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Showing posts with label Pandemonium Productions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pandemonium Productions. Show all posts
Friday, July 14, 2017
Friday, July 14, 2017
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Turns out there's a good reason the Brothers Grimm weren't the Brothers Cheery. Grimm's Fairy Tales finds Pandemonium Performance in Abney Park Cemetery, their old stalking ground. Within this overgrown labyrinth, we find characters both familiar and stranges. Pandemonium, like many before them, are trying to un-Disney these nursery rhymes and children's tales. Gone are the chirruping animal companions the jaunty songs and the super happy endings.
What's left are dire warnings about the cruelty and unfairness of the world, designed to prepare wide-eyed innocents for a life of drudgery speckled with misery, with a predator around every corner and where a happy ending is probably just wishful thinking. This is underlined by the magnificent backdrop of dead Victorians, looming stone angels and crooked gravestones that, in the summer twilight, begin to resemble rows of crooked teeth.
Pandemonium adapts four stories: Rumplestiltskin, Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel and The Godfather. Paul Lingham, writing and directing, approaches them with a sadistic irreverence. The performers are constantly breaking the fourth wall to light-heartedly menace any children in the audience and making little satirical asides that fly over their heads. And so, for just over an hour, we wander the arteries of the cemetery, getting a glimpse of what it might really be like to be lost deep in the woods.
The show neatly captures this nervous chaos, with characters like Rob Cumming's Wolf and Stephanie Christian's cannibal Witch making us feel as if we've walked off the familiar path and found ourselves somewhere different and dangerous.
The feeling of dislocation peaks with the final story, The Godfather. This lesser known Grimm story involves a father unable to support his large family, so decides to entrust his thirteenth child to the Grim Reaper. Death raises the child, whose ability to see how long people have left to live makes him become a successful doctor. The moral of the fable is the inevitability and unpredictable nature of death, that you might feel a cold, bony hand touch your shoulder at any moment of the day and there's nothing you can do about it.
At the show I attended were a bunch of under tens who kept an eye on to see if they were enjoying themselves. They spent most of the show nervously excited (there was one great moment where, after The Huntswoman had slain the Wolf, a six-year-old spotted that his chest was still moving and exclaimed in surprise "It's not real! He's still breathing!"). However, in this finale they looked genuinely frightened - with Steve Fitzgerald's quietly sinister Death (with a taxidermied snake coiled around his top hat) even sending a shiver up my spine.
Okay fine, kids have to realise that they're going to end up as worm food at some point, but this being the finale of a show feels a bit like a theatrical sucker punch and is destined to lead to some sleepless nights/kiddie existential dread. I'm far from an advocate for all happy endings all the time, but perhaps concluding with the (relatively) cheerier Hansel & Gretel might have left us with some better vibes.
Despite that, Grimm's Fairy Tales is destined to lodge in the memory. I've seen a bunch of shows in Abney Park Cemetery now, and repetition has not dulled the power of the place. This production is especially notable for allowing us inside the skeletal chapel at the centre of the park. Formerly open to the elements but now newly roofed, it's an intensely cool place, so much so that the weather-beaten stones vie for attention with the play.
Pandemonium Performance are onto a winner here, their skewed adaptation making the familiar unfamiliar by resurrecting the dark, medieval origins of the tales. The cast gives it their all, with Nell Hardy's Hansel a particular highlight (her zombie-like eating is particularly horrifying) You can really sense the weight of history in the characters, get a taste of the power of myth and understand what W.H. Auden was on about when he described the work of the Brothers Grimm as "one of the founding works of Western culture".
One caveat - if you're thinking of bringing any particular sensitive children along I might give it a miss, unless you want to deal with a worried voice piping up on the ride home: "Mummy, when is Death going to come for me?"
Grimm's Fairy Tales is at Abney Park Cemetery until 30th July, with multiple shows per day. Tickets and details here.
Monday, October 24, 2016
Monday, October 24, 2016
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Nestled right in the firmly gentrified heart of Stoke Newington, Abney Park Cemetery is hemmed in on all sides by concept restaurants and cocktail bars. Yet just a couple of steps beyond its imposing wrought iron gates and you're somewhere else. Somewhere that nature has reclaimed. Somewhere the Victorian dead live. Somewhere ivy-clad stone angels loom from the thicket. Somewhere that light seems fearful to shine...
So, a pretty damn good place to stage a spooky Halloween play. Pandemonium Productions know this place well, having staged a couple of plays here, most successfully last summer's excellent Alice in Wonderland. That was a surreal summer treat, the sunset shimmering through gravestones upon in which the Cheshire Cat grinned.
Fear in the Dark is a different kettle of fish. The cemetery, difficult to navigate at the best of times, becomes chaos at night. Lit only by oil lanterns the performers march down paths where thorns threaten to ensnare your ankles. Disorientation beckons, the bustling city suddenly very, very far away. Worse, hidden behind the graves lie hissing monsters and distorted freaks, all ready to lunge out at any unsuspecting visitor.
Pandemonium exploit this in their horror mashup of bits of Poe and Lovecraft. It all kicks off with a panicked man lurching from the darkness and trying to escape the park, informing us that he's searching for his lost 'Sarah'. Before we know it we're launched down a winding trail on which we find maniacal doctors, twisted abominations, unholy cultists and people that just. won't. die.
I don't want to spoil too, but it's pretty classically spine-tingling stuff boosted by the fantastic location and oil-lit ambience. Nell Hardy, my highlight in Alice in Abney, also excels here. She's a brilliantly bendy performer, managing the single most unnerving moment in the entire evening when she stretches backwards until her head is practically touching the floor. It just looks plain wrong, as if her skeleton is being stretched from within by otherworldly forces from beyond the hell dimension.
Unfortunately, despite Hardy (and an excellent Steve Fitzgerald), Fear in the Dark doesn't quite work. The main problem is that the narrative never gels, feeling more like a collection of loosely connected vignettes than a proper story. Simply put, it's difficult to follow what's going on. Throughout I was waiting for the moment where the pieces would finally make sense. I was still waiting when I found myself being ushered out of the cemetery, apparently having not realised that the climax was actually the climax.
I get that a good horror story relies on the audience's imagination filling in a lot of the blanks, but there are an awful lot of blanks in Fear in the Dark. Prime amongst them is that the theoretical main character is often relegated to silently observing the drama and only occasionally intervenes. By contrast, Alice in Abney used its Alice character as a guide for the audience and the focus of every scene.
Also not helping is the size of the audience. Being alone in the dark woods is terrifying. With just a couple of people is scary. With about 40 people, you feel safety in numbers. Maybe this kind of thing can't be helped, but perhaps splitting the audience in two, as they did in previous productions, would have helped create the sense of isolation and danger.
I enjoyed the evening, but most of that enjoyment came from the simple atmospheric pleasure of being in Abney Park Cemetery at night. It's not that Fear in the Dark is badly performed or lacks atmosphere, but it's hamstrung by loose plotting and characterisation. Nevertheless it's going to stick in the memory - though it's the marching through the darkened graves that'll stay with me longer than the iffy drama.
★★
Fear in the Dark is at Abney Park Cemetery until 31 October. Tickets here.
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Thursday, July 21, 2016
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It's 151 years since Alice's Adventures in Wonderland exploded into the public consciousness and its popularity shows no signs of diminishing. Alice is everywhere - popping up in various forms on screen and stage, referenced in politics, science, music, fashion, mathematics, comics and videogames. Given her frequent changes in size, this malleability is all too appropriate - Alice able to translate to damn near any medium mankind can invent.
Pandemonium Performance's Alice in Wonderland is a fairly straightforward, Victorian tinged adaptation that hews pretty closely to the original text. A promenade piece presented as a series of vignettes, we follow Alice as she encounters all the familiar favourites, ending with her capital trial in front of the bloodthirsty Red Queen.
So far, so typically Alice. What sets this production apart from the rest is the scenery. Abney Park Cemetery is one of London's secret treasures: a real-life Wonderland tucked away in Stoke Newington. One of the 'magnificent seven' cemeteries of the 1830s and 40s, Abney Park is a garden of the dead, populated by morose and mossy angels and the mouldering skeletons of Londoners past.
On top of that is that the entire park is fetchingly overgrown. Visitors walk through paths carved into the dense undergrowth, all but the first row of graves receding into a tangled green emptiness. The effect is striking; monuments to death the bedrock for a chaotic, explosion of natural life: vines encircling tombstones, air thick with insects, trees creating a canopy above our heads. There's a pleasant feeling that you're somewhere you shouldn't be, coupled with a hint of danger (it's doesn't hurt that, somewhere in the thicket, lies an unexploded Luftwaffe bomb...)
Setting Alice here is an instant winner, a brilliant realisation of the dreamily surreal qualities of Carroll's story. Here, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee battle atop crumbling graves; the Caterpillar puffs leisurely from atop a music hall performers last memorial and the Mad Hatter's table is a flat tomb-top. The omnipresence of death gives proceedings an appropriately gothic tinge, something played up when Alice asks a shy eight year old "who lives here?", receiving the response "dead people", to which she reacts with mock horror.
This Alice would squeak into 'success' purely through location, but the performances cement its quality. Interestingly, the show is divided into two halves, red and black. Each mirrored half has its own cast and locations, though we begin as one and eventually meet for the finale.
I was on the black side, with Nell Hardy as Alice. Accompanying her were Sara Lynam, Caitlin McMillan, Steve Fitzgerald and Luke Willats, all of whom cycle rapidly between roles, sometimes even within scenes. The five bristle with talent, clearly delineating their roles and tiptoeing the line between funny and scary.
Particular praise must go to Fitzgerald's Cheshire Cat - the performer's toothy grin and skinny build is a perfect fit for the character, not to mention his faintly feral mannerisms and vocalisms. Also excellent is Lynam's homicidally imperious Red Queen, her performance precisely tuned to underline her haughtiness, joy in power and cracked regality.
It's a cavalcade of excellence, but sitting at the top is Nell Hardy's Alice. Bone-skinny, with piercing eyes and calculatedly angular body language. She's believably child-like in her reactions, her unvarnished snorts of laughter and indignant reactions to illogical weirdness. But beneath that you sense something wild, untameable and powerful in her, despite the parade bizarre nightmare figures, we come to see the little girl Alice as the most dangerous creature in Wonderland.
It's a hell of a performance in a hell of a show, one clearly enjoyed by adults and children alike. Setting Alice in Abney Park just feels right - though the story has aged beautifully, the characters are at home surrounded the graves of the Victorian dead. Pandemonium Productions have tapped into a wellspring of historical, psychological atmosphere, not to mention the sheer aesthetic beauty of the Abney Park setting.
In these roasting days, when the sun dips lazily in the sky things become woozily indistinct,. It's the perfect time for Alice. Check it out!
★★★★
Alice in Wonderland is at Abney Park until 31 July. Tickets here.
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