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Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Friday, April 8, 2016
Friday, April 8, 2016
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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.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Thursday, August 27, 2015
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At first glance Thoroughly Modern Millie looks like it's onto a winner. This is a sugar-sweet trifle of a musical packed with vigorously Charlestoning flappers, toe-tapping tunes, ultrachic Roaring Twenties fashion and snappy screwball dialogue. It boasts a bevvy of high octane, charismatic performers and is generally suffused with an air of good cheer. This is a show with many arrows in its quiver - so how does it miss the target by a mile?
Adapted from the cult 1967 Julie Andrews-starring musical of the same name, Thoroughly Modern Millie was revived in the early 2000s to broad acclaim. It tells the tale of new-girl-in-New-York Millie Dillmount (Francesca Lara Gordon). Sick of her podunk Kansas town, she arrives in the Big Apple with starry eyes and a head full of Vogue lifestyle columns. Her ambitions are fairly straightforward: to snare a rich husband and lead a life of easy luxury. If she has a bit of fun in speakeasies, society parties and fashionable clubs along the way, then so be it.
Complicating matters are a cold fish of a boss that ignores Millie's advances, an annoyingly persistent sweet young man who won't leave her alone, various money woes and dodging the prohibition enforcing cops. Unbeknownst to Millie, she's also got to tangle with her landlord Mrs Meers who's running a 'white slavery' ring that sells young girls to Hong Kong brothels.
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| This is cool. |
First things first. Francesca Lara Gordon, in her debut professional performance, is an excellent Millie. Intelligent eyes sparkle under her Louise Brooks bob, giving a cartoonish character a tangibly human dimension. Physically she's all sharp angles, coquettishly posing as if she's spotted a fashion photographer secreted in the audience. Gordon also makes the most of some marvellously tasselled dresses which nicely accentuate her movements as she throws herself into the dance numbers with gusto. She isn't the greatest singer I've ever heard, but imbues all her numbers with personality - which goes a long way.
Similarly fun are Samuel Harris' stuffshirt boss, a stock role but played almost to perfection, getting some of the biggest laughs of the night. Christine Meehan also impresses in her various roles, wringing every comedic drop out of her lines and body language. All that, in combination with some neat dancing, a nice sense of energy and a decently malleable set should make for a basic success. Thoroughly Modern Millie isn't going to rewrite the musical playbook, but this sounds decent enough, right?
Well there's a fly in the ointment. An massively racist fly. Being previously unfamiliar with the story I was sat there basically enjoying myself until the arrival of the villain, Mrs Meers. She's a straight-up racist caricature; a woman in yellowface with a black bun hairdo, geisha makeup and cheongsam whose catchphrase is "so sad to be arr arone in the worrd". Compounding this is her slavery scheme, which derives from racist conspiracy theories of innocent white girls being preyed upon by secret and powerful foreign criminal organisations bent on defiling them.
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| This ain't cool. |
Very slightly ameliorating things is Mrs Meers quickly reveals herself as a white woman disguising herself as Chinese. I suppose there's an argument that what we're seeing is the racism of the villain character, but imagine if the Mrs Meers character was in blackface and talking with a comedy 'Mammy' accent? After all, deep down the 'joke' here is making fun of the Chinese accent. This shit is unacceptable in 2015, bringing to mind Mickey Rooney's deeply regrettable Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast in Tiffany's.
Compounding matters are that supporting character Ching Ho is played by a non-Chinese actor. Alex Codd does a decent job in the role, but you have to wonder how hard it would be to find a London based Chinese actor to play a Chinese role (especially given that the show's already on some pretty thin ice), and not have someone trying very, very hard to talk in accented broken English without being massively offensive.
It boggles the mind that someone, sometime during production didn't point out that maybe this could come across as a teeny-weeny bit racist, and that perhaps the script could be altered to remove it. For me it spoiled what would otherwise have been a reasonably enjoyable production. Sadly, Millie proves to be anything but 'modern'.
★★
'Thoroughly Modern Millie' is at The Landor Theatre until 13 September. Tickets here.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
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Over the last few months I've suffered through (among many others) The Theory of Everything, The Imitation Game and (ugh) American Sniper, all self-important sludge cinema where important people have important conversations while a string-based score gently swells in the background. Occasionally the lead will gaze off into the middle distance and pronounce something so impossibly wise that, just for a second, the very world appears to revolve around him. I'm so damn tired of this thunkingly portentous rubbish.
Everything I'd heard about Selma led me to think it'd be the antidote to my severe case of biopic-itus. Most tantalising was the idea of zeroing in a few crucial months in the life of its subject, the exact tactic that made Spielberg's Lincoln surprisingly digestible. Also bolstering my enthusiasm was the Academy's racist snubbing of what by all accounts was a masterclass performance by David Oyelowo and ace direction by Ava DuVernay. Yep, Selma's gonna be the film for me - the cinematic mouthwash that's going to banish the foul taste of its biopic brethren. How could it possibly let me down? Well...
Set in 1965, Selma chronicles Dr Martin Luther King Jr's (David Oyelowo) organisation and participation in voting rights activism. The town of Selma, Alabama is infested with virulent racists, ruled with an iron rod by thuggish cop Wilson Baker (David Dwyer) and governed by segregationist dinosaur George Wallace (Tim Roth). The stupidity and violence baked into the town makes it the perfect stage for Dr King, whose philosophy of non-violence is most powerful when contrasted with petty-minded barbarism.
What happens in this insignificant town soon comes to define the entire protest movement, with national news filled with dramatic footage from Selma of peaceful demonstrators falling under the cop's billyclubs. Dr King's tactics crank up the pressure on President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), whose delaying a bill on removing voting restrictions begins to look more like cowardice than prudence.
To get this out of the way early on; Selma is a good film. DuVernay chronicles these events as if she happened to be present with a camera, taking us from the front-lines of the marches, to the back rooms of churches where tactical discussions take place and right up to high level political discussions in the Oval Office. There's a easy confidence in way we follow Dr King through the various spheres he occupies, simultaneously playing father, husband, politician, preacher, leader and icon. Similarly there's a careful eye for emphasising violence - though the camera cuts away from the moment of impact - excellent sound work and editing emphasises the repulsiveness of the cop's brutality.
She's aided by an impressive cast who're obviously conscious of the importance of their roles. Stand-outs in the supporting cast are the (always excellent) Wendell Pierce as Rv. Hosea Williams, Carmen Ejogo's embattled yet dignified Coretta King and Oprah Winfrey (whose acting skills are often overlooked) as Annie Lee Cooper. The film is peppered with cameos from excellent actors; with Cuba Gooding Jr, Martin Sheen and Dylan Baker all popping up for a scene or two and impressing.
Great as the cast is, it's bound together by the considerable gravitas of David Oyelowo's Martin Luther King. It's difficult to imagine any other actor coming at this role as successfully as Oyelowo does. During his thunderous speeches, which combine revolutionary rhetoric with evangelical preaching, we get a taste of his intense charisma, making it easy to understand why he among many others took leadership of the civil rights struggle.
But outside of the speeches Selma's Dr King is a frustratingly distant figure, hemmed in by the demands of a script that (quite understandably) can't help but beatify him. This leads to sequences where other characters talk at or about Dr King while he remains quietly statuesque. This comes to a head in two scenes; the first where his wife is confronts him on his infidelities and he takes a long pause before confirming that he only loves her and the second when he decides, after the police have cleared a path for his march, to turn around and walk back to the church.
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| Oyelowo's Dr King with Tom Wilkinson's LBJ. |
In both scenes he remains quiet and Sphinx-like, the film making no effort to inquire on what his thoughts might be. This extends to his private conversations, practically all couched in slow, thoughtful, statesman-like language. Real people simply don't talk like this, resulting in overcooked conversations that bristle with too much extra-narrative gravitas. It's absolutely understandable for the film-makers (and anyone else for that matter) to be in awe of Dr King, but reverence doesn't lead to incisive cinema.
This makes Selma 'merely' an excellent historical recreation. Taken on those grounds it's an undoubted success: the obvious care and attention lavished on every frame of the film makes it an educational watch. But simply portraying events as they happened makes the film a straight history lesson, content to teach the established facts rather than make new enquiries of its own.
So, sadly, Selma lands squarely in traditional biopic territory, stuffed full of self-consciously important conversations between actors doing impressions of politicians while a string-based score ensures that the audience is feeling particular emotions at particular times. Admittedly it's a very good example of the biopic genre - quite a bit ahead of The Imitation Game and way, way ahead of The Theory of Everything and American Sniper - but unfortunately it's still mired in the same old conservative genre trappings.
★★★
Selma is released 6th February
Friday, June 22, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
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To say that interesting theatre only happens above Islington pubs or in West End basements is a mistake. There are lots of interesting things going on all over London, and getting out Zone 1 once in a while is nice for a change of pace. But even with this thought running through my head, it was with a dark sense of foreboding that I stepped off the train at West Croydon Overground station. I am familiar with Croydon, and have formed the opinion that it is a featureless, depressing wasteland of the soul. As I staggered down the wind tunnel of Wellesley Road, corporate concrete monoliths towering over me I began to feel that sucking sense of hope being drained out of your soul that seems to accompany a visit to Croydon. I reached the theatre – Fairfield Halls, a monument to some deranged sense of 1960s functionality, a place that should have been torn down long ago and the earth salted. ‘This play had better be damn good’, I thought.
‘Born in the Gardens’ is a Peter Nichols play that premiered and is set in 1979, it’s about a family coming together for the funeral of their father. The mother, Maud (Katherine Senior) lives in a decaying mock-Tudor house with one of her sons, the somewhat isolated Maurice (Edward Ferrow). The two other siblings soon arrive for the party, Maurice’s twin sister Queenie (Rachel Howells) and their younger brother, Hedley (Jonathan Parish) a Labour MP. The plot revolves around Queenie and Hedley trying to get their mother to move into a duplex in London, and to get rid of the somewhat decrepit house she lives in Bristol.
First impressions of the play were not good. We open with someone dressed as bumbling old lady, it feels immediately sort of Little Britainy – the humour seems to be largely based around comically misunderstood words (‘michael wave’ for microwave for example) and on talking back to the television. It seems almost impossibly old-fashioned. The staging is overly naturalistic, the character’s dialogue is generally aimed at the audience rather than at each other and even though there are apparently jokes being told, no-one in the audience seems to be laughing. A slow tingle of horror begins to grow in my chest, have I come all the way to Croydon to see a bad play? The programme informs me that this production has arrived here by way of the Budleigh Salterton Public Hall, suddenly all signs are pointing to disaster.
But I bear with it, and try and work out what they’re getting at. 1979 seems like a pretty depressing year in British history, beginning with the winter of discontent, with rubbish piled up in the streets and parks, and corpses going unburied, and by the time the events of the play are taking place, the Labour government has lost a vote of no confidence and a new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher has taken power. It is a time of change, although not necessarily a positive and happy sort of change. The events of the play seem to hint at the social misery going on in the wider world around the characters. Ledley, the Labour MP is treated as a figure of fun for his socially crusading philosophy. I suppose in 1979 views like this would be considered ripe for mockery. The daughter, Queenie, is living in a beach house inMalibu writing acidic but hollow magazine articles, and Maurice seems to be locked into a spiral of masturbatory isolation and talking to his beloved cat.
It slowly becomes apparent that while on the surface the play is a harmless, toothless, neutered kind of comedy, deep within its chest beats a misanthropic and twisted heart. The characters are stock comedy archetypes, but these are archetypes just one step before their neuroses collapse in on themselves.
It is interesting to see how they play the ‘hilarious’ dottiness of the mother Maud. She is constantly seeing ‘mites’ on everything. This is frequently a punchline and it seems like they want the audience to think ‘this old woman is so whacky!’ Characters spend time angrily debating their existence, but it is clear to us at least that they do not exist. Maud finds them everywhere, in her shoes, in her bag, in the car, on the serviettes – they’re even eating her hair. Her children don’t seem to find this behaviour particularly disturbing, they see her delusion as a kind of leverage to get her to move out of the house and into a modern duplex. When we in the audience think about it for a moment, the humour begins to recede. It’s pretty apparent that no matter where Maud ends up, either in the Victorian house or the duplex she will continue to see ‘the mites’ on everything. How long before she sees them under her skin? And then what?
This is not some wilfully dark interpretation of mine: the play demonstrates a specific awareness of delusional clinical psychology. It takes pains to use the expression folie a deux, and then to explain what exactly this entails. It actively wants us to consider this comedic character’s quite disturbing mental illness taken to its logical end.
This sense of things going very wrong just waiting in the wings hangs over the whole play. While the events on stage are fairly comedic and inconsequential, there are pitch-black hints of the most terrifying activity in the character’s pasts and future. For example, throughout the first act of the play, the dead father, Victor’s coffin lies in the front room. Queenie, his ‘favourite’ says that she came over to see his ashes scattered for a sense of closure. "Closure for what he did to me that night…".
Wait… what?!
For a moment the spectre of childhood sexual abuse hangs over the play, and then it vanishes, uncommented on by both audience and cast alike. You find yourself wondering if you’d imagined it.
Another instance of this fleeting sense of underlying horror comes during a vaguely incestuous scene between the two twins. In this instance I can’t tell whether it was something in the script, or maybe a bit of miscommunication between the actors and the audience, but a murmur of shock travelled through the audience. Later on there is frequently disturbing sexual activity alluded to, and it seems to throw contrast to the light and harmless ‘humorous ‘dialogue on stage. Once you’ve glimpsed this darkness it seems to pervade even the lightest of scenes. The ruined late 70s furniture and technology seems to take on a sinister air, and the constantly mentioned decay of the house seems to mirror their mental states. The fact that the ‘jokes’ the characters make are falling flat does not seem embarrassing to anyone – only the bitterest and most cynical can laugh at these poor bastards.
I find it interesting that this play was in a contemporary setting when it was premiered. It works so well as a period piece that it is difficult to imagine it ever being regarded as modern, even in 1979. Nostalgia for the past is a pretty easy crutch for a play to rely on, and it is to the credit of the production company Creative Cow that they do not try to portray 1979 as a fond memory. It is explicitly a dank, depressing and tasteless era. Characters are casually racist in a reflexive and unexamined way, their listing of the nationalities of the business owners in their town sounds disturbingly like the kind of bile you’d hear foaming from the mouth of a BNP member. It all seems suffocating. Even the drinks seem warped and off-putting, characters frequently enjoy an absolutely vile sounding “bullshot” cocktail which apparently consists of beef bouillon and vodka (I had assumed that something so revolting must be made up, but no, apparently it’s a real cocktail).
I hesitate to say I enjoyed this play. It was unfunny, at times crushingly dull and the more you think about it, the more depressing the events of the play become. But maybe this is all the point? All of the performances are great, and the production values are extremely professional, but they seem in service of a sinister agenda, one designed to instil a sense of creeping horror and unease in the audience. It is a profoundly nihilistic experience: the final scene of the play is much the same as the first, suggesting an unending ouroboros of misery, pain and death. God only knows what the audience in Budleigh Salterton made of it.
As I stumbled out into the Croydon night it seemed like the crushingly oppressive world of the play was following me. I picked my way past pools of steaming vomit outside a chain nightclub, past people groaning (in pleasure or pain?) on benches on the high street, past strange inhuman howls coming from a back alley and eventually onto the train home. As it pulled out of the station the words of Johnny Rotten popped into my head: "There is no future in England's dreaming."
I have once again vowed never to return to Croydon. This time I’m determined to keep my word.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
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Back to the Hackney Empire for more from the Isango Emsemble. Despite not really being able to understand what the plot of La boheme was I had a pretty good time. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a bit more up my street though, and I was familiar with the book. Nonetheless, this time I took no chances, and read through the programme before it started. This also allowed me to find out just what was going on in La boheme. In retrospect, I should have bought a programme last week.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a musical based on the 1914 book by Robert Tressell. The book is a classic of socialist literature, with the action set in the South of England and showing how the working class of the town are exploited by their employers. This musical version is set in South Africa during apartheid. The central characters are employed as painters and as the plot develops, we witness the effects of capitalist theory on the working class. This version, with an entirely South African cast also looks at the effects of colonialism and racism. Setting the events in South Africa is not an arbitrary decision, Robert Tressell was an Irishman who at one point lived and worked in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It was here that he became involved with trade unions, and with the socialist philosophies that fill his book.
The staging here is quite similar to that of La boheme, with the gently forward sloping stage, and with minimal set. The set is bathed in earth tones, complementing the characters shabby clothes. When there is bright colour on stage it tends to stand out. In the first act giant green letters are slowly painted blue over the course of the act, and they seem to glow bright in the light. At the start of the second act, the male characters don their ' minstrel stage wear', red and white polka-dotted evening coats and white trilbys. The bright costumes seem to make their everyday wear seem even more dowdy.
In La boheme, the instrumentation was entirely African, in this production there is no orchestra, and very little instrumentation. The voices of the performers, nearly always singing in harmony more than fill the room. The fact that most of the songs only work when all of the performers are acting as one also works thematically. There are very few parts in the room where the workers sing alone. Their 'bosses' however are placed in isolated areas of the stage and sing alone. As before, the singing was exemplary. Admittedly, I don't really have the critical framework to decide whether someone is singing brilliantly or just extremely competently, but each performer injected the personality of their character into the songs.
Now that I have a programme, I can pick out individuals to praise. In both Isango productions I've seen, Mhlekazi Mosiea has been the standout performer. He's played the leads in both, and manages to show deep inner anger coupled with an innocent fragility. As the callous and money-grubbing superintendant, Noluthando Bogwana is also a stand out. She stalks around the stage in a floor length coat, striking strange angular poses and looking somewhat terrifying with her widened eyes. There is a particular fun scene where, pretending to have a close relationship with the workers she attempts to conduct them in a choir. Almost every weird pose she finds is hilarious. As she contorts the sound of the choir shifts and warps to match her motions, it's something I've never seen before on stage, and must be pretty damn complicated to rehearse.
One scene in particular stands out above the rest. It's when our hero, Nkosi Songo explains just how the workers are being bamboozled and exploited by capitalism. He playacts the role of a factory owner, using slices of bread as the raw materials of the land. He puts his friends in the position of working for him, making the bread into sandwiches and paying them for their work. Then when they've finished making sandwiches, he asks what they're going to eat. They pay back their wages, and get a single sandwich. They are left with nothing, and the boss's wealth increases at their expense. The cycle is infinite and the workers are essentially trapped at a near-poverty level. It's a neat demonstration of Marx's theory of surplus value. I've tried to read Capital, and despite my best efforts found it somewhat impenetrable, so the fact that this staged version is able to quickly, efficiently and convincingly illustrate one of the pillars of his economic theory is a credit to both Tressell and the production.
I enjoyed this much more than La boheme. The songs, production and the politics were much more to my tastes than the opera I saw last week. I'd like to see the third of their shows, Aesop's Fables before they finish just to complete the set. In popular culture it's uncommon to see something that so unashamedly advocates socialist values, so I consider this a rare treat.
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