performed to perfection. As I left I passed people dabbing away tears and sniffling into tissues - tears that the show absolutely earns. This is a true highlight of Vault 2018 and shouldn't be missed.
A Hundred Words For Snow is at Vault Festival until March 11th. Tickets here.
Rating:
Even if it were wrong about everything else, Hermetic Arts' Unburied would be dead on in praising 1970s British horror television. I was sceptical about these shows for the longest 0time, associating the era with terrible production values, stagey acting and campy rubber monster costumes. It's all well and good respecting the cultural significance of say, Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, but actually watching it? No chance.
That all changed the first time I saw Nigel Kneale's classic The Stone Tape, which scared the crap out of me. It's a traditional ghost story with a contemporary sheen, showing scientists exploring paranormal phenomenon with modern technology, only to awaken something dark and dormant within ancient stones.
Unburied is cut from the same cloth, and similarly interprets the supernatural through technology. Only this time it's not stones psychically recording the past, but a 'living folk story' echoing through history and haunting those who tell it.
The core of the show is 'Unburied', an unbroadcast horror TV show from 1978, whose production and subsequent disappearance is shrouded in mystery. Folk horror enthusiast Carrie Marx has been researching Unburied for the last year and this show is the summation of her work - we're the audience for the recording of a podcast to be uploaded in April. So boiled back to its bones, the show is essentially a fancy Powerpoint presentation.
But boy howdy what a Powerpoint presentation. Unburied straddles the line between fiction and truth with the grace and precision of a tightrope walker, simultaneously telling a completely believable story about the history of television production and internet research while also subtly spinning a genuinely spooky ghost story.
Much of the show's success is down to Carrie Marx's great delivery. Her enthusiasm about the subject matter is infectious and she drags us into her narrative of discovery with consummate ease. She's also a fantastic performer, slipping between the podcast recording and a series of audience asides skilfully, as well as making the more overtly scary final moments of the show properly spine-chilling.
I don't want to spoil exactly what happens, but the writing understands one of the golden rules of horror: less is more. It's not until quite a way in that the show reveals its hand, and you suddenly recontextualise what we've been told about, say, the minutia of obscure Victorian authors. Even better, Marx trusts in the audience's intelligence to put the jigsaw together, resulting in moments where you realise something before she does
It's also unusually thoughtful, dwelling on the Brexit/Trump impulses to "destroy the present and bring back an imagined past". This is a show about delving into the past, presented with more than a twinge of nostalgia for what seem to be more innocent times. The show repeatedly underlines that navel-gazing through rose-coloured glasses is deeply unhealthy: a truth that soon supernaturally manifests itself.
This show is a textbook example of how true horror isn't a product of big budgets and complex pyrotechnics. For example, I saw the West End production of The Exorcist recently. That show also has its roots in 70s horror, yet ended up being more campy than scary. Unburied knocks The Exorcist into a cocked hat - achieving more with a couple of Powerpoint slides and a talented performer than that show does with an Ian McKellen voiceover and the latest in digital projection-mapping.
Unburied is a modest marvel, and I'm incredibly glad I got the opportunity to check it out. I'll be there opening night for whatever Hermetic Arts does next.
Unburied is at Vault Festival until 11 March. Tickets here.
Unburied is at Vault Festival until 11 March. Tickets here.
Friday, February 9, 2018
Friday, February 9, 2018
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AI Love You's future isn't here yet, but it's in the post. We chat with voice-activated home assistants like Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, the R&D into sex robots and teledildonics is accelerating and, perhaps sinisterly, unknowable algorithms analyse our behaviour and mould our online advertising and experience to our particular tastes.
All that combines in Melanie Anne Ball's AI Love You, in which Adam (Peter Dewhurst) is a twentysomething Londoner in love with his robot girlfriend April (Eve Ponsonby). Three years ago he was selected to receive one of the first prototypes, programmed to adapt her behaviour to increase his happiness and identical in every way to a 'real' woman.
Now he's fallen in love with her (and, apparently, she with him), and she's malfunctioning. This presents as a degenerative disease: she wants to be deactivated rather than slowly losing her mind. He wants to prevent what is effectively her suicide, arguing that you would do the same for any human loved one in the same circumstances
It's an interesting situation, amplified by the decision to make the show a debate fuelled by the audience. Throughout we're asked to vote on whose argument is more convincing, the results shaping the course of the show and culminating in a Q&A session with the characters. It's Black Mirror meets Jeremy Kyle!
For my part, I found the show an eerie and faintly sad insight into male entitlement. Adam was explicitly chosen because he's a 'normal' guy - with friends, a supportive family, a career and no psychological issues. Even so, his proximity to an artificial woman designed to make him happy is eroding his morals: April is programmed to "bend like a blade of grass" to unquestioningly emotionally support him, leading Adam to disparage human women as he considers he's already got perfection.
She is, essentially, his slave. The question of whether an AI has consciousness or is just simulating it through programming is not something the play can answer, though it if looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then as far as I'm concerned we should treat it like a duck. Based on that, it's clear that she's stuck in unwilling servitude - something underlined by Adam's ability to force her to do things by saying "it would make me happy if you would..." Tellingly, he subtly but repeatedly reinforces the concept of her as property rather than as a person.
A decade ago these issues would have been an interesting thought experiment, but now they're inching into reality. The consequences of emotional attachment to lifelike AIs are absolutely something we're going to have to deal with sometime in the next 20 years or so (realistic humanoid robots are still a pipe dream though), and this gives us a preview of arguments we're destined to see play out very soon.
Aside from all that, AI Love You is a downright neat piece of drama. Dewhurst and Ponsonby quickly and believably sketch out their characters, with Ponsonby's body language and motions ever-so-slightly 'off', revealing her robotic nature. They're both skilled improvisers, able to quickly and believably interact with the audience as the show goes on.
Relying on a receptive audience is a pretty bold dramatic move - especially as there's a portion of the show where a random audience member is expected to chair a discussion into the issues raised by the play. This could go badly wrong (I'm guessing it probably will at some point), but last night's audience was perceptive and engaged. Having said that, I'd love to know what other audiences voted for, and whether making April more obviously artificial would affect that.
It's refreshing to see a smart and well-performed play that places so much trust in its audience - it's nice to be able to give your opinion on a contentious situation in the moment. One of the highlights of a so far very good Vault Festival - check this out!
AI Love You is at Vault Festival until 11 February. Tickets here.
Friday, February 2, 2018
Friday, February 2, 2018
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Becoming Shades reviewed by David James
Rating:
The Vaults underneath Waterloo make for a great Hades. The arched ceilings, damp dripping down the walls and trains distantly overhead rumbling overhead do a lot of legwork in Chivaree Circus and Upstage Creative's Becoming Shades - in which the audience becomes lost souls amidst the hellhounds, pomegranate seeds and enigmatic boatmen of the Greek afterlife.
A loose retelling of the myth of Persephone, the show consists of various circus acts performed by an all-female company scattered around Vault Festival's biggest venue. So, we might huddle around a performer doing a piece of interpretative dance, then be hustled over to another part of the room where we take in an acrobatics act and so on. Impressively, this is all musically accompanied by a live duo, Sam West and Becks Johnstone, the latter of which is such a talented vocalist that it feels a bit odd to have your back to her whilst she performs.
The show bills itself as immersive theatre but, like most shows that claim this, it isn't. Instead, it's more of a promenade piece. Though we're poked and prodded by staff who make sure we're not blundering into the fire-eaters, this is an almost entirely passive experience in which we sit down, shut up and watch people do stuff. That the show isn't interactive isn't necessarily a criticism, but "immersive" is quickly becoming a meaningless marketing buzzword and I wish shows would stop diluting the concept.
Becoming Shades also claims to be a "female story of empowerment", which is also a bit debatable. On the face of it, the Persephone myth isn't particularly progressive: a woman abducted and forcibly married, who has little agency of her own within the story. Chivaree Circus zeroes in on the imagery of a busted open pomegranate as a symbol of female sexual power, eventually reincarnating Persephone as a Queenly fertility goddess in full command of her own sexuality (she then twirls around on a flaming yonic hula hoop to really hammer the point home).
That's all well and good, though I'm always sceptical of shows about female empowerment that also feature attractive women in skimpy outfits doing hi-octane pole-dancing routines to dubstep. I get that doing this reclaims misogynist imagery and subverts masturbatory objectification, but y'know, it's still a sexy pole dancing routine.
Stuff like that feeds into a subtle but damaging disconnect between narrative and form. Essentially the show feels like a vehicle for various circus routines around which Greek myth and imagery have been stapled rather than the two properly tesselating. That contributes to an emotional disconnect that makes it difficult to care what's happening.
What's left is an okay circus show. The general atmosphere and dramatic lighting of the venue is effective, but while there's nothing objectively wrong with the acrobatics, there is also nothing that audiences who've seen a couple of circus shows won't have seen before. My barometer for a successful circus performance is when the audience spontaneously gasps and applauds during a piece, so impressed that they cannot help but react. This happens once or twice over the course of the night, but in general things are a bit muted.
Then there's the little gripes. Constantly being asked to sit down, stand up and being herded around the room every couple of minutes quickly gets old. The expectation that you're to wear a surgical mask for the entire show is annoying (most people discard theirs early on). And the wub-wub-wub dubstep effects on the soundtrack are a bit dated in 2018.
Becoming Shades isn't a bad show but it never comes together in a satisfying way; ending up as a collection of disparate elements that awkwardly rub up against one another. At £30 a ticket it's one of the more expensive (possibly the most expensive) show at the Vaults - if I'd have paid that I'd be feeling a little short-changed.
Becoming Shades is at Vault Festival until 18 March. Tickets here.
Then there's the little gripes. Constantly being asked to sit down, stand up and being herded around the room every couple of minutes quickly gets old. The expectation that you're to wear a surgical mask for the entire show is annoying (most people discard theirs early on). And the wub-wub-wub dubstep effects on the soundtrack are a bit dated in 2018.
Becoming Shades isn't a bad show but it never comes together in a satisfying way; ending up as a collection of disparate elements that awkwardly rub up against one another. At £30 a ticket it's one of the more expensive (possibly the most expensive) show at the Vaults - if I'd have paid that I'd be feeling a little short-changed.
Becoming Shades is at Vault Festival until 18 March. Tickets here.
Friday, January 26, 2018
Friday, January 26, 2018
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Silk Road reviewed by David James
Rating:
Why bother dealing with an unreliable and shady character whose grotty bedroom you have to sit around making small talk with when, with just a click of a mouse, the finest narcotics the world has to offer can be winging their way to your house? Or, as Silk Road puts it: "Postman Pat brings your smack to your door with a smile and his black and white cat is none the wiser".
Alex Oates' play is about the Silk Road, a darknet website that allowed its users to buy and sell drugs using bitcoin. It was founded on principles of anonymity and security, though this was blown wide open when the site's founder, Ross Ulbricht (aka the Dread Pirate Roberts), was arrested and his laptop taken as evidence. The FBI then shut down the website and seized its funds - which amounted to 26,000 BTC (currently worth approximately $200 million). Ulbricht was subsequently sentenced to life without parole.
Staging all that is a tricky proposition - but Silk Road comes at it from a dramatically satisfying angle. If the Silk Road was a stone hurled into the still pond of drug dealing, then this play tracks the ripples rather than the impact. So, we follow Bruce Blackmore (Josh Barrow), a teenager in Sunderland who finds himself in over his head when he decides to dabble on some online cocaine dealing.
The show combines adolescent drama, absurdism and brief lectures on cryptocurrencies, TOR and, entertainingly, the precise method of how to hollow out a book to hide something inside. Barrow has an admirable rubbery performance style: allowing him to switch between, say, a sweet old granny and a thuggish small-town gangster without missing a beat. It makes for an energetic and exciting hour, the pacey rhythm contributing to the sense that things are spinning out of control.
The show is particularly successful in ramping up the tension towards the end, when dealers whose methods are baseball bats and cheese wire clash with bedroom dwelling teenagers and their laptops. The initial libertarian fervour of the Silk Road tended to whitewash the violence involved in the narcotics supply lines, so it's interesting to see Bruce get a dose of reality as it begins to catch up with his small-scale operation.
I've also got to praise a play that's comprehensible no matter how technologically literate you are - clearly and concisely explaining the technologies, philosophies and methods involved in an operation like the Silk Road. From minute one you sense that this has been written from first-hand experience in these murky internet waters, a confident knowledge that makes Barrow's performance credible.
It adds up to an hour of theatre that's as informative as it is funny and tense, weaving together a very modern situation in an eminently relatable way. A great start to a promising looking Vault Festival!
Silk Road is at Vault Festival until 28 January. Tickets here.
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Thursday, March 2, 2017
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The rule of 'show don't tell' isn't inviolable, but it's definitely a decent mantra to live by. Tom Brennan's The Episode is pretty much all tell and no show - a play that essentially consists of characters describing gripping events that we never get to see and fascinating characters who we never get to meet.
Set in the aftermath of a reality show gone wrong, we meet three characters who recount their backstage experiences. The show is essentially America's Next Top Model with the copyright sanded off, hosted by Anna Wintour clone Kate (Nesba Crenshaw), assisted by model liaison Jay (Lolade Rufai) and camerawoman DW (Isobella Hubbard). The three women toss the storytelling baton between them, gradually teasing out what exactly went wrong in the titular 'episode'.
Without giving too much away, it turns out to be a cautionary fable on expectations of perfection. We hear how the contestants are placed in precarious situations and constantly judged to impossibly high standards. It leads to a pressure cooker of emotions, exacerbated by a low-calorie diet of celery and raw carrot. Things soon zero in on one of the contestants, possessed of some intangible magnetism that each of the three women are drawn to. Maybe they really have found America's next top model?
Traverse staging not only gives the loose impression of a catwalk on which the characters walk, but also allows us to judge the people sat opposite us. There's several lengthy monologues from the Wintour character about the nature of beauty and fashion, during which she encourages us to examine how she looks at her and how we look at each other.
Crenshaw's Kate feels like the totemic centre of the show, and when she's rigidly sat on a throne in dark sunglasses and with a severe bob, she looks appropriately regal. It's a performance with real gravitas, making a deeply convincing and intelligent argument that the fashion industry is philosophically and commercially important. She manages to make us think that finding the next Kate Moss is a genuinely important task - that intangible x-factor stirring in a subtle touch of the divine to the show.
DW and Jay are somewhat more grounded, ending up more as exposition machines than compelling characters in their own rights. Both have nicely observed moments, with DW's journey from hard-bitten war photography to getting wrapped up in reality TV ephemera particularly nicely drawn (I also liked the touch of her being late to set because she was busy charging batteries).
This is all interesting and decently performed stuff, but the further we get into the play there's a nagging feeling that simply hearing about all this interesting stuff isn't quite cutting it. Would it really have been too difficult to stage this 'in the moment' and have us experience the drama first hand? Plays that place in the aftermath of a huge event can work - Stuart Slade's brilliant BU21 is about the aftermath of a commercial airliner crashing into west London, but that at least has the excuse that you can't realistically stage a planecrash in fringe theatre. But, I think, it is eminently possible to stage a reality TV show.
On top of that, the grisly event at the core of the drama isn't quite grisly enough to stand out. Nicholas Winding Refn's film The Neon Demon occupies the same territory to The Episode, each being about a particular model's indefinable radiance and each ending in violence. But The Neon Demon cranks things up to an unforgettable avalanche of graphic eye-ball puking, corpse fucking and cannibalistic mayhem. The Episode, by comparison, ends up with a brief, tasteful description.
I'm not demanding buckets of blood, but this is the cherry on an overly detached play that desperately needs an injection of excitement. Part of this is down to the retrospective storytelling mode, part is that we never get to meet the real main character, part of it is down to an inbuilt laconicism that makes the pace molasses slow.
The Episode isn't exactly bad, it just feels someone describing a much more interesting play.
The Episode is at Vault Festival until 5th March
Monday, February 20, 2017
Monday, February 20, 2017
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It's always nice being a theatre critic when family comes to visit from out of town. Turning up at the press desk to get your name ticked off a special list, having a couple of complimentary drinks and settling down to whatever it is you've signed up to write about that night - it's a good look. So, when I got invited to This is Not Culturally Significant on the same weekend my Dad was in town, I snapped up a couple of comp tickets.
I didn't do any research into what the show was - I just liked the title. It's a sentiment that's run through my head during countless half-baked conceptual snoozefests with an over-inflated sense of self-importance. Plus, hey, it's the Vault Festival. Not only is the venue dead cool but the shows are only about an hour long, even if something's rubbish it won't be rubbish for long.
In retrospect I maybe should have done a tiny bit of research: the confluence of all the above left me sat next to my Dad as we watched a butt-naked man with his legs spread, rhythmically manipulating his cock while girlishly squealing "oh my god my pussy is soooo wet!" Ah right. It's one of those shows.
Said cock-manipulator is Adam Scott-Rowley, founder of Out of Spite Theatre. The company's mission statement is to create "confrontational, unsettling and high-intensity theatre". Mission accomplished.
This is Not Culturally Significant introduces us to a dizzyingly fast-paced gallery of grotesques: Scott-Rowley shuffles between characters like a magician with a deck of cards, presenting us with an abused housewife, her ramrod-straight bastard of a husband, an American porn star, a sadistic Oxford don, a homeless junkie and several more besides. Each of these roles has their own particular body language and voice, and are cycled between at breakneck speed.
Very quickly the nudity justifies itself. I've seen many shows and performance art pieces with full frontal nudity before, and there's always a risk that it becomes the centre of the show. Here it allows Scott-Rowley to crank up his chameleonic abilities and vividly bringing each character to life. It also brings a subtle element of danger and unpredictability to the show - with his dick bouncing around nothing seems outside the realm of possibilities.
The nudity also levels the social playing field between the characters, blurring the distinctions between a snooty Professor and crack-addled homeless lady. The fast pace of the show blurs the lines between these personalities, exposing life as a tightly woven tapestry of furtive orgasm, fetishistic pleasure and sexual debasement. It's a somewhat nihilistic world that leaves an acid tang in the mouth - but it's also all too plausible.
Having now done a bit of research I've learned that this show's previous (well-received) run at the Edinburgh Festival was fully clothed. It's difficult to imagine - the full frontal nudity so central to the show that it wouldn't be half as good without it.
That said, Scott-Rowley quickly proves not only a talented physical contortionist but possessed of a puckish rubberface and an acrobatic voice. He's particularly great at flipping a switch and descending into diabolical malevolence, his eyes flickering with a psychotic Gerald Scarfe glint. There's also something undeniably Rowan Atkinson-ish to the wheedle in his voice and the demented narcissism with which his characters prevent themselves.
This is Not Culturally Significant is a serious breath of theatrical fresh air. The Vault Festival is riddled with sentimental and self-centred journeys of discovery through fatherhood, mental illness or whatever - but this whips through these dusty tunnels like a nuclear blast wave, making damn near everything else look staid and tame by comparison.
On top of that it's also funny as hell. I liked it. The audience liked it. My Dad loved it. It's finished at the Vaults now, but if (when?) it returns to the London stage make a bee-line for that ticket desk.
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Thursday, February 16, 2017
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In space no-one can hear you scream. But, perhaps, they can hear you sing. This is the conceit behind Hannah Elsy Productions' latest, Summer Nights in Space. Hopes were high - I very much enjoyed the company's diabolically bizarre The Quentin Dentin Show, and a brief n' breezy musical set in outer space sounds promising.
And so we meet John Spartan (Matthew Jacobs Morgan), drifting aimlessly through space on a lengthy, dull mission accompanied only by a bored-sounding computer. Spartan had spent his childhood gazing up at the stars, dreaming of a life spent exploring the cosmos and subsequently enrolling in space school. Now that he's achieved his goals he's growing disillusioned, worried that his lengthy isolation is causing the first symptoms of dreaded 'space madness'.
Fortunately a couple of things are on the way to spice up the void. First comes a distress signal, then an alien (Candice Palladino) visitation and finally the return of Spartan's space-rival 'Lethal Space Bizzle' (Benjamin Victor), who throws Spartan's world upside down.
I've always been a fan of the blue collar, working stiff space adventure. This loose genre runs the gamut from Alien all the way to Red Dwarf, stopping off along the way at Dark Star, Silent Running and Moon. I love how it gently subverts the classical Star Trek vision of space as ordered and clean in favour of getting a bit greasy, (probably) accurately predicting interstellar travel as more equivalent to manning an oil rig than running a gleaming research station.
But sadly, for all its promise, Summer Nights in Space never comes together. Part of this is down to a series of unfortunate technical mishaps. The start was delayed to iron out some glitches with the rear projection, but even with this it never quite worked properly. Video was confined to a small off-centre square with a Macbook taskbar at the top of the screen.
Then the video was out of sync with the audio. Then a live camera bit didn't work. Then the voiceover audio cut out. Then the sound levels (particularly the treble) went way out of whack, causing genuine pain whenever anyone said anything loudly. On top of all that, the entire show was underscored by an annoying buzzy hum from a loose connection somewhere. Did the tech crew flatten a black cat on their way here?
But, even were everything to have gone swimmingly, the show simply isn't funny or entertaining enough. None of this is the fault of Jacobs Morgan, who seems to be taking it upon himself single-handedly save the show through sheer energy and force of will, but even his titanic efforts can't get around that there's just not that much going on here. Even the usually reliable Benjamin Victor comes unstuck in an excruciatingly annoying part that aims for Die Antwoord but lands squarely in Ali G territory (fortunately he's much better as the voice of the computer).
Creator Henry Carpenter talks in the programme about how "thirteen months ago, the 'show' consisted of three songs about space, which I performed myself wearing a bicycle helmet." I can't help but think this show might have been more entertaining if it'd stayed stripped down, leaving the audience's imagination to fill in the blanks rather than treacherous tech.
I saw The Quentin Dentin Show twice. Once in an embryonic form and once with the rough edges sanded away to leave a sleek, polished and completely entertaining night out. I can only hope the same happens with Summer Nights in Space - all the parts are present and correct, but this rocketship never achieves lift-off.
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