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Showing posts with label prison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prison. Show all posts
Friday, June 19, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
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Food is a fantastic dramatic metaphor. The best food and the best art both get under your skin, both bear the fingerprints of its creator and both communicate complex emotions without words. Not to mention the sheer visual dynamism of preparation and presentation, or simply describing it in strings of luscious, saliva-inducing adjectives. Sabrina Mahfouz's Chef uses food as a reflection of its subject's soul: no matter how much shit is heaped on an individual they are still capable of wonderful things.
Chef comes pre-garlanded with praise, nabbing the Fringe Fest Award at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival. It's a scanty 50 minute monologue, presented with minimal stagecraft and little theatrical frippery. There's a sense that the dead wood of theatre has been pared away - allowing us untrammelled access to an interesting person: almost theatre as confessional rather than narrative.
Said interesting person is 'Chef' (Jade Anouka). Going in we know that she was a haute-cuisine head chef and is now a convicted inmate running a prison kitchen. Salacious questions immediately pop to mind - what could have precipitated such a fall from grace? How could someone used to expressing themselves through food work in such a restrictive environment? What on earth did this woman even do?
All these answers are revealed in a chronologically jumbled story that gives us insights into family, victimhood, self expression, guilt, denial and joy. It'd be remiss of me to spoil the revelations in Chef, but I can say that by the time we're applauding we've seen a three-dimensional portrait of a genuine human being, one obviously informed by personal experience.
There's a ragged honesty to Mahfouz's writing style. Her broad technique here is to build to an emotional peak (recounting some grim act of abuse) then undercut that with subversive humour. In less capable hands these opposite forces would undermine one another, spoiling the mood. Yet Mafouz deploys comedy and tragedy with precision timing, playing us like a fiddle.
Aside from these clever rhythms, there's some straight-up beautiful descriptive writing on display. My favourite was a description of an uneaten Chinese takeaway: "noodles gloomily looking through foggy containers / at a scene of all too common domestic distress / chunks of sweet and sour chicken solidifying / under the soundwaves of unextraordinary anger". The text is studded with these wonderful turns of phrase, viscerally constructed, full of satisfying alliteration and harmonic phrasing.
This is all beautifully played by Jade Anouka. The confined upstairs room of the Soho Theatre allows a performer to engage with their audience, something that Anouka instinctively grasps. Throughout she makes eye contact with her audience, peppering us with rhetorical questions and the occasional accusatory glance. The effect is that, as we swerve towards darker themes, we're right there with her - almost implicated in her situation. Similarly, shifts in body language, from confident gesticulations to an inverted stillness, go a long way in accentuating the rhythms of the text.
Throughout we keep returning to food; Chef breathlessly describing a perfect peach, coconut tofu curry or hibiscus sorbet. It sounds delicious, the enthusiasm of the performance and the knowledge in the writing conveying an infectious passion. What I took away is that there are some incorruptible passions in life, and food is one of them. The misery inflicted upon the character cannot damp her enthusiasm and pride in her art; though her life is a shambles her soul remains intact.
I've always held that brevity doesn't indicate a lack of depth. In just 50 minutes this manages to pack in more sincerity, truth and humanity than some pieces manage in a couple of hours. I've always enjoyed seeing monologues performed, and this marks one of the best I've seen this year. It's a complex, troubling piece of work that doesn't offer up any easy answers. It's also warm-hearted, funny and approachable. A definite win all round.
★★★★
Chef is at the Soho Theatre until 4th July. Tickets here.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
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For a play about an indecisive loser whose half-baked plans get everyone killed, William Shakespeare's Hamlet is actually pretty good. It's my favourite Shakespeare - which is perhaps a bit of a cliched choice - but I've always felt Hamlet is as incisive in 2014 as it was in 1614. Jealousy, anger, lust and guilt are part of the universal human condition, all fully realised in the sympathetic character of Hamlet. Who can't sympathise with putting off an important project as long as feasibly possible, hurting people you care about with casual lies or just straight-up being a bit dippy, morose and self obsessed?
It's this relatable psychology that makes Hamlet so malleable. From slight tweaks like Kenneth Branagh's 19th century imperial splendour in his 1996 adaptation, to wholesale modernisations like Michael Almereyda's 2000 contemporary reworking with Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, CEO of The Denmark Corporation (also featuring Bill Murray as Polonius!) to the most popular modern take on the material: Disney's The Lion King. Here, in Zoé Ford's adaptation, Elsinore becomes Her Majesty's Prison Liverpool. Claudius is the warden, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are snitches and Hamlet himself is an inmate, the show opening with his graphic strip-search.
Oftentimes a Shakespeare production can become unstuck when it tries to crowbar the material into a particular setting, and I had my doubts that Hamlet would even make sense within a prison. After all, Hamlet is a Prince and much of the narrative is predicated on him being able to move through the castle as he wishes. His position also allows his increasingly bizarre behaviour to be tolerated by those around him. How can this work when he's confined to a cell at the lowest rung of the social ladder?
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| When Hamlet gets really angry his hair goes a bit 1990s. |
Ford's clever solution is just to hand wave most of these problems away. The prison setting thus becomes more about tone than location; the adaptation underlining the play's pent-up masculinity, homoeroticism and authoritarian misery. This is conveyed by an impressively minimalist set. The stage at the Riverside Theatre is wide and shallow, the stage walls painted in institutional two-tone with exposed electrical transformers powering the lighting rig. Locations are delineated by three barred walls on wheels, moved around to create cells, corridors and offices. This, combined with the high contrast lighting that throws chiaroscuro shadows over the actor's faces makes for a pressure cooker environment; a place where the bloody violence of Hamlet's final scenes feels even more inevitable than usual.
And boy oh boy is this a violent Hamlet. In place of mannered, balletic rapiers duels these characters have brawny, visceral shiv fights. When Hamlet duels with Laertes it's a bare-knuckle boxing match where elbows smash teeth from gums, blood streams from swollen cuts and bones are brutally shattered. There's a protracted beating dished out by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that's painfully drawn out, a symphony of thumping body blows and cries of pain. In less capable hands this might all feel a bit gratuitous - a way to make Shakespeare 'cool' for the kids - but within the prison setting it feels appropriate, the caveman barbarism contrasting neatly with the flowery language.
Another weapon in Ford's arsenal is the frequent slippage of the Shakespearian 'mask'. Characters frequently switch in tone between Shakespearian iambic pentameter and a casual, Alan Clarkish naturalism. For example, during the 'play-within-a-play', the actors bicker at each other like teenagers stuck in a GCSE English lesson ,squabbling about whether kissing each other is 'gay' or not. Similarly, the actors often slip out of the prose to make asides to each other "don't fuckin' look at me like that mate" or "I'll fuckin' av' you". This, coupled with the nasal Scouser accent, gives Shakespeare's wordy tangled prose a vaguely Brechtian artificiality (something highlighted when the fire exit is thrown open and Hamlet briefly walks out onto a humid Hammersmith street).
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| You have to fight the urge to shout out "Get 'im Hamlet!" |
Adam Lawrence's Hamlet is a sweatily intense nutter, muscles bulging from within a wifebeater and hair loosely slicked back over his head. Lawrence's approach is to play up the weird discontinuity between the depressive/suicidal soliloquys and the hyper-masculine alpha posturing. The sense that Hamlet is playing a role is a vital component of the play, Lawrence's disconnect between his actions and his internal monologue making him seem vulnerable and sympathetic even as he puts his knee through a someone's jaw. Textually Hamlet is pretending to be mad, but Lawrence's Hamlet plays up actual madness - the actor maniacally pacing about the stage with bulging eyes, compulsively slicking back his hair and, at one point, bursting randomly into a snatch of Joy Division's Transmission.
Any Shakespeare adaptation that manages to sneak in Joy Division is okay in my book, but Ford's Hamlet impresses throughout. It's not perfect mind you, Gertrude is relegated to staring in mild consternation and I was never quite sure what Ophelia was supposed to be doing in the prison, but then the focus of this Hamlet is masculinity and violence. So, while unfortunate, it's at least understandable why femininity has been sidelined here.
This could so easily have been an enormous embarrassment: a bunch of high-falutin' public school boys playing at proletariat aggression, but Ford's production emanates an oppressive sense of menace that succeeds in not only breathing life into dusty prose but actually making it feel unpredictable. Considering that Hamlet is a play everyone knows inside and out that's no small achievement - well worth checking out.
Hamlet is at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith:
Wednesday 28 May to Saturday 21 June at 7.30pm
Sunday 22 June at 5.00pm
TICKETS: £16 (£14 concs.)
Sunday 22 June at 5.00pm
TICKETS: £16 (£14 concs.)
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
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Prison is a fascinating place in cinema. Good directors use it as a microcosm - a hermetically sealed bottle where frustrations, resentments and violence that bubble under the society's surface come to the forth, usually in a torrent of swearing and brutality. My genre favourites are Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped, Hector Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman and Alan Clarke's Scum - all of which are politically and psychologically incisive. It's the last of these that Starred Up most resembles: both films are gritty, foul-mouthed and vicious.
We follow the young Eric (Jack O'Connell) as he's "starred up", the slang term for a prisoner moved from a young offenders institution to regular prison. Eric is not a very nice man. He's Alexander DeLarge crossed with Charles Bronson; capable of dishing out and receiving beatings, taking a psychotically masochistic pleasure in causing as much havoc as he can. Almost from the moment he's placed in his cell he lashes out, fracturing another inmates skull, fighting off body-armoured prison guards and threatening to chew off a guard's testicles. It's difficult to say he's a "hero" (or even an antihero really) we don't like him, we don't want to see him succeed and we certainly don't want to see him released or escape.
Eric is a blunt instrument but he's at least honest about it. Less so are the complex tangle of interpersonal relationships between guards and inmates - his arrival throwing a wrench into the smoothly running machine of low-level drug-dealing, casual violence and entrenched social hierarchies. Prime among his difficulties is that he's incarcerated on the same wing as his Dad, Neville (Ben Mendelsohn). Though Neville's been in prison for most of Eric's life the two are clearly cut from the same cloth - both men quick to raise their fists. Further dramatic fuel is added by the intervention of Oliver (Rupert Friend), an anger management counsellor who runs a group for violent offenders. Oliver is a bit of a puzzle, mixing a weird class guilt with an affinity with these men - the only non-inmate who genuinely seems to care about rehabilitation.
I visit prisons in a professional capacity and though this obviously don't give me any insight into what it's like to live there - I can at least say that McKenzie captures the dreary Victorian institutional squalor perfectly. Paint peels from the walls, the bars shabbily wear their 11th coat of paint since they were installed, the markings on the floors bear the scuff-marks of ten thousand miserably plodding prison-issue shoes. You can almost smell the disinfectant (with the faintest whiff of piss and vomit underneath) that characterises life at her Majesty's pleasure. Perhaps it's not really surprising that the location looks so realistically downbeat - the film was shot in the disused Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast - once known as "Europe's Alcatraz".
But you can't just shoot inside a prison and expect the location to do all the heavy lifting. McKenzie knows this, exploring the space with an immaculately minimalist style, the most efficient weapons in his arsenal long tracking shots along the cell block and repeated closeups of eyes glaring through slats in the doors. This precise and controlled style reflects the carefully ordered institutional world these men live in. The repeated close-ups induce a state of claustrophobia - subtly giving the audience a taste of what it's like to be stuck in a place like this.
The excellent sound design also contributes, the omnipresent sounds of metal doors slamming shut, burbling conversation, faint abuse and alarms ringing almost down the corridor. It was so expertly done that in an early scene I thought one of the alarms we were hearing was the cinema fire alarm going off. The violence also has a visceral *thwak* to the blows - when these men hit each other you hear the brittle crack of bones breaking and flesh thudding against the floor.
Technically its quite marvellous, as are practically all the performances, particularly O'Connell in the lead role. So what does all this add up to? Writer Jonathan Asser (who I gather the counsellor character is a dramatised version of) clearly has something to say about the Her Majesty's Prison Service, but, amidst the beatings, blood and broken bones, what is it?
Prior to Eric's arrival in the prison, life seems to exist in a state of uneasy peace. The warden conspiring with high-status inmates to get drugs into the prison, thus allowing a miniature gangland to develop. The pecking order this creates means everyone knows their place, so life goes on under a cycle of addiction, fear and respect. Eric's arrival throws everyone for a loop - he doesn't respect any of this, battling against every entrenched power structure he encounters - be it the prison itself or the organised crime within it. Like a seed introduced to a saturated solution his behaviour crystallises the hidden violence that keeps the whole system going.
Underneath all this lies the question as to whether prison should be a place for punishment or rehabilitation - the film firmly coming down on the side of rehabilitation, or at bare minimum behavioural management. What Starred Up ultimately concludes is that the prison system is institutionally violent and that the behaviour of the inmates is symptomatic of the cruelty of the system they find themselves inside. While there's a few good eggs within the ranks of the guards, they primarily exist to torment the prisoners - even to murder them if they cause a big enough stink.
It's a pretty cynical outlook, though one with undeniable roots in reality. You only have to look at how many suspicious deaths in police custody are ruled as suicides to realise how scarily easy it would be for guards to 'arrange' for them to happen. In the cinema I was in this clearly touched a nerve; one woman spontaneously yelling out "fuck the system!" during a particularly unpleasant sequence.
Noble though revealing this is there's an uneasy sensationalism to the film. Though obviously intended to condemn the violence is both cathartic and brutally satisfying to watch. Like Romans watching gladiators go at it we eagerly await the next clash of bone and muscle, taking homoerotic pleasure in watching "well 'ard" men go at each other. These opposing forced make Starred Up is a difficult film to classify, ultimately lying somewhere between socially conscious messaging and lurid exploitation - but though it often falters this is never less than compelling, smart cinema.
★★★★
Starred Up is on general release from March 21st
Friday, February 1, 2013
Friday, February 1, 2013
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Executing a human being is barbarism. Societies that practise capital punishment are giving in to their worst impulses: justice as revenge, pleasure through cruelty and simple, straightforward blood lust. Thankfully the political climate worldwide appears to be heading towards abolition of the death penalty, but when 35 states in the US still have capital punishment on their statutes it’s clear that there’s still a long way to go. Last night’s event at Vibe Bar showcases a series of short films created to crank up the political pressure, with the aim of adding a powerful voice to the debate.
‘One For Ten’ refers to the fact that for every ten people executed in the US, one person sentenced to death has been completely exonerated. The execution of an innocent person by the state has been the instigating factor in a number of countries abolishing the death penalty. The abolition of capital punishment in the UK came about as partly as a result of one of these miscarriages of justice. In 1949, Timothy Evans, 25 was accused of murdering his wife and daughter in 10 Rillington Place. He was convicted on the evidence of his neighbour and sentenced to death by hanging, a sentence carried out on 9th March 1950. The neighbour that gave evidence against him was John Christie, one of England’s most notorious serial killers. Christie admitted killing Timothy Evan’s wife, but of course by then it was too late for poor Timothy Evans who was by then mouldering in the dirt under Pentonville Prison.
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| Amador by Nick Reynolds. A death mask of an executed inmate. |
It’s a nightmare to imagine yourself convicted of a crime that you didn’t commit, being marched towards the gallows, the electric chair or the gas chamber knowing not only that you’re an innocent man, but that the real killer still walks free. Trials can turn on the flimsiest of reasons; you may have a terrible defence counsel, the prosecution may have a compellingly charismatic expert witness or in your own nervousness you may inadvertently incriminate yourself in the witness box. All these things have happened to people much like you or I.
The fact that it’s so easy to identify with wrongly convicted people sentenced to death is what makes ‘One For Ten’ so compelling. This is the launch of a project, and upon completion the film-makers will travel around the US in a campervan that’s been converted into a mobile editing suite. They’ll meet ten exonerees, film their stories, edit the video and upload it overnight, allowing for an unusually fluid and responsive kind of film-making.
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| 405 and Counting by Carrie Reichardt |
We saw a preview of what these short films will be like at Vibe Bar last night. In 1991 Ray Krone was convicted of the rape and murder of a bartender in Phoenix, Arizona. Although he protested his innocence, an expert testified that the bite marks on the body couldn’t possibly have been made by anyone else. With confident testimony like this in front of them the jury didn’t hesitate in handing down a guilty verdict, and Ray was sentenced to death.
Ten years pass.
In 2002, the evidence was re-examined, and DNA testing on the blood and saliva found on the victim excluded Krone as the source matching a convicted sex offender living close to the bar at the time. Krone’s story is horrifying, all the more so for how pleasant, nice and want of a better word, 'normal' he is. You can sense the anger behind his words, but it’s measured, calm and controlled. He’s the model subject for a documentary like this.
His story is so compelling that it’s a bit of shame that the video is a bit over-produced, with a flashing graphics, pointless shots of Ray feeding a horse or playing darts and a constant, overbearing guitar soundtrack over the top. The bright spot is a brilliant bit of narration by Danny Glover, but the visual overload distracts from the subject. Aesthetically, the tone is unpleasantly close to something like 'CSI', I found myself wishing they’d just pointed the camera at Krone and let him speak.
The major point of comparison is Werner Herzog’s ‘Into the Abyss’. This documentary is primarily a series of conversations between Herzog, death row inmates, prison workers and relatives of the condemned. Herzog has always been an opponent of capital punishment, but this isn’t a preachy documentary. His subject, Michael Perry, committed a reprehensible and pointless crime; murdering a woman so he could joyride in her car. Although he denies the crime, the weight of evidence stacked against him is considerable his conviction is secure. Herzog’s choice to focus on an unsympathetic, guilty man is, I believe, why ‘Into the Abyss’ makes a stronger and more compelling argument than ‘One For Ten’.
By interviewing the exonerated, ‘One For Ten’ sets up an unnecessary division between the innocent and the guilty on death row. All executions, whether carried out on the innocent and guilty, and no matter what crimes the person may have committed, are equally ethically reprehensible. After all, in one respect interviewing people exonerated of their crimes proves that the system works. In these instances innocent people weren't executed. I will grant that purely from the point of view of changing people’s opinions on the death penalty, concentrating on the innocent is more emotive, but I think you make a stronger and more honest argument by defending those who are least sympathetic.
In the excellent art exhibition that supports this cause there was one piece that particularly stood out to me. In a corner there are a number of letters from prisoners on death row. They are quite moving, except one which reads “I didn't like homosexuals and killed him. ... I feel sorry for the victim's family. Have no feelings for him". This it made me angry, and for a microsecond I wondered if maybe this despicable person should be executed. Would the world really be a worse place without him in it? But the very fact that cases like these arouse those retributive feelings in me makes them better examples than exonerees. We have to look beyond crude impulses towards retribution and examine our own ethical framework. While I’m sure ‘One For Ten’ agree that the death penalty is universally wrong in all instances, by only using exonerees to make their argument they give a foothold to the counter-argument that execution would be justifiable if the conviction is sound beyond all doubt.
Having said that, I wholeheartedly support this campaign and the speakers last night were convincing in both their enthusiasm and their intelligence. My favourite speaker was Selma James, who spoke with furious passion about creating a society that wants to care, rather than kill. It was her speech that articulated what I think the overarching problems with the state having direct powers of life and death over those in its care are. The state committing violence and murder against its own citizens in the guise of justice helps implant the ethos that murder is acceptable deep under the society's skin.
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| Ceramic Slipped Cast Spray Cans by Carrie Reichardt |
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| Selma James speaking. |
The abolition of the death penalty in the US would not only save men like Ray Krone from the electric chair, gas chamber or lethal injection, it'd demonstrate that the state believes in the power of rehabilitation, of the idea of prison as a corrective rather than punitive measure. For those reasons and many others, this campaign deserves to make an impact in the argument.
You can donate to the project here: http://www.indiegogo.com/supportoneforten?c=home
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