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Showing posts with label edinburgh preview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edinburgh preview. Show all posts
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Saturday, July 12, 2014
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My ideal night out can be summarised pretty easily; hanging out in an interesting place surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things. If there's some nudity tossed into the mix that's a welcome bonus. So HOLY SH!T STAMP! cozied up to my sensibilities in the loveliest possible way. This was the much desired triple threat of performance art, comedy and theatre, unafraid to be aggressive, confrontational but also warm and inclusive.
The old BBC London HQ in Marylebone turns out to be the ideal place for a night like this. The soundproofed studio rooms give artists the room they need to make all the racket they want inside while never having to worry about disturbing anyone performing in the main space. In these pods around the main room are installations varying from an exciting looking 'Make-Your-Own-War-Movie' (which looked fun but I never got to do), a tombola stocked with organiser Ellie Stamp's toys (I won a toy racquet) and interesting stuff flickering tantalisingly just behind closed doors that I didn't have time to experience.
The purpose of all this is to raise money for those making the trek up to Edinburgh. Later in the night they apologised that the money being raised wasn't going to starving children; but by all indications visiting the Edinburgh festival is equivalent of being held by your ankles and violently shaken until all the money has fallen out of your pockets (and your bank account). Anyway, with this much neat stuff around to enjoy they more than make it worth their while.
One of my instant favourites was Gaia Harvey Jackson's blindfolded paintings. You're led into a side room draped in cloth, the atmosphere like that of a fairground fortune teller. Inside is Jackson, as she asks you questions, you place her hand on your face and she roams around, exploring your contours and charting your features. As she does she gently questions you. I was in a chatty mood so I immediately started excitedly gabbing about an interesting woman I've met that I'd like to see more of. It's like a miniature form of therapy just to have someone really listening to what you've got to say - all the while she's scratching out ragged lines on a piece of canvas. I'm excited to see the result:
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| I like it. |
Similarly neat was the stall set up by Heather Bandenburg and Emsey Jones. One of my big annoyances in life in general is when people try oh-so-hard to be nice and pleasant. It's the rough edges in life that make things interesting. So it's kind of refreshing that these two are absolutely horrible to me. They're running a misanthropic cake stall dedicated the memory of someone called Diane (I don't know who she is). With curled lip and insouciant glare they invite you to pick between a cake experiences and reaching into Diane's cardboard vagina-bucket to see what's inside. How can you possibly choose? I didn't, and did both over the course of the night. Sat upon Heather's bony knee I gulped down a cake as I stared into the picture of Diane's eyes. Then, hand plunged deep between cardboard labia I scrabbled around - pulling out a bag of rhubarb and custard sweets!
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| Heather Bandenburg and Emsey Jones |
By now I had a toy racquet, portrait of myself, bag of sweets and a couple of beers in tow. Life was looking pretty rosy. And it was about to get rosier. After a great talk by Richard DeDomenici about his Redux project - sweding movies in the locations they were shot in, Ira Brand takes the stage. Up to now things have been pretty upbeat and comedic, but not now.
Within about twenty seconds the room becomes utterly silent. She sits at a desk, opens a laptop and starts reciting a monologue: it's simple stuff, but like a black hole she inexorably draws everyone's attention to her. With a gentle wobble in her voice and a slight sparkle of tears under her eyes she guides us through the emotions and technical experience of cancer.
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| Ira Brand |
We quickly realise she's talking about a prostate cancer scare. I wonder for a moment if women have prostates (I was pretty sure they don't), but then she settles that train of thought by talking about having blood in her semen. A weird cocktail of emotions and thoughts begins to take mix. Brand is such a good actor that the subjective, emotional side of us cannot help but instinctively sympathise with her - the room was so rapt that everyone there was feeling her pain along with her.
Meanwhile the coldly logical side of us is trying to puzzle out what the hell is going on. Whose story is this? What point is being made by a translating a masculine cancer through a feminine prism. Neurons are flickering around the brain like an untuned TV as we try to put it all together, a state of mind that leaves us confused and vulnerable - amplifying Brand's performance even more. It's a hell of an intense monologue, diluted only by experiencing it as part of a crowd. If this were a one on one experience it'd have been like taking a bullet made of sadness right to the temple.
Things don't let up. Next is Sara Zaltash, who stands on a stage looking perfectly normal and happy. Slightly bashfully she explains that she's not allowed to burn incense in this room for fear of setting off the smoke detectors. Then in the blink of an eye she whips off her dress and she's completely naked. It's the quickest disrobing I've ever seen and the sudden nudity silences the room. But this is just stage one of her transformation. Out go the lights and on comes the UV - revealing that Zaltash's body is smeared with UV paint. Her lips glow toxic waste orange in the darkness, disembodied and monstrous.
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| The angry disembodied lips of Sara Zaltash. |
She begins reciting song lyrics - snatches from across the pop spectrum, all punctuated by a snarled "DISCUSS!". In 15 minutes or so we travel through about a hundred songs from Dolly Parton to Kanye West, stopping everywhere along the way as Zaltash's voice becomes ever fiercer and slightly hoarse, and her yells of "DISCUSS!" become ever fiercer. This is visually stunning stuff; the performer becoming a kind of phantom as she performs - slicing away humanity until she's just a few floating body parts in the darkness. Dynamic, exciting and brave - my kind of performance art!
After this we got a truncated version of Sh!t Theatre's excellent Guinea Pigs on Trial and an even more pared down smidge of Ellie Stamp's also brill Are You Lonesome Tonight? - both of which I reviewed here. By the end of the night I had a cold curl of jealousy in my belly that I wasn't heading to Edinburgh. If it's like this it'd be a tiny bit of heaven.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Friday, July 11, 2014
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Edinburgh Fringe preview season is one of my favourite parts of the year. There's nothing like watching increasingly frazzled young performers in a state of mild-to-strong freak out as August crawls ever closer. Last night was a visit to a double-bill preview, nestled within an ex-BBC building in Marylebone - currently known as Theatre Delicatessen. Seized spaces always send a pleasant little twinge of adventurous through me: the more dilapidated, stripped backrooms I get to see in my life the better. But enough of my yapping, the shows:
Guinea Pigs on Trial - Sh!t Theatre
Back in the early 2000s I was a poor student. Malnourished I tottered about in rags like a Dickensian waif, until one day a man in a white coat eyed my bony body and informed me I could get a good price for my little toe. £12,000 to get it excised from my body, and then to have the toe stump experimented on to test bold new stump-prettifying drugs. I was initially up for it, but then I chickened out, realising that if I got on the slippery slope of selling bits of me to the highest bidder chances are I'd end up a moderately well off torso.
As I happily wiggle the toe now I thank good sense that I didn't go through with it, but it's precisely these kinds of decisions that Sh!t Theatre's Becca and Louise are tackling in Guinea Pigs on Trial, a politico-science-comedy show about the processes of becoming a guinea pig for medical testing. This subject matter ranges from the horrifying to the farcical, Becca and Louise painting a picture of a sinister, secretive industry that trades in the flesh of the desperate.
This is all framed through a ramshackle lecture that uses The X-Files as a framing device, encompasses a debate on the merits of Sister Act versus its sequel Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, public urination and a quick summary of reviews of a crappy local hotel. Sure, Guinea Pigs on Trial is ragged around the edges but we quickly realise this is camouflage for the pair's burning sense of injustice.
At the core is the indignation that pharmaceutical companies exploit those in need of money with scant regard for their worth as human beings - preferring to see their guinea pigs as mere proddable, probeable, bacteria-ridden fleshbags. With an admirable willingness to get their hands dirty, the two list off the trials they've applied for, from the innocuous ("Flu Camp", which actually sounds quite nice) to the scary (getting you hooked on smack in the name of science) to the 'holy shit that's a bad idea' (injecting your bladder with botox to see what happens). As they show us the rejection letters, listing faults like "underweight", "too much/little bacteria", "not sterilised", "not wrinkled enough" and so on, we begin to get a sense of the human body as commodity.
It's actually pretty creepy stuff: the X-Files framing device stops feeling like a quirky conceit very early on as we learn about the evasiveness of the big drug companies, behaviour which directly led to the disastrous 'Elephant Man' drug trial at Northwick Park in 2006.
This cuts to the quick of what Sh!t Theatre are trying to achieve - the charisma and comedy the sugary coating on a powerful political pill. This brand of activist comedy really floats my boat - reminding me of the pointed stunts of Mark Thomas. Here, as there, the laughs spring from some strange place between outrage and shock at the ambiguous flutterings behind the curtains of power. It was ace is what I'm saying.
Are You Lonesome Tonight? - Ellie Stamp
Ellie Stamp is interested in identity. Who is she? Who the hell do we think we are? Who do other people think we are? What does the cosmos have to say about us? Genetics? Geography? Appearance? By the time you've gotten to the end of this show you'll have been categorised, rearranged, interrogated, had your innermost psyche laid bare and, if you're really lucky, gotten to eat a toasted peanut butter sandwich.
The skeleton on which everything is overlaid is an exploration of Ellie's relationship to the dead King Elvis. What if, instead of ignominiously popping it on the bog, he'd made his way to England and begun a clandestine relationship with Ellie's mum. After all, Ellie, unlike her sister, has dark hair and if you squint the right way in the right light, why - she might even have Presley's distinctively insouciant brow and plump, smoochable lips. The root of this train of thought was Ellie receiving a book with the unwieldy yet descriptive title Are You Lonesome Tonight? The Untold Story of Elvis Presley's One True Love and the Child He Never Knew.
This moment is the seed of the show and everything that we experience branches from it. There's a particular focus on numerology, with everybody in the audience being asked to add up their dates of birth to get a number between 1 and 9, by which we're then sorted into groups. Supposedly we're then to realise our similar personalities and proclivities. For example 1s are born leaders, 4s are perceptive and 6s are warm and caring.
I think what Ellie's doing is dividing us, labelling us and telling us how we feel not differentiate ourselves from each other, but to underline our similarities. The numerological stuff is, let's face it, a bunch of bullshit. Somewhere inside everybody is a caring person, a perceptive person and a forceful person. The only way to get through life is to shuffle these personae like a pack of cards, deciding which face is best to pop on for any given situation.
The show that results from this train of thought is an extremely intimate archaeological excavation; a kind of auto-autopsy on why Ellie Stamp is who she is. There's a crafty loopiness to proceedings, with tangents spinning from tangents, confessions and moments of self discovery for us and her. There's an air of truth to damn near everything Ellie says - and what's more - there's the illusion that she's realising a lot of this for the first time on stage.
I'm making this all sound unappetisingly serious so I should point out that Are You Lonesome Tonight? is also very funny. Ellie has a bag full of jokes and a stony deadpan expression that had me cracking up throughout. That said, the confessional sincerity shot through everything forces us to take her seriously, and we eventually arrive at a genuinely moving palce. By the final moments, with the crowd singing along to Elvis as Ellie frantically monologues about who she is and who we think we are, she's achieved something weirdly compelling and (ironically) unclassifiable - a show lodged in the crevice between performance art, theatre and stand up comedy.
I hope this double bill does well in Edinburgh. There were a few rough edges last night, but this meant that the material felt fresh and dynamic. I only hope repeated performances won't dull the blade; if they can maintain this sharpness and energy they're onto a winner.
'Guinea Pigs on Trial' / 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' are at the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh for the entirety of the Fringe.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
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I was a bit surprised to find an Edinburgh comedy preview on at King’s Place. The place is ultra classy, all pine, neat sculptures and £4 bottles of beer. They have Dyson Airblades in the toilets which, while they have become slightly more ubiquitous, are still my benchmark for an upmarket establishment. I’ve only been there before for classical music and I always feel a bit out of place there. I'm just waiting for a security guard’s hand to gently but firmly land on my shoulder and ask me to “please leave now sir, quietly, and without a fuss”. I don’t know how these acts managed to wangle their way into here, but it’s nice to see comedy in such a deadly serious venue.
Max and Ivan are… Con Artists
I don’t want to beat around the bush, this was wonderful stuff. 'Max and Ivan' are Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez, and they play every role in a complex Oceans 11 style heist thriller. It satirises nearly every trope of the genre, and manages to pull off giant action set pieces with just two chairs and two guys. The tone of the humour reminded me of Hot Fuzz or the golden age of the Simpsons in that while it pokes fun at the ridiculous aspects what it is satirising, it still, on some level, takes its own narrative vaguely seriously.
Watching what is essentially an ensemble piece with 7 main characters performed by two people does require that you pay attention. It’s a bit like being thrown into the deep end of a pool to begin with, but each character has a distinct body language and accent, so you learn fairly fast who’s who. 20 minutes into it you can easily tell who’s ‘on camera’ just by body language, let alone accent. I haven’t seen any of their other productions, so I don’t know if this kind of complex, multi-character narrative is anything out of the ordinary, but it’s a credit that even as the plot twists into unlikely contortions, we can still follow what is going on. Each of the main characters is quickly and efficiently sketched out. The characterisation is by necessity, fairly broad (the sinister Russian oligarch, the jaded, upper-class female hacker, etc) but even through all the jokes, and even though the fourth wall was comprehensively demolished I surprised myself by actually caring what was going to happen to them. Now, I wouldn’t exactly go so far as to say I was emotionally invested in these characters, but most of them have little mini-arcs within the narrative that pay off pretty satisfyingly and you find yourself caring when they are placed in danger.
This was the premiere performance, and things were a little rough around the edges. The second half was largely performed with scripts, but the charisma of the performers carried them through. They hit just the right balance between chatting to the audience and getting on with the performance. It was almost scary how quickly they built up a rapport with everyone there, and the audience was consistently enjoying themselves even through the occasional forgotten line or missed cue. In fact, the scrappy nature of the performance probably added to the enjoyment, and some of the biggest laughs were as a result of adlibbing.
The structure of the humour seems influenced in some way by the ‘cut away gag’ nature of animated shows like Family Guy. We repeatedly ‘cut away’ to say, films that the characters appeared in, or a previous heist. Unlike Family Guy though where the cutaways don’t forward the plot, and just serve to reference some random piece of 80s pop culture, all of these filled in a nice bit of backstory and added to the characterisation. There are some inspired bits of writing in this, which I don’t want to spoil. My favourite however, was the “that’s not a con!” sequence, which just kept piling on the ludicrousness to great heights.
I would love to see this again towards the end of their Edinburgh run to compare the difference in performance. I’m curious to see whether the off-the-cuff nature of the adlibs and the close camaraderie with the audience survive a month long run.I’d like to think it will. I also want to see how Ivan looks after doing the toothpaste gag for a month (he's right, that can't be healthy). But I loved the rough edges of last night, and even with missed lighting cues, scripts on stage and forgotten lines wouldn’t have had it any other way.
The Three Englishmen: SQUARES
The Three Englishmen are Ben Cottam, Nick Hall, Tom Hensby and Jack Hartnell. It’s much harder to write about their set than it is Max and Ivan, mainly because of slightly subjective factors that stopped this being quite as funny as it should be. The format is relatively quick-fire sketches covering pretty disparate ground. It ranges from straightforward parody to the surreal.
Technically there is not much wrong with the show. The costuming is quick, simple and effective and the characters within the sketches are, like Max and Ivan, quickly and efficiently defined. We can usually tell what stock character is being used from the first line said. The jokes are original and fairly creative – there were very few times where I thought that something missed the mark completely, and yet somehow the show felt lacking. It was loose and ponderous where it should have been razor-wire taut.
The annoying thing is that there are lots and lots of excellent jokes in this show, but the energy frequently dips, or the show lingers on a particular sketch past the punchline. The most funniest sketches were the shortest, the two involving boys/buoys were straightforward and funny without outstaying their welcome. Some just didn't work, for example, the Juliet Binoche joke just went on and on and on with no clear punchline in sight other than copious mugging to the audience.
It’s even worse when the concept of the sketch is pretty good, and would work if it was half as long (the Wine Shop sketch particularly) but it gets bogged down in repeating what the audience knows over and over again. If the joke is (and sorry for spoiling this one) that the guys running the wine shop are hopeless alcoholics, it doesn’t get any funnier after the second or third time you’ve shown us this. 3 or 4 minutes later the same joke was still being made and was rapidly getting unfunnier.
Towards the middle, the show began to fall into what I call the Whirlpool of Sympathy. This is when something happens that makes you feel sorry for the performers on stage. This happened during a song towards the middle where we were exhulted to sing along - “come on, you know the words!”. Apparently not. No-one sang along. In that instant there is an immediate disconnection between performer and audience. The audience feels a sense of group self-consciousness and you can’t help but think “why is no-one singing along?”. A frisson of discontent spreads through the crowd, suddenly there is a dividing line between the act and us. We are now not on the same page. I don’t know what the performer must think in that moment, confronted by a sea of silent, uncomfortable faces, but I’m betting it’s not good. I find myself feeling a bit sorry for the people on stage– it’s got to be a horrible feeling when people apparently aren’t having a good enough time to sing along with you. It’s hard to laugh at someone when you’re feeling a bit sorry for them. At this point we are both are trapped in the Whirlpool of Sympathy, it’s not a funny place, and it's damn hard to get out.
It feels a bit callous to be so critical, really. It’s clear to everyone watching that everyone on stage is funny in their own right, and that this is material that’s been worked on quite a bit. There are outstanding moments, for example a sketch where animal behaviour is acted out to the narration of David Attenborough – a concept that’s probably good enough to sustain an entire show on its own. The low points are the one-joke sketches that go on too long where the one-joke isn’t even particularly funny, like the Chris de Burgh sketch.
Towards the end there is a colossally unfunny celebrity chef song that lands like a lead balloon on the stage. It just keeps going and going. And I suppose it’s funny in a way that the audience can’t even recognise the chefs in question without being told who they are (if you think about it a bit harder you realise that probably means this bit isn’t working very well). We’re asked to sing along again. Silence. I feel more sympathy for the performers, who are trying so very, very hard to entertain us.
Sympathy should not be the emotion that comedians engender in their audience. I’m convinced there’s a great, lean, punchy 45 minute show here. They’ve just got to trim the fat out.
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