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Showing posts with label new diorama theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new diorama theatre. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
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Britain's post-war housing estates were borne from utopian ideals. The days of mouldy Victorian terraces were over: replacing them would be elevated communities in flats with all mod cons: cosied by central heating, blessed with stunning views and boasting pleasant green spaces in which to socialise. What could possibly go wrong?
Cut to the modern day and the estates that survive are, for the most part, graffiti-covered hellholes with pissy lifts. The scared residents that remain have barricaded themselves behind steel security bars and the social spaces are occupied by bored and hostile kids. Culturally these places are now bywords for neglect and criminality - and make excellent backdrops for low budget horror and gangster movies.
Kandinsky's Trap Street tries to explain why this happened, the effects the transformation had on long-term residents and the consequences of the estate's demolition and redevelopment. The vehicle for this is the story of the first family to move onto the fiction Austen Estate in Bermondsey, whose story we follow from their arrival in the early 1960s to the demolition of the estate in 2017.
The story centres on Valerie and her daughter Andrea (both played by Amelda Brown). Their story is one of slow disillusionment with the social systems designed to take care of them, with Valerie fighting a Sisphyean battle against the estate's social collapse and, in 2017, the now elderly Andrea struggling to sell up for a reasonable price and remain in the neighbourhood.
Trap Street tells a half-century long, cross-generational saga with impressive ease. But this story is just one facet of an information-dense tapestry that includes dramatisations of how the view of estates shifted in the media, from a bright n' perky Pathé film introducing this wonderful new housing philosophy to a Clockwork Orange parody that shows the increasing suspicion the public had of the estates.
For me, the show was most affecting when it dramatised the contemporary housing situation. Andrea is taken on a virtual reality tour of the 'next' utopian ideals in housing, which are priced at about £1 million a flat. Andrea nervously enquires about the 'affordable housing' she's heard about - only to be informed that 'affordable' is defined as 80% of market rates. Do the maths, then wonder to whom that's supposed to be affordable?
Perhaps the true tragedy of Trap Street is that the decline and criminalisation of these estates was never inevitable. The Barbican Estate was constructed on precisely the same utopian philosophy by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, working from Le Corbusier's ideas. With its lush green spaces, hanging baskets, fountains and multiple residential/cultural facilities, the Barbican Estate is still very much in demand.
Meanwhile, down in South-East London, the similarly designed Thamesmead Estate lives up the stereotype: damp-stained and litter-strewn with seriously bad vibes. It's no wonder that Chris Cunningham shot Aphex Twin's iconic Come To Daddy video here.
The difference is that one houses the poor and one the rich - you don't have to think too hard to work out which group have been preyed upon. While the wealthy Barbican Estate residents largely own their flats and happily fork out for an army of caretakers, gardeners and maintenance workers, the Thamesmead residents have suffered the consequences of 35 years of ideological warfare against social housing.
The most effective weapon in the Government's arsenal is that councils are obliged to send half their rents and the vast majority of their profits from house sales directly to Whitehall. This means there simply aren't the resources to improve or maintain conditions: the buildings are left to decay until they're demolished and replaced by glittering (and empty) luxury flats. The developers ensure the right people get a nice wodge of cash in their back pocket, while communities are scattered to the winds.
Just around the corner from the theatre there's a large piece of graffiti scrawled on the Euston Road Underpass which reads "People are living in tents and million pound flats lie empty!" Couldn't have said it better myself.
And if you want a more visceral look at the consequences of chronic underfunding and social stigmatisation just hop on the tube for twenty minutes, get off at Latimer Road, and take a sobering look at the burnt out husk of Grenfell Tower.
But despite all this misery and horror, and the most viciously targeted policies of successive governments, the dream of utopia still lingers in the imagination. The V&A recently announced that they're taking an eight-tonne fragment of the demolished Robin Hood Gardens estate to the Venice Biennale. This will be displayed on an outdoor scaffold, allowing visitors to stand on the iconic 'streets in the sky' as they look out onto the classical beauty of Venice, intended to make people reconsider how these architectural ideas can “can inform and inspire current thinking”.
So aaaanyway, back to Trap Street, which is great.
The cast, Amelda Brown, Danusia Samal and Hamish MacDougal are all great. The live score by Zac Gvirtzman is great. Joshua Gadsby and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen's set design is great. And writers/directors/producers James Yeatman and Lauren Mooney have clearly done their homework (for the sake of completeness, they are also great).
With Trap Street Kandinsky further solidifies its reputation as the go-to theatre company for political and social theatre free of stodge and preachiness. I can't wait to see what they tackle next.
Trap Street is at the New Diorama Theatre until 31st March. Tickets here.
Friday, February 16, 2018
Friday, February 16, 2018
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It Made Me Consider Me reviewed by David James
Rating:
Hot damn, what a space! GRUFF Theatre's It Made Me Consider Me is staged in ND2, a stupendously enormous Regent's Place office block just around the corner from the New Diorama. Its round central atrium feels similar in scope to the reading room at the British Library. It could be a kind of corporate Colosseum, in which desperate office drones battle to the death as their co-workers bay like animals from the balconies.
Tonight it's the venue for R.A.L.P.H - a company which specialises in memory retrieval, storage and playback. We, the audience, are a group of fresh employees working through an induction day. This involves being given a fresh identity and taken through the methods and philosophies of this very strange company.
Our guides on this adventure are HR Manager Sue (Cordelia Stevenson), memory technicians Christopher and Peter (Johnathan Blaydon and Derek Elwood), handyman Merv (Thomas Bostock) and eccentric rollerblading CEO Ralph (Rhys Slade-Jones). Each of these characters is slightly 'off': over-enthusiastic to the point of mania, passive-aggressively snapping at each other's heels and apparently afraid of someone or something...
The show winds and weaves out of the central atrium into the half-finished back rooms, full of networking equipment, air-conditioning units and heavy-duty fuseboxes. It is a deeply surreal place: supposed to be throbbing with money-making activity yet inert and creepily sterile, as if the shrink wrap on the place has yet to be fully removed. Though the cast are all effective it's the setting that does the heavy lifting - simply being here is atmospheric as hell.
But despite some effective scene-setting and a decent sense of mystery, the various pieces of It Made Me Consider Me never quite gel. I'm guessing that the piece was formulated in response to the location, with GRUFF Theatre figuring out what kind of show would best exploit what's available to them.
In that respect, it's a success. But the show is so self-consciously weird that there's little room for pondering what the story means. Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind covered the same territory, exploring the significance of memory through a science fiction lens and ending up making some pretty profound points. So it's a shame that It Made Me Consider Me just didn't 'make me consider me'. Boiled down it's a bunch of talented performers running as fast as they can to conceal that there isn't much thematic meat on these bones.
That's not to say I didn't have a good time. It's nice to see a genuinely immersive show and I always love the thrill of stepping into a scene and performing. I also deeply dug the off-kilter 70s sci-fi vibe and the send up of beige corporate culture. And, on top of all that, simply being in the building is fascinating.
It Made Me Consider Me is a really good piece of theatre, but it could be a mind-blowingly great piece of theatre if they followed through on their concept and developed the narrative a bit more. Still, it's going to stick in the mind for a while to come yet.
It Made Me Consider Me is at the New Diorama until 21st February. Tickets here.
It Made Me Consider Me is at the New Diorama until 21st February. Tickets here.
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
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Rating:
It's the kind of darkness where you can't see your hand in front of your face. The kind where your pupils dilate to saucers, hungry for the slightest stray photon. The kind where a muffled rustle conjures up horrible monsters. The kind that envelopes you like a suffocating blanket. It's a bad darkness, and bad things happen in it.
This is Lulu Raczka's A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into A Bar), an intensely atmospheric two-hander with as firm a command of light as any play I've ever seen. It's set in a fuzzily defined dystopian Britain ("It's the future, but only slightly"), regularly suffering from blackouts that go way beyond lighting a candle. Trapped within one of these are Steph (Laura Woodward) and Bell (Bryony Davies).
Bell is a bored bartender, filling the time running a dive bar nobody goes to anymore. She's a spiky Northern goth, with big stompy boots, pink hair extensions and an aggressive, forthright sexuality to her. All that makes her the opposite of schoolgirl Steph, who's in a garish pink and mustard uniform, pigtails and straw boater, all perky adolescent awkwardness and naivety. Steph is searching for her friend Charlotte, who has disappeared in a recent blackout. Bell knows something, but she isn't about the spill the beans to just anyone.
The situation adds up to a combative back and forth: the disparate pair clashing as they gradually get to know one another, growing closer as the darkness becomes ever more claustrophobic.
One of the scripts cleverest aspects is how much it leaves unexplained. The dystopia is only ever explained in generalities ("with things they way they are..."), leaving it up to the audience to imagine what could have gone so wrong with society to get us to this point. That the characters studiously avoid discussing it hints at their collective trauma, yet also allows for the blackouts to be understood in metaphorical terms.
I interpreted the darkness as a masculine repression of women: a growing ink blot of ignorance that forces women into prescribed gender roles, entraps them in their homes and presents an ever-present threat to their safety. But these two women aren't going to take this sitting down, seizing the lack of light to spin a tale of empowerment and grisly revenge on the men who've wronged them. It's fantasy, yet when it's explained so vividly in the pitch black you cannot help visualise every detail.
I interpreted the darkness as a masculine repression of women: a growing ink blot of ignorance that forces women into prescribed gender roles, entraps them in their homes and presents an ever-present threat to their safety. But these two women aren't going to take this sitting down, seizing the lack of light to spin a tale of empowerment and grisly revenge on the men who've wronged them. It's fantasy, yet when it's explained so vividly in the pitch black you cannot help visualise every detail.
All that's supported by consistently smart stagecraft. Everyone here deserves kudos, but particularly Lizzy Leech's design, Kieran Lucas' sound design and Peter Small's lighting design. Ali Pidsley's direction weaves these elements together beautifully: the soundscape mirroring the crack and popping of the fluorescent lights, or the organic squish and tangy smell of the shredded rubber on the floor. It makes for an oppressive, unfriendly dramatic space, the traverse staging giving the actors no place to hide except darkness.
A Girl In School Uniform is 80 minutes of uneasiness punctuated by comedy and genuinely creepy horror - a genuinely compelling and memorable night at the theatre. It also proves how much can be achieved on a (presumably) limited budget by applying intelligence, talent and creativity.
A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into A Bar) is at the New Diorama Theatre until 17 February. Tickets here.
Production photo by Graham Michael.
Friday, November 4, 2016
Friday, November 4, 2016
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In Still Ill, Morrissey asks one of the classical biggies of philosophy "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?" Are we creatures of intellect or instinct? Are we beholden to our flesh? Do we fool ourselves when we imagine transcending these prisons of bone, sinew and blood?
It's weighty dramatic territory, but there's few more appropriate prisms to examine it through than psychogenic disease, specifically functional neurological syndrome disorder (FNsD).
FNsD is a condition in which you begin suffering neurological symptoms like unexplained weakness, seizures or loss of muscular control (to name but a few). If you research these symptoms online, the first thing that's going to leap out at you are two terrifying words: brain tumour. So you make the trip to the hospital and end up nervously lying inside an MRI. When the results come back, the doctor happily explains that there's no physical abnormalities in the brain.
Awesome! There's nothing wrong with you! But even after the all-clear the symptoms persist, maybe even get worse. There's something wrong with you, but the doctors say you're completely fine. Suspicions start to build that you're malingering: making the whole thing up for attention. After all, there's nothing wrong with you, and 'nothing' can't be treated. And yet you're in constant agonising pain.
Up and coming young actor Sophie (Sophie Steer) finds herself trapped in this cruel medical oubliette. The condition first rears its head as she's playing a doctor in a cheesy medical drama. During a stressful day on set her left hand contorts into a paralysed claw. Terrified, she consults a doctor who injects it with botox; it's miraculously and instantly cured. Problem is, botox only starts working after two days.
As the months progress things only get worse. Sophie begins suffering frequent seizures, chronic pain and even loses muscle control in her leg, confining her to home. The once ambitious young actor is reduced to listlessly watching TV and researching her condition online, each possibly diagnosis inevitably leading down a medical dead end. She grows depressed. Her brother Mark, initially sympathetic, grows suspicious and resentful. All too soon, life has turned to shit.
Still Ill is a marvellous bit of drama: stuffed fulla dramatic creativity, top notch performances and lots and lots of interesting medical information. It's an hour and forty minutes straight through, yet manages to avoid being dull by deploying a tonne of contrasting tones - running the gamut from broad comedy right through to bone-chilling medico-horror.
Sophie Steer is the star attraction: pouring every last drop of her soul into an incredibly physically and mentally demanding role. It's pretty breathtaking stuff, the character going on an odyssey to the depths of frustration, pain and misery. Sounds pretty heavy right? Fortunately it's a journey leavened with humour, and saved from sentimentality by some pretty severe probing of the fourth wall.
Mind you, Hamish McDougall and Harriet Webb are no slouches, believably inhabiting a variety of supporting characters. They fill in the dramatic blanks, constructing a world of helpful yet emotionally distant doctors, snippily caricatured TV production crews and support ground attendees.
On top of all that, the show is liberally studded with countless imaginative bits of staging, set design and lighting. Characters reach 'through' television sets, conduct brain surgery on a cauliflower, cover the stage in discarded medical supplies, insert a catheter up a cucumber cock or conduct mock Skype sessions through on-stage cameras. In addition, there's some seriously smart blocking - at one point confining Steers to the far corner of the stage, isolating her even within the set.
But the performances and theatrics are all in service to director James Yeatman's masterful control of tone and pace and on-stage live musician Zac Gvirtzman. Still Ill is a show of lulls and swells, snowballing from calm to complete sensory overload. These moments press you back into your seat, the drama almost symphonic as it reaches a series of crescendos that perfectly simulate the stress, frustration and misery experienced by the lead character.
Since watching Todd Haynes' excellent 1995 film Safe, I've been fascinated by psychogenic and psychosomatic illnesses; having spent time reading about medically strange conditions, like electromagnetic hypersensitivity, Morgellons and multiple chemical sensitivity. They present a curious paradox: when external or physical causes have been empirically ruled out, how do you explain a a patient that their life is ruined purely because of their malfunctioning psyche? How can you deliver that information without passing the blame onto them. It's easy to discount these conditions as 'all in the mind': these people are experiencing pain, and medicine is largely failing its obligation to sooth and treat it.
This is the second great play I've seen this week named after a Smiths song, the other being the excellent Rubber Ring (the obvious lesson is to only go see plays full of Moz references). Still Ill deals with this tricky (and unfortunately still fringe) medical subject with style, grace and empathy, making for an enormously affecting bit of theatre. You leave with Morrissey still jangling around in your head, still asking "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?"
I dunno.
★★★★★
Still Ill is at the New Diorama Theatre until 19th November. Tickets here.
Monday, September 12, 2016
Monday, September 12, 2016
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It's been a while since we had a Prime Minister that wasn't either incompetent or monstrously evil (or both!). The jury is currently out on Theresa May, but honestly, "we will encourage mono-racial schools" does not bode well. After a while, politics begins to look like an endless procession of besuited bozos strip-mining everything of worth from the country, before quitting to sit on the boards of the companies that coincidentally bought all that stuff at a knock-down price.
Sometimes you just wish a normal person could take over. I guess wanting to be PM indicates a certain amount of megalomania, but still, do they all have to look weirdly like lizard people uncomfortably stuffed into flesh suits?
Simon Paris posits a solution; a lottery in which random members of the public are selected to run the country for a five year term. Whilst the problems of picking some random dude (or dudette) are obvious, there's also positives. Firstly, chances are slim that they'd be beholden to corporate interests and not be feathering their business portfolio while they're in office. Also, they'd theoretically have a genuine insight into normal life and would be able to empathise more directly with the population at large.
And so, Fictive Theatre's Lottery. A satirical play taking place in a UK not too dissimilar from our own. In the opening scene we meet two young people (Ava Pickett and Elliot Bornemann) stuck on a real administrative lottery - jury service. They uneasily make friends, the woman awkwardly making her way through a jokey conversation like a drunkard navigating a minefield. She's all twitches and elbows, randomly breaking off the conversation to stare into space with a glazed expression and giggling manically at inopportune moments.
She spends the play wobbling along the tightrope between lovable and disturbing - basically a decent person, but given to worrying fantasies about stabbing people in the eye and burning faces off with acid. She is our new Prime Minister. Still she can't be worse than Prime Minister Barry, who went on a killing spree and is now confined to a maximum security prison.
Fortunately she has a more than capable advisor (Rhys Tees), who guides her through the particulars of governance and makes her policy ideas ("More buses, and bigger ones.") a reality. But soon our new PM is discovering that her office isn't simply smiles, speeches and giving money away - tough decisions need to be made. And isn't it a little strange that her friendly advisor keeps prodding her towards cutting funding for the poor while bolstering the finances of the rich?
Lottery is razor-sharp satire, taking aim at the corruption at the heart of modern politics and the idea that there's 'common sense' answers to incredibly complex problems. Representing the political classes is the diabolical advisor: proposing impossibly sinister supervillainish plans with a smile and acting like it's no big deal. Meanwhile Elliot Bornemann's 'normal bloke' threatens to overturn the applecart with the simple application of honesty.
Along the way Paris touches on the UK's economic reliance on selling weapons to shady regimes, 'sweetheart' corporate tax deals, reasons for picking on the already disadvantaged ("they're so resilient!"), the ways in which government money is doled out and the current trend for making law-on-the-hoof without consideration of the consequences. There's an ice-cold core of seriousness in Lottery's heart, and a correctly directed anger towards a political class detached from the reality of their decisions.
But it's also very very funny. The sheer absurdity, bizarre humour and willingness to push boundaries reminded me of two of my comedy faves, Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris. The dialogue has a particularly Chris Morris-esque flavour: characters launching into terrifyingly furious outbursts and then lapsing into preternatural calmness, the ways in which everyone seems to be frantically suppressing their inner psychopath or the simple straightforward sobriety in dealing with the deeply surreal.
This is all bolstered by a pair of fantastic comedy performances by Pickett and Tees. It's probably arguable that Pickett is playing the role a touch too weirdly, but she got me laughing so much it's difficult to pick holes. She's possessed of impressively precise comic timing; especially in the meandering flirtatious conversations she has with Bornemann. And she makes some marvellously funny faces, as if the character's neurons aren't quite hooked up right and she suffers the occasional short circuit. Tees' Luciferian advisor is also fantastic, the character snowballing from shy to domineering over the run-time and delivering a show-stopping vocals only rendition of Stayin' Alive.
Lottery is a great bit of writing, strikingly staged and excellently performed. My only criticism is that the situation it presents is so pregnant with possibilities that I wanted to explore more of the strange alterna-Britain that Simon Paris presents us with. Then again, leaving the audience wanting more is a great technique. Can't wait to see what this company comes up with next!
★★★★
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