Recent Articles
Showing posts with label kandinsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kandinsky. Show all posts
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Thursday, February 28, 2019
- 0 Comments
Reviewed by David James
Rating:
There is no way in hell I'm going to miss a show called Dinomania. Perhaps understandably, there are few plays about dinosaurs on the London fringe, with cash-strapped theatre companies reluctant to blow their budget on rubber Velociraptor costumes. More's the pity, but as Dinomania proves, there is still room in theatre for palaeontology nerds...
I've been a big admirer of Kandinsky ever since their excellent Still Ill back in 2016 and their talents were only confirmed in last year's Trap Street. Those shows covered psychosomatic illness and post-war housing. Now, as if actively resisting being pigeon-holed, they've created a seriously engaging play about Victorian science and the birth of palaeontology.
I imagine that for most people the names Gideon Mantell, Richard Owen and Georges Cuvier don't mean a huge amount, but they're indelibly burned into my brain thanks to 5-year-old me spending hours poring over various Usborne and Kingfisher books about dinosaurs. These books generally had a section on the discovery and classification of dinosaurs, generally taking time to explain how country doctor Gideon Mantell unearthed one of the first dinosaurs while out walking in the English countryside.
You can imagine what learning something like that does to a five-year-old's imagination. Dinosaurs are not only real and incredibly cool but they are literally hidden under the ground in this country. What on earth is stopping me from going out into the woods and finding the most awesome dinosaur the world has ever seen? All of which led me to me begging for a hammer and chisel for my sixth birthday - which in retrospect must have made for a pretty cheap present.
Anyway, all that's to say that I was extremely geared up to see a show about Gideon Mantell. While the show is broadly biographical, following him from cradle to grave, his life becomes a prism through which we understand Victorian science. The Victorians made enormous leaps in our understanding of the natural world - though these revelations were by no means easily accepted.
And so Kandinsky dramatises the key rifts in Victorian science. This begins with the class divisions between upper-class gentlemen scientists like Owen and Cuvier and middle and working class fossil-hunters like Mantell and Mary Anning (who I was slightly disappointed not to see get a name-check here). This feeds into a more serious rift, with young-earth Christianity and Genesis not having room for extinct prehistoric species and the millions of years required to produce fossils.
One of the most fascinating observations Kandinsky make is to explain how the concept of a creature changing form over time and becoming extinct was anathema to the upper-class Victorian consciousness. The scientists of the day looked to nature to justify the supremacy of their way of life (also a great way of securing patronage) and in Dinomania we hear how the theory that 'a mollusc may become a man' can be viewed as an attack on the rigid class structures.
It's a perspective the show reflects in Mantell's life. The child of shoemakers, he's told by his parents that the Mantells were once a great family and throughout the play we see him struggling to gain gentlemanly respectability. But, much as the Royal Geographical Society resist any 'progressive' ideas about adaptability, they resist his very presence among them and do their best to minimise his role in the discovery and classification of Iguanadon.
Kandinsky stages these arguments with their usual razor-sharp precision. The march of scientific progress and the discarding of incorrect or politically untimely theories is depicted by scientists dispatching each other with a pistol shot to the forehead, religious thought is heralded with hilariously overblown latin chanting and, in the play's best moment, the villain of the piece crumbles as he receives a vision of the future: his hated rival Charles Darwin is venerated and he dies miserable and alone. (Ha-ha! Suck it, Richard Owen).
I was never not going to enjoy a play that sits at the intersection of so many things I'm into, but it takes some serious skills to make a potentially dry subject so gripping. I've read a tonne about these dusty old scientists and in my imagination they are always the rigid, stern-looking men you see in their lithograph portraits (or the photographs of them as corpse-like old guys). Dinomania brings them to lusty, passionate life, blood pumping through their veins and sweat on their faces as they decipher the evidence left in rocks.
I have no idea what subject Kandinsky are going to tackle next but I'll be there day one.
Dinomania is at the New Diorama Theatre until 23 March. Tickets here.
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
- 0 Comments
Britain's post-war housing estates were borne from utopian ideals. The days of mouldy Victorian terraces were over: replacing them would be elevated communities in flats with all mod cons: cosied by central heating, blessed with stunning views and boasting pleasant green spaces in which to socialise. What could possibly go wrong?
Cut to the modern day and the estates that survive are, for the most part, graffiti-covered hellholes with pissy lifts. The scared residents that remain have barricaded themselves behind steel security bars and the social spaces are occupied by bored and hostile kids. Culturally these places are now bywords for neglect and criminality - and make excellent backdrops for low budget horror and gangster movies.
Kandinsky's Trap Street tries to explain why this happened, the effects the transformation had on long-term residents and the consequences of the estate's demolition and redevelopment. The vehicle for this is the story of the first family to move onto the fiction Austen Estate in Bermondsey, whose story we follow from their arrival in the early 1960s to the demolition of the estate in 2017.
The story centres on Valerie and her daughter Andrea (both played by Amelda Brown). Their story is one of slow disillusionment with the social systems designed to take care of them, with Valerie fighting a Sisphyean battle against the estate's social collapse and, in 2017, the now elderly Andrea struggling to sell up for a reasonable price and remain in the neighbourhood.
Trap Street tells a half-century long, cross-generational saga with impressive ease. But this story is just one facet of an information-dense tapestry that includes dramatisations of how the view of estates shifted in the media, from a bright n' perky Pathé film introducing this wonderful new housing philosophy to a Clockwork Orange parody that shows the increasing suspicion the public had of the estates.
For me, the show was most affecting when it dramatised the contemporary housing situation. Andrea is taken on a virtual reality tour of the 'next' utopian ideals in housing, which are priced at about £1 million a flat. Andrea nervously enquires about the 'affordable housing' she's heard about - only to be informed that 'affordable' is defined as 80% of market rates. Do the maths, then wonder to whom that's supposed to be affordable?
Perhaps the true tragedy of Trap Street is that the decline and criminalisation of these estates was never inevitable. The Barbican Estate was constructed on precisely the same utopian philosophy by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, working from Le Corbusier's ideas. With its lush green spaces, hanging baskets, fountains and multiple residential/cultural facilities, the Barbican Estate is still very much in demand.
Meanwhile, down in South-East London, the similarly designed Thamesmead Estate lives up the stereotype: damp-stained and litter-strewn with seriously bad vibes. It's no wonder that Chris Cunningham shot Aphex Twin's iconic Come To Daddy video here.
The difference is that one houses the poor and one the rich - you don't have to think too hard to work out which group have been preyed upon. While the wealthy Barbican Estate residents largely own their flats and happily fork out for an army of caretakers, gardeners and maintenance workers, the Thamesmead residents have suffered the consequences of 35 years of ideological warfare against social housing.
The most effective weapon in the Government's arsenal is that councils are obliged to send half their rents and the vast majority of their profits from house sales directly to Whitehall. This means there simply aren't the resources to improve or maintain conditions: the buildings are left to decay until they're demolished and replaced by glittering (and empty) luxury flats. The developers ensure the right people get a nice wodge of cash in their back pocket, while communities are scattered to the winds.
Just around the corner from the theatre there's a large piece of graffiti scrawled on the Euston Road Underpass which reads "People are living in tents and million pound flats lie empty!" Couldn't have said it better myself.
And if you want a more visceral look at the consequences of chronic underfunding and social stigmatisation just hop on the tube for twenty minutes, get off at Latimer Road, and take a sobering look at the burnt out husk of Grenfell Tower.
But despite all this misery and horror, and the most viciously targeted policies of successive governments, the dream of utopia still lingers in the imagination. The V&A recently announced that they're taking an eight-tonne fragment of the demolished Robin Hood Gardens estate to the Venice Biennale. This will be displayed on an outdoor scaffold, allowing visitors to stand on the iconic 'streets in the sky' as they look out onto the classical beauty of Venice, intended to make people reconsider how these architectural ideas can “can inform and inspire current thinking”.
So aaaanyway, back to Trap Street, which is great.
The cast, Amelda Brown, Danusia Samal and Hamish MacDougal are all great. The live score by Zac Gvirtzman is great. Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen's set design is great. And writers/directors/producers James Yeatman and Lauren Mooney have clearly done their homework (for the sake of completeness, they are also great).
With Trap Street Kandinsky further solidifies its reputation as the go-to theatre company for political and social theatre free of stodge and preachiness. I can't wait to see what they tackle next.
Trap Street is at the New Diorama Theatre until 31st March. Tickets here.
Friday, November 4, 2016
Friday, November 4, 2016
- 0 Comments
In Still Ill, Morrissey asks one of the classical biggies of philosophy "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?" Are we creatures of intellect or instinct? Are we beholden to our flesh? Do we fool ourselves when we imagine transcending these prisons of bone, sinew and blood?
It's weighty dramatic territory, but there's few more appropriate prisms to examine it through than psychogenic disease, specifically functional neurological syndrome disorder (FNsD).
FNsD is a condition in which you begin suffering neurological symptoms like unexplained weakness, seizures or loss of muscular control (to name but a few). If you research these symptoms online, the first thing that's going to leap out at you are two terrifying words: brain tumour. So you make the trip to the hospital and end up nervously lying inside an MRI. When the results come back, the doctor happily explains that there's no physical abnormalities in the brain.
Awesome! There's nothing wrong with you! But even after the all-clear the symptoms persist, maybe even get worse. There's something wrong with you, but the doctors say you're completely fine. Suspicions start to build that you're malingering: making the whole thing up for attention. After all, there's nothing wrong with you, and 'nothing' can't be treated. And yet you're in constant agonising pain.
Up and coming young actor Sophie (Sophie Steer) finds herself trapped in this cruel medical oubliette. The condition first rears its head as she's playing a doctor in a cheesy medical drama. During a stressful day on set her left hand contorts into a paralysed claw. Terrified, she consults a doctor who injects it with botox; it's miraculously and instantly cured. Problem is, botox only starts working after two days.
As the months progress things only get worse. Sophie begins suffering frequent seizures, chronic pain and even loses muscle control in her leg, confining her to home. The once ambitious young actor is reduced to listlessly watching TV and researching her condition online, each possibly diagnosis inevitably leading down a medical dead end. She grows depressed. Her brother Mark, initially sympathetic, grows suspicious and resentful. All too soon, life has turned to shit.
Still Ill is a marvellous bit of drama: stuffed fulla dramatic creativity, top notch performances and lots and lots of interesting medical information. It's an hour and forty minutes straight through, yet manages to avoid being dull by deploying a tonne of contrasting tones - running the gamut from broad comedy right through to bone-chilling medico-horror.
Sophie Steer is the star attraction: pouring every last drop of her soul into an incredibly physically and mentally demanding role. It's pretty breathtaking stuff, the character going on an odyssey to the depths of frustration, pain and misery. Sounds pretty heavy right? Fortunately it's a journey leavened with humour, and saved from sentimentality by some pretty severe probing of the fourth wall.
Mind you, Hamish McDougall and Harriet Webb are no slouches, believably inhabiting a variety of supporting characters. They fill in the dramatic blanks, constructing a world of helpful yet emotionally distant doctors, snippily caricatured TV production crews and support ground attendees.
On top of all that, the show is liberally studded with countless imaginative bits of staging, set design and lighting. Characters reach 'through' television sets, conduct brain surgery on a cauliflower, cover the stage in discarded medical supplies, insert a catheter up a cucumber cock or conduct mock Skype sessions through on-stage cameras. In addition, there's some seriously smart blocking - at one point confining Steers to the far corner of the stage, isolating her even within the set.
But the performances and theatrics are all in service to director James Yeatman's masterful control of tone and pace and on-stage live musician Zac Gvirtzman. Still Ill is a show of lulls and swells, snowballing from calm to complete sensory overload. These moments press you back into your seat, the drama almost symphonic as it reaches a series of crescendos that perfectly simulate the stress, frustration and misery experienced by the lead character.
Since watching Todd Haynes' excellent 1995 film Safe, I've been fascinated by psychogenic and psychosomatic illnesses; having spent time reading about medically strange conditions, like electromagnetic hypersensitivity, Morgellons and multiple chemical sensitivity. They present a curious paradox: when external or physical causes have been empirically ruled out, how do you explain a a patient that their life is ruined purely because of their malfunctioning psyche? How can you deliver that information without passing the blame onto them. It's easy to discount these conditions as 'all in the mind': these people are experiencing pain, and medicine is largely failing its obligation to sooth and treat it.
This is the second great play I've seen this week named after a Smiths song, the other being the excellent Rubber Ring (the obvious lesson is to only go see plays full of Moz references). Still Ill deals with this tricky (and unfortunately still fringe) medical subject with style, grace and empathy, making for an enormously affecting bit of theatre. You leave with Morrissey still jangling around in your head, still asking "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?"
I dunno.
★★★★★
Still Ill is at the New Diorama Theatre until 19th November. Tickets here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
