Recent Articles
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
- 0 Comments
Killymuck: 
The Conservative Party are the biggest destructive force the United Kingdom has faced since the Luftwaffe. Forget the occasional bombing, overseas military threat or predatory superpower. Their true evil is that every second they've been in power since 1979, they've been gradually making life worse for the vast majority of people by funnelling public money into their (and their public school chums') bank accounts.
The British Medical Journal estimates that their austerity politics has been directly linked to 120,000 deaths since 2010 that would not have otherwise occurred since 2010, with those casualties disproportionately occuring amongst the poorest in society. Now David Cameron's brilliant idea to have a Brexit referendum has left us teetering on the edge of economic collapse, and you can bet that those who'll die because of it won't be Old Etonians.
The consequences of Conservative ideology are keenly felt in this double-bill of plays written, directed and performed by women. Though geographically and temporally separated, both take an unflinching look at what a vote for the Tories causes.
First up is Box Clever, written by Monsay Whitney, directed by Stef O'Driscoll and performed by Redd Lily Roche. This tells an intensely frustrating and moving tale of a mother caught in a byzantine web of support structures. Marnie lives in a woman's refuge and is doing her best for her four-year-old daughter Autumn: abusive and violent men circle her like sharks around a wounded dolphin and the government and charitable services theoretically designed to save her from her misery are fragmented, under-funded and don't communicate with one another.
Whitney gradually zeroes in on the classism that ruins Marnie's life. The managers of the refuge, the don't-give-a-fuck council housing officers and the sceptical police officers hear her south London accent and instantly drop her down to the bottom of the credibility ladder. As Marnie is continually ignored, sidelined and condescended to, her and our anger reaches boiling point.
I've worked in the court system for over a decade (including spells in the Family Court) and Marnie's situation is sadly all too familiar. It's also all too easy to predict what's going to happen to her: the stress of the situation will exacerbate her depression, resulting in a downward spiral that will probably see her child taken into care. What really sticks in the throat is that this misery was never inevitable: if public services hadn't been cut to the bone Marnie's life wouldn't be collapsing around her ears
This is a raw and visceral piece of theatre and Lily Roche's performance is mindblowing (and clearly emotionally taxing). Perhaps the ending is a bit abrupt and leaves things unresolved, but showing how things are going to go for Marnie from this point on is going to be like rubbing salt into the wound. Box Clever isn't exactly entertaining in a traditional sense, but I can think of many civil servants for which this play should be mandatory viewing.
Killymuck takes a different approach to social deprivation. Written by Kat Woods, directed by Caitriona Shoobridge and played by Aoife Lennon, the play shows us the childhood of Niamh as she grows up on a maligned housing estate over the 80s and 90s. Kicking off with a quote from Margaret Thatcher, we learn about the Killymuck estate, described as a cursed area where society sends all its misfits and down-and-outs.
Though this is ultimately as depressing a story as Box Clever, Lennon infuses her character with bouncy and charismatic energy, pinballing around the stage as she neatly conveys childish enthusiasm. As we proceed through her life, we see how this smart and talented child is gradually ground to dust by underfunded schools, classist teachers and government that couldn't give a solitary shit about estate girls like her.
Killymuck isn't afraid of spelling out its message. Throughout the show, Lennon breaks character to back up the play's argument with statistics, for example explaining how a pupil's economic background has a drastic impact on their exam results. If Box Clever was a person reaching breaking point over a very bad month, Killymuck is like straw gradually being piled onto a camel's back. As Aoife grows up she internalises what her environment and society is yelling at her: you are scum, you have no future and you will fail.
It's an excellent piece of writing and beautifully performed. The only fly in the ointment is that there's a very repetitive backing track playing throughout the piece. I get that this helps keep the show to a rhythm, but there were times I wish they'd have given it a rest. Also, purely for reasons of temporal neatness, I think Killymuck would work better before Box Clever, as we'd see the immediate and long-term effects of Thatcherite politics in order.
These two plays honestly and plainly depict the direct results of putting the Conservative Party in power. You should come out of these shows with a burning desire to prevent any Tory politician from ever seeing a glimpse of office so long as they live. At this stage in our politics, with so many historic and current examples of greed, stupidity, sadism and corruption, anyone who votes for, supports or is a member of the Conservative Party has crossed a moral event horizon.
Stories like Marnie's and Aoife's are why we need a Jeremy Corbyn led Labour government now. From the way things are going that's what we'll have very soon - let's just hope there's enough of the country left to save after the Tories are done fucking it.
Box Clever & Killymuck are at The Bunker Theatre until 13 April.
Box Clever & Killymuck are at The Bunker Theatre until 13 April.
Friday, December 7, 2018
Friday, December 7, 2018
- 0 Comments
Don't go to Aisha if you want a chilled out night at the theatre. This is 75 minutes of pain, misery and rage, condensed through the small yet powerful form of Alex Jarratt. She plays the titular Aisha, a 17-year-old girl who has been purchased from her parents by her uncle, married against her will, imprisoned, enslaved and raped almost every day for three years.
And, without wanting to give too much away, you shouldn't hold out hopes of this being some kind of emancipatory feel-good drama of someone triumphing over adversity. There is a battle at the heart of Aisha, but it's the equivalent of a person screaming into a hurricane.
Written by "AJ", the show has an impressively streamlined purity and sense of focus to it: it's a one-woman monologue; Aisha is on stage pretty much the entire time and; while other characters do feature in it, they're left to the audience's imagination.
Zeroing our focus onto Aisha rather than distracting us with other performers is a smart decision - if, for example, her rapist husband was actually played on stage then it would diminish the monster that we visualise in our heads. It also makes the painful and traumatising rape scenes in the play that much more powerful, her absent husband standing for oppressive patriarchy as a whole rather than as an individual we can collectively hate.
Another clever choice is Jarrett's interacts with the audience, a technique that sets us on edge and cranks up the tension. The most excruciatingly awkward moment was when she singled out some middle-aged guy in the audience as her father and repeatedly implored him to come on stage and dance with her. Understandably he remained rooted to his seat (which I think was the point - though if I was chosen I probably would have gotten on stage...). Other examples are Aisha handing props to audience members in the front row to look at or, in my case, being asked to hold her dress as she washes herself.
It's a simple and straightforward dramatic technique that reminds us that this story isn't some hypothetical fantasy, but rather something that invisibly happens all around and that (at least on some level) we're all implicated in Aisha and other child brides' plight. After all, what do you do if you see a girl with suspicious bruises standing in front of you at the supermarket till? Would you step in and ask her if she's okay or look the other way?
And then there's Alex Jarrett's performance. I'm not one for lists of superlatives, so I'll just say she's fearless and brilliant. There's a palpable intelligence to the way she interrogates the audience, half mourning the loss of her potential, half eager to show off that even after all she's suffered she's still herself. And yet, you sense a deadening of feeling within her, a gradual dimming in her eyes as she realises that even if she were to escape through a tantalisingly unlocked door, 'normal life' is now a fantasy.
So yeah. This isn't drama for the lighthearted but it's drama that deserves an audience. You might feel bad for looking away when you see something uncomfortable in real life, so sooth your conscience by at least confronting it through art. Kudos to everyone involved, they've knocked this out of the park.
Aisha is at the Old Red Lion under Saturday 8th December. Tickets here.
Friday, November 2, 2018
Friday, November 2, 2018
- 0 Comments
A bell rings in a North London pub and someone yells "ten minutes until Brexit!" A collective shudder passes through the well-to-do metropolitan crowd at the idea as we dutifully file into the theatre. I'm shuddering as well - I hate Brexit. It's not just that we're the laughing stock of the world, not just the ridiculous flag-waving nationalism, not just that we're about to commit economic seppuku - but because it is so fucking boring.
I work in politics and law, but Brexit has gobbled up so much the news for so long that even I am beginning to tune it out as white noise. The endless internecine spats in the Tories, the half-assed rebellions of the Labour right, the mewling of the right-wing press and #FBPE types on Twitter. If Britain is destined to end up in a Mad Max style hellscape I wish it'd happen already just so we can get it over with.
But that's not the future that Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky's Brexit imagines. Set a few years in the future, we find Britain still negotiating with the EU and trapped in an extended transition period. New Prime Minister Adam Masters (Timothy Bentinck) is the latest to place his neck on the chopping block - his only ambition to outlast the short 1922-23 premiership of Andrew Bonar Law, who bowed out in under a year (due to throat cancer).
His plan to 'beat Brexit' is zugzwang - a chess term for a situation in which making any move puts you at a disadvantage. Therefore, he chooses to do nothing at all, playing the hardcore leavers against the remainers. The leavers are represented by Simon Cavendish (Thom Tuck): a deeply unpleasant amalgam of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove, while the remainers' champion is Diana Purdy (Pippa Evans), who seems vaguely Amber Rudd-ish (with a pinch of Vicky Ford).
With equal but opposing forces locked in stalemate, his strategy pretty much consists of the classic "hide under some coats and hope that somehow everything will work out". Naturally, this doesn't go to plan - and the play spirals towards farce as the Prime Minister desperately avoids committing to a course of action.
It's a cynical piece of theatre - but then these are cynical times. Perhaps the most believable aspect of it is the lead character's sheer terror of ideology. Towards the end of the play, he bemoans his situation, saying that he's got "a right-wing press that despises my every action - even though I tried hard not to take any. And a left-wing press that despises me for my beliefes - even though I tried very hard not to have any!" Later, a betrayal by his friend and advisor Paul Connell (Adam Astill) prompts the accusation - "you betrayed our friendship for ideology!"
Like, no shit, dude. If Brexit gets anything right, it's the failure of centrist politicians to understand their own ideology. Brexit's PM paints himself as the epitome of non-ideological moderation, treating 'remainer' and 'leaver' as equally valid abstractions that must be placated rather than understood (notably he merely glances through their lengthy policy proposals).
The conclusion is a reminder that doing nothing can be far worse than being decisive, that convincing yourself that market and social liberalism combined with a soft nationalism isn't ideological but 'common sense' is ridiculous. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of far-right leavers, but at least it's an ethos. It's a smart conclusion to a perceptive piece of drama. But, sadly, there are a couple of flies in the ointment.
The dowdy set design of a couple of chairs and a scuffed, cheap desk against a plain black backdrop does little to convey the wood-panelled gentlemen's club atmosphere of No. 10 and the Houses of Parliament (and I doubt whether any contemporary PM would wear a three-piece suit on a day-to-day basis).
Plus, for a comedy, Brexit just doesn't have that many laughs. There's a couple of cringey panel-show style political jabs that pass over the audience without so conjuring so much as a titter, and while the play does eventually conjure up a couple of genuinely funny moments they are few and far between.
Brexit nails the philosophical morass of its subject, rightly portraying the process as some nebulous concept that means different things to everyone: a Gordian knot that can never be satisfyingly sliced apart. As a piece of drama? It's a bit too loose, languid and mildly diverting - throw in a bit more bite and passion and you'd be onto something.
Brexit is at the King's Head Theatre until 17 October. Tickets here.
Production shots by Steve Ullathorne
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Thursday, October 25, 2018
- 0 Comments
Like the vast majority of people in this country, I have never known anything other than the NHS. It's our safety net : setting bones in casts, diagnosing illness and there for the inevitable problems that come with age. Well, that's the theory. The reality is that this safety net is fraying, the holes in it are growing bigger and if urgent changes aren't made it may collapse completely.
Veteran comedian and activist Mark Thomas is, as the police describe him on their database of domestic extremists, a "general rabble-rouser and alleged comedian". To mark the 70th birthday of the NHS he's giving it a checkup, examining its history, its current state and delivering a prognosis for the future.
The show consists of anecdotes from his time embedded in various London hospitals and medical centres, combined with interviews with prominent healthcare bigwigs and his own observations. Before we get into the meat of the show, it must be pointed out that Thomas isn't just a witty campaigner with a talent for meticulous research, he's also an incredible performer. Check Up is delivered at a relentless rat-a-tat pace that barely stops for breath - the information he delivers feeling as if it's downloaded straight into our brains.
A common thread throughout the show is Thomas explaining what NHS staff deal with on a daily basis. For example, part of his research was spending a night in a central London A&E . This sounds like well-managed chaos, with experienced doctors juggling various patients with critical wounds, before zeroing on one in particular who has fallen through a 1st story plate glass window.
He describes being sat in the corner of the operating theatre, trying to make himself as unobtrusive as possible while legions of expert professionals operate, anaesthetise, transfuse blood - all whirring around the patient in a blizzard of limbs, equipment and barked orders. What he's watching is the result of hundreds of thousands of hours of study, millions of pounds worth of training, the pinnacle of mankind's technological medical prowess. The patient dies.
But there's no time for reflection - the next critical patient is being wheeled through the scuffed doors.
Accurately communicating what NHS staff deal with on a daily basis is impossible, but Thomas does it about as well as anyone reasonably could. Whether it's as high pressure as A&E, regimented as a dialysis centre or just the patience and empathy in a dementia ward, the staff are performing a constant high-wire act: balancing a fierce duty of care to their patients; dealing with cuts to services (there's a particular keenly felt moment where a GP decries the government cutting the toenail clipping service); and, usually a long way behind, their own physical and mental wellbeing.
It's when the heroism of the staff is contrasted with the ideological bent of the government that the show really hots up. While the breadth of what the Conservatives (and their Liberal Democrat stooges) have done to the NHS is difficult to summarise, it's all under the ideological umbrella of free market economics. Socialised healthcare system is anathema to Thatcherite Conservatives, who believe that competition within a marketplace is the only way forward.
As anyone who's used a train lately will testify, they're wrong. While they might sing compelling tunes about Darwinian competition resulting in survival of the fittest, the reality is a race to the bottom as each competitor strives to reduce costs to get a nose ahead of their rivals. And most, tantalisingly to Conservative politicians, opening the NHS up to the market fills their pockets as the private healthcare companies they're associated with (and on whose boards they will inevitably sit) prosper.
Though shrouded in byzantine financial arrangements and many degrees separated from an individual patient's misery, make no mistake: politicians profiting from private healthcare companies are directly enriching themselves via the pain of you and your loved ones.
Thomas pins this on Andrew Lansley's 2012 restructuring of the NHS (described as an attempt to emulate the privatisation of utilities), a decision which is estimated to cost the NHS £2 billion per year. His reforms in the Cameron government have resulted in, among many other things, fewer nurses, the ruination of mental health care and contributed to Britain having some absolutely dismal cancer survival rates (which, uh, he now belatedly realises).
New Labour is far from blameless too, with the Blair and Brown government's PFI schemes set to funnel money from the NHS into the pockets of private companies for generations to come.
Thomas' prognosis is bleak. An interviewee explains that we have been having our cake and eating it for decades, enjoying relatively low taxes while expecting the very best in healthcare. It's a situation that cannot continue and future governments will be placed in the awkward political position of raising taxes or abolishing the NHS in all but name (even the most reptilian Tory recognises the worth of the NHS brand). If you can picture any future Conservative government drastically raising taxes to support a non-profit seeking public service you have a better imagination than I do.
It's a worrying future (especially with Brexit looming) and you just have to cast an eye over the Atlantic where a cancer diagnosis can bankrupt a family or a broken leg can cripple you financially and literally. The takeaway from the Check Up is that the NHS isn't just something to rely on - it's something you have to fight for. And everytime someone votes Tory it's just another hairline crack in its edifice.
Appreciate what you've got, because you'll miss it when it's gone.
Mark Thomas: Check Up is at the Arcola Theatre until 3rd November. Tickets here.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
- 0 Comments
This Is Not A Safe Space reviewed by David James
Rating:
You might assume a show titled This Is Not A Safe Space would be some identity-politics-baiting, politically-correct-puncturing attack on Millennial sensitivities. It isn't. In fact, host Jackie Hagan goes out of her way to create a safe space, from assuring any audience members with Tourette's that they do not need to suppress their tics, to providing BSL support throughout the show, right down to the simple way she quickly befriends the audience.
No, the 'space' referred to in the title of the show is, sadly, the United Kingdom as a whole. Since the 2010 election the Conservative government (with the help of the Liberal Democrats) have constructed a purposefully cruel environment for disabled people.
This is a many-faceted cruelty - taking the form of ATOS/Maximus run 'work capability assessments', byzantine PIP (Personal Independence Payments) forms and a general cultural shift that portrays people receiving benefits as workshy scroungers. It bears repeating that the paranoia, misery and pain caused by these systems is not an accident, it's purposefully designed into the system and is borne of a philosophy that posits people claiming disability benefits are actually able to work and simply need to be beaten until they'll admit it. The consequences of these systems are brutal, with DWP statistics revealing that 2,380 people died between 2011 and 2014 alone shortly after being declared able to work.
Into this strides Jackie Hagan: heavily tattooed, fairy lights wrapped around her glittering prosthetic leg, pink-haired and pissed off with the state of the world. Over the course of an hour, we hear how the DWP's policies have impacted upon her life and those around her. To a backdrop of ragged toys and tattered junk she opens the doors on her life, touching on her daily annoyances with people calling her 'brave' and taxi drivers telling her she could be a Paralympian (to which she responds, "Well, why aren't you an Olympian?").
This segues into her experiences with the dreaded PIP forms, which she lucidly outlines as a bureaucratic exercise in humiliation. Filling it out is an exercise that defeats even the naturally optimistic Hagan: who explains that her viewpoint on life is to take all the shit that life hands her and roll it in glitter. Filling in this form is like painstakingly picking every piece of glitter back off that shit, then rubbing the turd in your face - forcing you to dwell on when you were weakest, when you embarrassingly failed, and the moments in which your life was at its absolute worst.
As a reaction she imagines a fantasy PIP form that inverts the DWP's intentions and makes you feel good, asking questions like "Are you (a) awesome, (b) awesome wonky) and (c) wonky with strains of awesome". It's a funny, touching moment - Hagan's intrinsic warmth and empathy a stark contrast to impersonal bureaucratic cruelty. Her argument is further supported by clips of interviews she's had with friends and acquaintances dreading ATOS means testing and terrified of having their already not great living standards further reduced.
Successfully communicating the horror of this system while being funny and good-natured is a tricky tightrope to navigate, and it's to Hagan's credit that she manages. However, there are moments where the focus slips. Most of these come in the (apparently) improvised moments in which Hagan interacts with the audience or heads off on a tangent. On one hand, these moments help define her character and go a long way towards making us like her, on the other the anger of the show is so righteous and its target so deserving of disgust and mockery that the slacker moments feel like time wasted.
It's a tricky criticism - after all, toning down the lighter bits could throw off the balance of the show. Then again, the systems that are the subject of the show are so important, infuriating and morally repellent that as much light needs to be cast on them as possible. Jackie Hagan is absolutely the person to be doing this: there's a razor-sharp lyricism in her poetry, she's an imaginative, engaging performer and is smart enough to distil these issues down and communicate them quickly and effectively.
This Is Not A Safe Space isn't a perfect show, but then it's probably not meant to be. It is, however, an eye-opening examination of how government policy and ideology preys upon those they consider least able to defend themselves. If you want to get angry, check it out.
This Is Not A Safe Space is at Camden People's Theatre until 21 April. Tickets here.
Friday, February 23, 2018
Friday, February 23, 2018
- 0 Comments
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, October 19, 2017
Thursday, October 19, 2017
- 0 Comments
It's easy to watch politicians from the sidelines and think you could do better, especially given the shambolic state of the current bunch of bastards. You look at governmental disasters like universal credit, disability means testing or cruel sanctioning of jobseekers and wonder whether those involved are malicious or just incompetent (or both). Yup, if I were in their shoes, I'd definitely do better.
Well, now you're given the chance, courtesy of The Lab Collective's Incoming / Exodus. This interactive show (it bills itself as immersive, but I think this is stretching it a little bit) invites the audience to represent the London Borough of Camden and choose who's to be resident here. We begin by being divided into north, south, east and west districts, then we're asked to nominate a councillor to represent us, and given quick overviews of applicants who want to live in our borough.
These range from a professor of Islamic Studies who cannot teach under a repressive regime, a mother hoping to take advantage of Camden's excellent education reputation, a Russian genderqueer journalist who doesn't feel safe, a young Portuguese mechanic "who'll do anything for his brother" and so on. Each is ranked, Top Trumps style, based on what they can bring to Camden and what Camden will have to do for them. But we can only take so many new residents and the clock is ticking. What do we do?
Performed/wrangled by Matthew Flacks and Amelia Vernede, Incoming / Exodus is a chaotic and lively show that sometimes teeters on the edge of absurdity. The audience is invited to interject at any moment to quiz the cast and councillors on their decisions, the rules under which we must operate and all manner of nitpicking minutia (the oddest being when someone argues that "paedophiles just can't help themselves"). I'll say this though, if you've ever attended a local council meeting or some kind of community forum, you'll recognise that the show does an uncanny job in recreating the febrile, frustrating inertia of group-based decision making.
What comes out of this tangle of opinions and egos is fascinating stuff. The applicants are blank canvases - we get just a brief paragraph about who they are and a couple of meaningless numbers - but upon this, the overwhelmingly white, middle-class audience projects a mountain of assumptions and ideas onto them, essentially inventing people whole-cloth to argue over.
For my money, the best thing about Incoming/Exodus is the way it outlines an immoral system that reduces human beings to a set of stats (almost exactly the tactics of the current Tory government wrt to benefits means testing and immigration criteria) and then shows how, given a sniff of power, a group of London liberals will happily participate in said system without making any serious effort to reform it. Granted, there were some rumblings of breaking away from the system and finding a better procedure, but they're almost immediately silenced by a familiar nod to security.
It adds up to a fine demonstration of people's moral malleability, reminding me a bit of the famous Milgram experiment where authority figures talked 'normal' people into administering (what they thought were) fatal electric shocks to volunteers. The sting in the tail of all this is Flacks ending the show with "you had the opportunity to change things. You missed it. Maybe next time...".
Incoming/Exodus is a bold achievement in political theatre, successful in getting people to behave counter to their beliefs without them ever realising it. But then, the show rests so much on the audience that every single performance has the potential to produce an entirely different result - from bovine conformity right through to full-blown rebellion. Do you see injustice in the world and feel a burning desire to change things? If so, get a ticket to this and see if you really could.
The answer might surprise you.
Incoming/Exodus is at the Camden People's Theatre until 21 Oct. Tickets here.
Performed/wrangled by Matthew Flacks and Amelia Vernede, Incoming / Exodus is a chaotic and lively show that sometimes teeters on the edge of absurdity. The audience is invited to interject at any moment to quiz the cast and councillors on their decisions, the rules under which we must operate and all manner of nitpicking minutia (the oddest being when someone argues that "paedophiles just can't help themselves"). I'll say this though, if you've ever attended a local council meeting or some kind of community forum, you'll recognise that the show does an uncanny job in recreating the febrile, frustrating inertia of group-based decision making.
What comes out of this tangle of opinions and egos is fascinating stuff. The applicants are blank canvases - we get just a brief paragraph about who they are and a couple of meaningless numbers - but upon this, the overwhelmingly white, middle-class audience projects a mountain of assumptions and ideas onto them, essentially inventing people whole-cloth to argue over.
For my money, the best thing about Incoming/Exodus is the way it outlines an immoral system that reduces human beings to a set of stats (almost exactly the tactics of the current Tory government wrt to benefits means testing and immigration criteria) and then shows how, given a sniff of power, a group of London liberals will happily participate in said system without making any serious effort to reform it. Granted, there were some rumblings of breaking away from the system and finding a better procedure, but they're almost immediately silenced by a familiar nod to security.
It adds up to a fine demonstration of people's moral malleability, reminding me a bit of the famous Milgram experiment where authority figures talked 'normal' people into administering (what they thought were) fatal electric shocks to volunteers. The sting in the tail of all this is Flacks ending the show with "you had the opportunity to change things. You missed it. Maybe next time...".
Incoming/Exodus is a bold achievement in political theatre, successful in getting people to behave counter to their beliefs without them ever realising it. But then, the show rests so much on the audience that every single performance has the potential to produce an entirely different result - from bovine conformity right through to full-blown rebellion. Do you see injustice in the world and feel a burning desire to change things? If so, get a ticket to this and see if you really could.
The answer might surprise you.
Incoming/Exodus is at the Camden People's Theatre until 21 Oct. Tickets here.
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
- 0 Comments
"If you're worried about the weather / then you picked the wrong place to stay." so sang James Murphy in the closing moments of what was officially the muddiest Glastonbury ever. His audience, who'd collectively endured five days of trudging through drizzle, rain, fog and thick mud, cheered so hard he had to skip the next line.
2016 was not a vintage Glastonbury. Leaving aside the godawful weather for a moment, the line-up was pants, the headliners were a bit dull and the festival was in a collective state of mourning over Brexit. At 4am on Friday morning I was sat in a huddle near the stone circle waiting for the sun to come up when the news started to filter through the crowd. A cry of "Brexit for breakfast!" went up. The crowd's stomachs collectively turned, for once not as a result of consuming industrial amounts of ket.
Staggering back to my tent in an anoxic daze a fine drizzle started up, the pitter-patter of rain on tents punctuated only by freaked out mutters from within that "we are so fucked" and the occasional teary whimper. I hid in my tent reading whatever snatched news article I could get over the patchy 3G, devouring an procession of apocalyptic stories about the pound transforming into monopoly money overnight, a gloating Farage triumphant and general disbelief that the morons actually won.
I was awoken by irrelevant indie has-beens James, whose piss-weak mogadon rock was leaking over our campsite from the Other Stage. I began to wonder just what the hell I was doing here. The country is falling to pieces and I'm trapped in a filthy Somerset field with a damp sleeping bag and a growing puddle in my tent. In desperation I decided to go and see Billy Bragg on the Left Field stage. Surely Billy Bragg would know what to do! Did he fuck.
Compounding the political misery was the sheer physical effort of getting anywhere. Glastonbury is enormous and navigating it is difficult at the best of times, but particularly when every footstep lands you in glue-like, wellie devouring mud. Considering festival goers are running on a couple of hours of sleep and subsisting on expensive fast food served from plastic plates (the portions seemed pretty stingy this year), just getting between places wears you down. Even I, a seasoned Glastonbury-goer, had to retreat to my tent on Sunday afternoon. I was beaten down by the thick drizzle, the omnipresent mud and the fact that I'd just spilt a full bottle of vodka and coke down the back of my jeans. For a brief hour, I just buried my head in the sweaty t-shirt I was using as a pillow and wished I was back home.
 |
| Taking these on and off was not fun. |
But when life hands you lemons, even lemons caked with mud, you make lemonade. Even if the rest of Britain has decided to inflict upon itself lobotomy via handgun, even if I and all my possessions are covered in mud, at least I'm surrounded by the generous, progressive, open-minded and supportive people.
What the non-Glastonbury going public can never quite understand is that the heart of Glastonbury isn't on the big stages - and it's certainly not in Chris Martin's bland wail - it's in the thousands of ways strangers pull together for a greater good.
Throughout the festival you see people dragging each other out of mud, human chains being formed to pull people up from sodden banks, people distributing free food and dry clothes to the soaked. Upon hearing that we were low on phone battery, a stranger casually handed us a free portable charging pack. My friend and I spotted a lone woman pukily staggering out of a late-night dance tent, gave her some water, chatted to her and we three proceeded to spend the night happily exploring the weirder corners of the festival.
It's sentimental, but there's something genuinely special about this place. Glastonbury is the briefest of glimpses into a world that could exist if this country didn't default to suspicion, hatred and xenophobia. It's an unsustainable bubble (and lets face it, it'd go Lord of the Flies if things went on too much longer), but even a peek into a society that functions compassion like this was enough to warm my Brexit-broken heart.
After crawling out of my tent and sliding on my 'cleanest' (i.e. least filthy) pair of jeans I went to LCD Soundsystem's mind-blowing awesome closing set on the other stage and danced my guts out as best I could (while rooted in mud). Then I drank cider underneath a discoball in a treehouse. Then I went to see Kate Tempest. Then I swilled my brain out in the weirdest corners of Shangri La. Then, finally, as Monday morning crawled into view, I scaled the slippery, mud mountain atop the park stage, reaching the big Glastonbury sign and gazed down happily over a festival that represents just about every value I hold dear in this screwed up world.
You get back home and everything is shit. Sour-faced commuters glare into their doom n' gloom newspapers. The country is peppered with xenophobic violence. Our supposed leaders can't even wipe their arses without smearing shit over their faces. We face a grey, uncertain future. The only certainty is death.
But there'll always be a very special, albeit muddy, patch of Somerset that shows us what we could be. And I'd wade through a thousand miles of mud to do it all again.
Friday, April 8, 2016
Friday, April 8, 2016
- 0 Comments
Labels opens with Enoch Powell's notorious 'rivers of blood' speech, then segues through Idi Amin, Jeremy Clarkson and Donald Trump. We conclude with the infamous 1964 Conservative slogan: "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour". The process neatly traces the skeleton of contemporary bigotry to the current day. The language shifts, the tone changes and the arguments gently morph, but the core remains the same: fear of those who're 'different'.
The show goes on to probe the infinite ways that racism manifests: sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly. The vehicle for this is the life, family and heritage of writer/narrator Joe Sellman-Leava. He's a personable, eager-to-please sort of guy, hailing from a small village in Devon. Ordinarily that'd be a decent potted biography, yet Joe quickly explains that things aren't so simple for him.
With a white, English Mum and a Dad from India (by way of Uganda) he's frequently assailed by people inquiring where he's 'really' from. "Cheltenham?" he innocently responds, but we all know what they really mean: "You're not white. You don't look suitably English. You're an outsider. What label can I mentally file you away as?"
Joe talks us through various incidents throughout his life: being bullied in primary school by kids doing a comedy Indian accent, hearing people call him 'Paki' behind his back, strangers yelling abuse at him on the street and even getting racially abused by DMs on Tinder. We hear about his family history; his Dad forced to abandon life in Uganda after Amin decreed that Indians were exploiting hardworking Ugandans; his mother having to deal with prejudice for being in an interracial relationship and the various bigotry they've all had to deal with down the year - culminating in the family deciding to change its name from Patel to Sellman-Leava, in the hope of sidestepping discrimination.
Sounds pretty heavy right? Fortunately, Joe keeps things relatively light. In between the sobering accounts of discrimination there's decent wodges of straightforward comedy, gentle audience interaction and a moment where we all make paper planes and throw them at him. Joe's got this enviable easy-going charisma - a little bit vulnerable, a little bit sarcastic, all sincere.
This all makes the moments of naked anger that much more visceral. Towards the closing scenes the light-heartedness is jettisoned as we explore the current, very real consequences of bigotry: gently bobbing corpses in the Mediterranean. Quoting Katie Hopkins ("Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I don't care.") he launches into an impassioned diatribe about the essential stupidity of racism, asking why lives from one patch of dirt are considered worthless and lives from another exalted.
While the woes of a middle-class Devon boy are all well and good, it's here that Labels really shows its teeth. There's a humanist thread in Labels that begins in the gentle domestic anecdotes, runs through the re-enacted portrayals of racism suffered by Joe and reaches a climax with the current refugee crisis.
Okay, so Labels isn't exactly offering a mindblowingly fresh perspective on racism and bigotry, but it's precisely this kind of sincere, friendly, funny yet serious as hell show that exposes the idiocy and inherent misery of discrimination and bigotry. Concise, smart and movingly performed - it's a winner.
★★★★
Labels is at the Theatre Royal Stratford East until 30 April. Tickets here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)