LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Friday, February 24, 2017

Review: 'The Fate We Bring Ourselves' at the Crouch End Arthouse, 24th February 2017

Friday, February 24, 2017 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The Fate We Bring Ourselves reviewed by David James

Rating:

If there's one golden rule in mythology, it's that you never screw around with the gods. Not only are they immortals who can do whatever the hell they like, but they've got seriously sadistic imaginations. Even worse, the lives of us mortals are dust in the wind compared to their magnificence. 

I've been a fan of Greek mythology ever since someone gave me an illustrated book as a child. There's something attractive about the combination of bizarre ancient moral standards, realising what various things are alluding to and the simple pleasures of the soap opera shenanigans that go on in Mount Olympus. But there's a hell of a lot of Greek myths they don't put in children's books: the gory, the sexual or the just plain bonkers.

Enter Ben Haggarty. He's in the upper echelons of performance storytelling: weaving together precise oratory, a striking physical presence and an uncanny knack for improvisation. One of the more magnetic (and slightly intimidating) performers I've seen in a while, the moment Haggarty opens his mouth he has the audience in the palm of his hand. Then, slowly, he closes that palm into a fist, squeezing us, cranking up the tension, etching vivid pictures into our imagination.

Tonight's quartet of stories is particularly vivid. The theme is choice, more specifically the danger of making the wrong choices. We begin with a parable of an ancient blind family. A husband, wife and their mothers live a happy, mutually supportive existence in a community. Their calm is broken by the reverberations of distant war; a lack of men causing the harvests to fail. With the spectre of famine raising its head, the villagers cast out "those without a future".

And so the blind family are left to fend for themselves in the wilderness. It's going to be a story with a bleak ending, until the husband trips over a mysterious bag on the ground. Reaching around inside he finds slick, spherical objects and, for reasons known only to him, pops one in his empty eyesocket. It miraculously grants him sight. He pops another next to it, then sorts out his wife and begins to dish them out to their mothers. But here's the rub:  there's eight eyesockets and only seven eyeballs. The man must make a careful choice - whose mother will remain a cyclops?

Now, we're unlikely to ever have to make this exact choice, but life offers plenty of tricky decisions. Sometimes you feel like you're standing at a fork in the road, one way leading towards a happy life of sunshine and roses, the other towards misery and destruction. And you have no way of telling which is which. The three myths that follow are examples of people making the wrong call. 

First is the myth of Actaeon and Artemis, in which a hunter happens across the goddess and her nymphs bathing nude in a pool. He decides to silently observe, becoming the first mortal ever to see the goddess' naked beauty. That achievement is scant consolation to Actaeon though, who is turned into a stag by an angry Artemis and subsequently devoured by his own hunting hounds. Next up is the myth of Erysichthon of Thessaly, a King who makes the fateful decides to chop down a grove of trees sacred to Demeter and is cursed with insatiable hunger. Last comes the tangled tale of the (double) birth of Dionysus, which involves killer clowns, Zeus incubating a foetus in his ballsack and a poor young woman being completely vaporised by Zeus' atomic strength ejaculation.

Lessons learned? Think before you act and don't fuck with the gods (and if you see Hera coming down the street be sure to cross the road). Though fantastically delivered, the connective tissue of 'choice' sometimes feels a bit flimsy, but in face of such great storytelling this feels like quibbling.

My favourite bits come when we begin to approach the horrifying or the cruel. The delivery slows down, giving us ample opportunity to anticipate what's to come next. Here, Haggarty is like a boxer shifting his weight backward before unleashing a knockout blow. When he delivers the imagery whacks into you with considerable impact - every syllable of the goriest passages conjuring up hideous mental pictures. 

Ben Haggarty is a monumentally effective storyteller: the kind of man who'd be as at home on a Crouch End stage as around a medieval bonfire or a Roman forum. The Crick Crack Club continues to remind me of the power of unadorned storytelling - of letting yourself be lost in a forest of words, giving yourself up to the sheer primeval power of the human imagination. 

For more of the Crick Crack Club, see their website.

Friday, November 25, 2016

Review: 'Little Red Riding Hood & Other Lost Girls' at the Crouch End Arthouse, 24th November 2016

Friday, November 25, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Bad things happen in the woods. Deep within the tangled foliage, where the trees blot out the sun and the ground grows boggy, chaos reigns. This is the kingdom of the wolf: a rapacious, amoral force of nature that creeps, hunts and pounces, devouring anyone unfortunate to end up in its clutches. AThis far into woods, if you scream, no-one will hear you. Yet a little girl skips daintily through all this on her way to visit her grandmother. This is Red Riding Hood, or Little Red Cap, or (from the wolf's perspective) dinner.

Everywhere wolves have lived seems to have some folk story variation on the same themes: the wolf's cunning and treachery, and the little girl's initial obliviousness and hidden cunning that lets her escape (or not, in the darker variations). Performance storyteller Nell Phoenix, part of the 'Crick Crack Club', guides us through this literary thicket, identifying the common thematic strands that exist everywhere from Staines to Japan and weaving them together into a deeply satisfying whole.

First things first, Phoenix is an amazing storyteller. Her voice is acrobatic, one moment a gutturally charming wolfish growl, the next sweet as sugar. She picks through the syllables and pauses of her tale like a mountain goat skipping up a cliff face - confident, able and never close to putting a foot wrong. On top of that she has an enviable and evocative control of her body language, hunching over into crone-dom or puffing her shoulders out to communicate the wolf's size and power, or gradually shrinking herself down to show us five increasingly small children.

Phoenix could make reciting the phone book fascinating, but here the content is at least as compelling as the delivery. In a gentle folk history lesson we travel through various European forests (French Red Riding Hood brings wine and cheese to her grandmother, while her German equivalent brings beer and sausage), all the way to a loose and surreal Chinese sister story which features an animated severed head and a demonic talking cabbage.

Common to all is the diabolical trickster wolf and the vulnerable young girl. The original Little Red Riding Hood story dates from about the 10th century, so it functions pretty straightforwardly as a warning that medieval children shouldn't stray too deeply into the woods - after all they're in danger of actually getting eaten by wolves. But as the story mutates over the years, the wolf becomes a symbol of sly, manipulative masculinity and his ambitions of consumption become a metaphor for sex.

This is all played with the utmost charm and creepy insistence, Phoenix describing the wolf as having a 'creamy' voice and taking care to accentuate his physique, hairiness, leering smile and, eventually, his cock. The children's stories get increasingly icky undertones, hearing variations in which the wolf instructs Little Red Riding Hood to remove her clothes, piece by piece, and eventually climb into bed naked, next to his bristly body.

It's at this point that the season title Fairytales for Grown-Ups makes sense. Folk tales and storytelling traditions like this are messages from the past, true unfiltered insights into the minds of now dusty and forgotten ancestors. I was enthralled, entertained and little blown-away by Nell Phoenix. If you spot her performing I'd urge you to check it out. If not, the next two in this performance series promise to be as good.

★★★★

Fairytales for Grown-Ups continues in 2017 with 'Rebranding Beelzebub' and 'Others from the Other Side' at the Crouch End Arthouse. Details/tickets here.