The Word House, Gallery Cafe
The Word House has returned for its second night of eclectic rhymes and melodic lines, organic beers and hearty cheers. Having launched in the summer to much acclaim, the Gallery Café's spoken word night had set its own standard, and expectations were high. Predictably enough, these expectations translated into another full house of eager Londoners, ready for pizza and poetry. And this is good news, as the event was part of Oxjam, and all proceeds go to charity.
So, having ensured I wouldn't get kettled at St. Paul's, I strolled in as the clock struck 19:34 and bartered with a member of staff for a bottle of beer. Without hesitation, the lights lowered, the music lowered, the audience lowered themselves onto seats, and the Word House began.
We were treated to a tickler of an opener by our host, Dan Simpson, with his sympathetic portrayal of the Orange Ghost - the most inexplicably unfortunate ghost in all of Pacman. I don't think most of us had previously considered the difficulties of the Orange Ghost. But now we know, and we won't forget.
On to the first act, one Christian Watson. Don't be fooled by the dishevelled attire and facial hair, for his words are as sharp as tuxedos. He shifted from fast-paced rapping rhymes to slow, considered reflections; his hands like weapons cutting the air. He shared thoughts on pessimistic projections for love and growing up and becoming a person, expressing an equal wonder at both the highs and lows of life, and balancing sincerity with self-effacement.
Then came the Open Mic slots. A real treat, these, where anyone has the opportunity to share their thoughts and words, providing you've got the guts. The audience have no need to be forgiving - no token applause here - as the open mic poets prove themselves to be more than capable amateur wordsmiths. We had south London caricatures, friendships and family, consumerism, jobs, and an array of views on contemporary sex. Sex and capitalism, sex and myths, post-sex emotion, sex and language metaphors. All very tasteful - mostly.
A short break and we're back on for John Berkavitch, the recently-returned-from-Cambodia poet with wry sense of humour and a political conscience. His act was punctuated with audience banter and one-line poems, and jokes at once clever and ironically obvious. His finest moment, a witty and thoughtful argument for difference; a good-natured and optimistic polemic against some of the political ills of recent years.
The final act was an exercise in exploring the natural melodies contained within words and sentences, a process of combining sentiments with syntax, and floating them on some kind of the calm aural ocean. This was Inua Ellams, with his diverse vocabulary managing to convey tragedy and mockery in ways rarely done so elegantly. He showed us that perhaps a three hour midnight walk south from the Thames need not be a cold, tired chore, but a stimulating social and architectural experiment - an appealing advert for nocturnal psychogeography, and about time too. Like those before him, he won the audience through the character that fused each poem together.
The mood is one more akin to a house party than a bar: chatting in the toilet queue; bumming cigarettes off friends of friends. The audience here have a character of their own, both mischievous and courteous. Many idiosyncrasies on display on this night of spoken word, and much for us to consider as we erupt into Bethnal Green after the show. The range of content and style is at once impressive and inspiring, encouraging us all to tap poems into our phones on the late night bus home.
Written by Adam Hutchings for On The Fringe
Hang of the Gaol, The Brockley Jack Studio Theatre
Smoke fills the air. Before us a dilapidated brick wall is barely visible through the mist, dank and impenetrable. Immediately, the audience is thrown head first into the unknown, the setting swarms around us and the actors emerge on to the stage like spectres through fog.
This, the burnt out ruins of Middenhurst Gaol, is the backdrop to the play – a set that is in fact rather basic once the smoke has cleared, though effective in its simplicity. Howard Barker’s play is a political-comedy, using an inquiry into the apparently malicious burning of a prison to satirise social order and question the purpose of jails and the true meaning of liberty. Corrupt and power hungry, the male characters are brimming with moral ambiguity as social hierarchy is challenged – Jardine, the inquisitor (Alan Thorpe), using somewhat unjust methods in his inquiry, Stagg, the home secretary (Julian Bird), abusing his governmental powers. Cooper (Adam Lewis), the prison warden, wore his twisted psychology in every line of his face, left staring into the audience like a Lucian Freud painting. Yet, it was the female characters that really stood out; their frank, open conversations and liberal language revealing an honesty the men fail to grasp in an otherwise male dominated world. However, there was a surprising amount of comedy in Barker’s script, most prominently from the two camp fire inspectors whose constant chiming of phrases often proved hilarious and were performed wonderfully by Darren Benedict and Sam Raffal.
As a whole, the performances were well nuanced, naturalistic and believable. Hang of the Gaol was premiered by the RSC in 1978 – this production reignited an authentic look and feel of the era, replicating the distressed political mood. Doug Rollins’s direction was clear in its portrayal of a narrative filled with political intrigue and pessimism. Though long, the play was mostly gripping thanks to the well-balanced cast performances.
Written by Ed Nightingale for On The Fringe
The Rain That Washes, The Chicken Shed Theatre
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The Rain That Washes recounts a story of change of government, suppression and racism that would be considered too violent too far-fetched and too brutal for the stage, if it were fiction. History books only go so far in portraying the tumultuous rollercoaster ride that millions of Zimbabweans have endured in its short history. Told by one man in the tense closed world of the theatre, the story has twice the impact. Ashley Maynard stands before the audience to tell Chritopher Maphosa’s amazing memories - growing up in an apartheid-controlled South Africa and then as part of the revolutionary force trying to overthrow the white supremacist regime of Ian Smith in a collapsing Rhodesia, a British colony. As the struggle becomes more political and the response more repressive, Maphosa is sent to Bulgaria to be educated – and returns to quite a different country to the one he left behind. Maynard acts not only the character of the protagonist but also his allies, Mugabe’s brutal 5th Brigade, and Christopher’s favourite, gentle uncle. His remarkable representation of each bring them to life before your eyes – and mocks them when it is needed. Christopher finally escapes the ultimate brutalization of his cause, avoiding a mission so chilling it cannot be recounted outside the theatre without horror. The resultant drama is electric and huge credit is due to the writer Dave Carey who realises these memories and above all to the courage of director Kieran Fay who dared to put it on in the first place. The Rain That Washes celebrates the optimism, humour and determination of Zimbabwe’s people, while marking the struggles that millions of people just like Christopher have endured and remember. Amusing and witty one moment, brutal and chilling the next, this play is an admirable staging of the telling of one man’s life that represents the journey of millions, the story of a country and the determination of the human spirit. Written by Caiti Grove for On The Fringe |
Thick, New Diorama Theatre
Rudolph is Thick in a way that makes intelligence seem crass, convoluted and cold.
Thick. Think about that word, and think about its opposite. Thin. Insubstantial. Fragile. Short-lived. A veneer. A film. A surface.
TV ads that declare “where once there was pain, there's financial gain”. A priest who says anyone who's witnessed a miracle must be “away with the fairies”. A saleswoman who snidely patronises her customer until he tells her he has a lot of money. Opportunists. Hypocrites. These are the thin people. These are the people in Rudolph's world.
Rudolph, by contrast, is simple, sincere and constant in his intentions. All he wants to do is get on. “To make the best of the hand he's been dealt”, as his gentle father might say. But Rudolph is hampered in his pursuit by almost everyone he meets.
People think Rudolph is stupid because Rudolph was dropped on his head when he was a baby. They – lazy, hungry for easy answers - are content to dismiss everything he does as being due to a single bad card in his hand.
'Thick' is a collage of moments from Rudolph's life, loosely structured around a trip to his mother's funeral. It is a dream of the world as it is through the eyes of a man made alien to it. That Rudolph is mainly cast aside because of the power of his own insight is a condemnation of that world. His simple questions undermine ill-considered prejudices and satirise commonplace absurdities wherever he goes. Socrates would have probably liked him for a student.
“Why doesn't momma like people who are different shades of brown?” “God must have got lost because momma found him.” “We need assholes because without them you couldn't poo.” “It's good to accept your mistake because it's yours.”
It's in these lines - which so easily could have slipped from the pages of a self-help book, and in transcription die like the saccharine pronouncement on a Quote of the Day calender on a day when you're actually feeling pain – that the play teases magic from the air.
Perhaps it's because Rick Bland – remarkable as Rudolph – finds so much sardonic humour in his character, and is so richly heathen in his sensibilities: there are some cacklingly wicked jokes about religion, including a cameo from Pope Jean Paul II, funny enough to make the reference to Bland's appearance in Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee's 'Jerry Springer: The Opera' on the play's posters highly apt.
For me, there was a single scene that I'm sure will stand in memory. It'll remain there, like the spine of a well-loved book standing cracked on the shelf; an icon for the small, shifting, quietly touching way in which this play has contributed to my experience.
Returning from his mother's funeral, Rudolph takes a cab. The scene follows from a downbeat moment in which he wonders how life might have differed had he never been dropped, and the cab driver, as if in a nod to this possible counterfactual history, is played by the same actor who portrays Rudolph's father. As they speak, the driver listens.
That's it. They tell some jokes and just about get past small talk, and nothing much happens, and yet for the first time, Rudolph's words are taken, they are not dismissed or treated ironically, but considered, by someone who knows nothing of his background, someone who can't box Rudolph up and dismiss him, someone trying to make sense of what he is hearing and why another person might be saying it.
In this moment, two people meet. Easy answers, thin concepts and ironic posturing are absent, and two thick men do nothing but talk and listen. In a shallow world, something meaningful finally happens. Thick or thin. Which seems a better synonym for stupid?
Written by James Munroe for On The Fringe
‘night, Mother, Old Red Lion Theatre
On the one hand, there's Camus, telling us that “there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”; on the other, as far as John Updike is concerned “suicide seemed to me almost an experience that no writer should attempt to describe.” A dilemma. Art, surely, should concern itself with the most important of problems, but is it always equipped to do so?
' 'night, Mother', a play by Marsha Norman, is one attempt to describe and dramatise a suicide. At the play's outset Jessie (Sadie Shimmin) announces to her Mama (Pat Starr), with a simple and alarmingly hollow frankness, that by the end of the evening she will be dead. The play's first success is that it manages this opening entirely without histrionics, indeed, it is the blandness of Jessie's manner - her frank disavowal of any desire to live, and her remorseless determination to carry out her intention - that provides the initial, unsettling chill.
Sadly, this is also where the play begins to run into the initial difficulty. The tone of realism the play adopts means it is necessarily obligated to depict the emptiness of Jessie's undesired life and exhausted words; thus ' 'night, Mother' becomes a drama about a life that, outwardly, lacks that very quality (until, of course, it reaches its inevitable conclusion). And of course, Jessie's inner life is as thunderous, agonising and heartbreaking as can ever be experienced, but the difficulty for the play is that it restricts itself to exploring the territory of this psyche entirely from the outside, and whilst this allows us to empathise with Jessie's stricken, helpless Mama, it also feels at times like we are frustratingly remote from Jessie herself, without any more insight than can be gained by any despairing observer of depression, an illness the most deadly feature of which is that it is impenetrable.
Realism is a questionable aspiration for a work of art. Better, perhaps, to aim at the interesting, the unusual, the surreal, the iconic. The realism here is undermined, too, by the performances. Whilst both actresses do a formidable job with difficult roles, they both seem to be impersonating rather than inhabiting their characters – especially Sadie Shimmin, as Jessie, whose English accent undermines her attempt to capture the musical voice of the American South, leaving her words sound foreign or unnatural, homesick at points when it is crucial that they be domestic and familiar – and though this is not in itself automatically a problem, it does become one, for, given that these characters are for the most part without eccentricity, and that the style in which they are portrayed is intended to be naturalistic, it is essential that at no point do we think of them as being acted, lest the intensity that stems from the play's intimate, domestic, personal tone be diminished.
There is no doubt that this play is shocking and affecting (but with its theme, how could it not be?), what leaves me more ambivalent is the sense that I'm not sure if I learned anything; if the tragedy of the play's subject – that most (only?) important philosophical problem – was given any new shape in my mind. I doubt that it was, but I don't regret the attempt.
Written by James Munroe for On The Fringe
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, Upstairs at the Gatehouse
William Shakespeare bequeathed a lot to the world. Will's own final testament may have been rather prosaic in its concerns – specifying most memorably that his wife should receive “the second best bed” - but it's well known that his contemporaries saw the measure of his legacy in strikingly prophetic terms, Ben Jonson famously telling Shakespeare's very first posthumous readers that he was “for all time”. This old cliché is among the truest, and one of the pleasures of Shakespeare is seeing how each contemporary production discovers itself in his words; his greatest bequest is his adaptability.
This adaptation of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' sees the action inexplicably taking place in a Geisha-populated Japanese forest, a setting that provides simplicity of scenery and costuming that gives a kind of magical elegance to the all-female cast. It is also, like several other adaptive additions, underused or unexplained. One of the main obstructions to enjoyment in the initial part of the production is the music played incessantly throughout the opening scene, which mars the rhythm of the language and leaves no breathing room for some of the jokes, the punchlines of which need to fall into silence. A second wayward musical choice was to have the brilliantly heartbroken Hermia (hypnotically played) sing Amy Winehouse's 'Love is a Losing Game' when she reaches a point of utter dejection. It's an addition that feels completely intrusive and frankly opportunist, the interjection of pop lyrics here and in other places taking us out of the otherwise hypnotic metre and cadence of Will's words.
What the production brings out best are the playful allusions contained within the play that might today be called post-modern or self-referential. Helena's self-subjugating devotion has her crawling like a dog before her would-be lover, debasing herself before him in words that mock the kind of hyperbolic praise that is breathed so naturally from the mouths of Shakespeare's other lovers, Romeo and Juliet (it is thought that the two plays hail from a similar period in Will's career) but here sounds laughable. This shooting down of the grandiose is paralleled in the play-within-the-play which marks Midsummer Night's Dream's climax, in which Bottom and the hilariously played Peter Quince are careful to provide an endless succession of prefatory remarks and retrospective commentaries on their performance in order to draw attention to its artificiality, the self-important artists fearing they may be overpoweringly, dangerously dramatic in their production of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, which ends with a familiar lovers' double suicide.
I'll leave it to the author himself to summarise this adaptation of his work in words that describe each of the qualities it displays – “merry and tragical, tedious and brief” - thankfully, on this night, it was the positive pair that dominated.
Written by James Munroe for On The Fringe
The Chairs by Eugene Ionesco, Etcetera Theatre
So far as I can make out, Eugene Ionesco's approach to playwriting in 'The Chairs' seems to involve taking the failings of people and the failings of language and presenting these inadequacies as art. Taking a lurid stare at banality and tedium is of course so common an idea now it can be hard to even notice what an unusual thing it is. But choosing to take note of the ordinarily unremarkable, to celebrate the unexceptional, has not been the usual course in art or drama, not for the bulk of history anyway. Of course, there have always been objections to the artificial element in art – to the unreality of its characters and their experiences, which unfold with more intensity and extremity than almost anything ordinarily experienced in reality; as Hitchcock put it, “drama is life with the dull bits cut out” - and Ionesco was part of a twentieth-century trend towards something more commonplace. Although, paradoxically, the very hollowness of his characters and their crushingly familiar concerns actually has the effect of making them seem all-the-more bizarre.
So what we have in 'The Chairs' are the inarticulate mutterings of two rather unremarkable old people. A married couple in a possibly post-apocalyptic world making veiled but largely un-intriguing allusions to their history which indicate just how intimate they have become in their seventy-five year union, over the course of which they seem to have come to know one another by heart, a notion emphasised by the fact that the Old Man tells many of his stories whilst stamping his feet in rhythm, as if utilising a mnemonic to summon up memories learned by rote. However this also brings up the teasing suggestion that these anecdotes may have in actuality been fictionalised in the process of telling them, so not only are these characters relatively uninteresting, but the stories they tell about themselves may not even be true.
Susan Sontag has pointed out the tension in Ionesco's writing between tedium and the 'poetry of cliché'; in this performance, the former definitely wins out. The characters' complaints are instantly forgettable, they don't enter the mind with any force. The old couple voice generic concerns; rather than embodying the universal in a telling detail, they simply spell out their boredom and regret in so many words, leaving all on the surface, leaving nothing but surface. As the old couple lay out the eponymous chairs for a group of imaginary guests, whom they happily talk to, they use their conversations with these spectral figures as an outlet for their frustrated desires; they flirt with them, pay them complements, receive complements from them. The acting here is effective, the bare stage never feeling underpopulated, but the whole exercise - this wholesale presentation of life's dull bits – nonetheless amounts to what at worst feels like a waste of time.
Ionesco wanted to crown these banalities with a spectacular finale, complete with streamers, whoops and cheers, as might befit the conclusion of a reality show - possibly in order to bring weight to the earlier occurrences. If this particular performance had a virtue, it was that it avoided such unjustified histrionics. Instead it simply faded into darkness and out of memory, a single virtue I'll grant this inane attempt to make art out of emptiness.
Written by James Munroe for On The Fringe
Genevieve Swallow is Sharing, Etcetera Theatre
It's Nine O'clock in the Etcetera Theatre, and a jolly crowd is awaiting Genevieve Swallow's one-woman show. She comes out and becomes an interviewee, talking timidly to a ghostly, pre-recorded landlady. It's clever and observant – selling ourselves by any means possible is a part of life, is it not?
She then introduces the show. It's all about house-sharing, a subject with which she has a wealth of experience. So if Genevieve is such a house-sharing expert, perhaps the best way to judge her is as a potential housemate?
Well she's not that tidy but doesn't have too much stuff – a couple of chairs and a table furnish the stage, random things here and there, a plate of cold sausages and beans. She changes clothes fairly frequently and jumps into strange characters: the sexually adventurous old landlady; the cool East London student; the over-excited girl who's finally moving in with the boyfriend (and his friend); the one who only likes living on hills; and the stressed out, good-natured housemate who just wishes everyone would pitch in, do their bit and not steal her Pepperami.
These characters show great variety and Genevieve truly becomes them. When living with Genevieve you may find yourself conversing with a member of a cult or someone who's collecting stool samples for science experiments, but they'll keep you entertained for as long as they're around. In between the little sketches, Genevieve ties the show together with her easy, personable stage-presence. She is not too serious, never phased, even re-thinking her act as she chats to the audience. And she's even a generous soul, giving a bag of presents to one audience member who's house-sharing compatibility was tested. Presents are a clear winner in my book for any potential housemate.
Genevieve does seem quite the expert in this particular field and provides a show which is enjoyable in it's very ability to relate to almost everyone. A penis drawn on the cleaning rota?? It's like she's being spying on our house! The tribulations of house-sharing are nothing if not universal, but when considered through a particular lens, they're also extremely funny.
By the end of the show Genevieve is reflecting on moving on to the other side of the rent exchange procedure, for she has now become the dreaded Landlady, and is in need of tenants. So why am I being so nice in this review? Well, because I'm looking for a place to live, of course, and Genevieve, despite having mild OCD, is a landlady who finds it hard to demand rent – perfect!
Written by Adam Hutchings for On The Fringe
Jo Romero: Touched For The Very First Time, The Camden Head
By means both calculated and incidental, Jo Romero at once insulates herself against criticism and at the same time leaves herself starkly open to it. On the one hand, with a savage, embittered attack on the author of a cruel rejection email proffered in response to Jo's submission of a play to a small theatre, she warns the critic against her impressive wrath. On the other, her act is so frankly personal, so devotedly autobiographical, that passing judgement on it as performance feels uncomfortably close to passing judgment on her life itself. Yet this, in getting up on stage, is what she is inviting.
How close, I wonder, is Jo Romero to Jo Romero? Is 'touched for the very first time' an act of confession, or mostly just an act? It's not possible to tell from her delivery alone, which is utterly convincing. She tells the story of her life with conviction: alarming tales of alcohol and drug addiction since the age of fifteen, the bittersweet consequences of her recent sobriety, the sexual competition she now finds herself engaged in with younger, more confident, more substantially plastic women (Jo is considering a cosmetic amendment of her own in a bid to up her chances at finding men: a boob job, only these ones will be on her back, making her doubly huggable) and her struggle to find a career after years of fogged out demi-living.
Romero's delivery is often punctuated by intense, contortionist posturing – she mimes the caricatures she conjures with such wholehearted lunacy it's hard not to laugh even when it occurs to you that she's used essentially the same voice and manner for everyone from her sanctimonious yoga-going friend to the preening 'saleswomen' she works with in her day-job as a promoter of Gilette razors and Twinings teabags to the generic hostess she conjures for the purposes of a rant about the trials of attending dinner parties sober. In this act, no point goes un-illustrated.
With her intense eccentric persona, her standup is very much character-driven, meaning the degree to which she wins laugh will in large part depend upon the extent to which the audience can relate to her life-story. Indeed, she often attempts to measure this by asking for audience responses to supposedly common experiences. 'You know those times when you wake up in the morning next to someone you don't recognise in the slightest?' Silence in the room.
It's in these moments that Romero plays to the cliches of her experience. When she passed herself off as the former blind-drunk, sexually unstable, one-night standing mess of a woman she is now overcoming, she fails to do herself justice, both in that she slaps away the subtleties of her back-story - and so in a sense demeans her experience, depriving us of some comic insight she might be well-placed to offer - and in that there is a heard-it-all-before quality to these gags, which means they fall short of the hilarity she is well capable of providing.
However, hilarity is here to be had, especially in the spectacular finale. What can be said about it other than it left this audience member feeling like he was being seduced by Jo Romero-channelling-Julia Davis dancing with more aggressive crassness than a lads' mag editor leers after in the girls at his photo-shoots? It's worth it for that alone. Probably.
Written by James Munroe for On The Fringe
Luke Toulson: Laid Back Grouch, The Camden Head
Luke Toulson: Laid Back Grouch, is an apt name for this show which premiered to a packed and roasting Camden Head last night. Toulson is man who is both laid back in character and in stature. His laid back approach was reflected in his routine, which was largely read off a piece of annotated paper and at times confused and a bit bumbling. He is laid back in stature because he somehow manages to stand with a 45 degree backwards tilt, a physical feat that, at times, distracted me from his routine.
Stature and disorganisation aside, Toulson managed to stumble his way through a routine that had some material of real quality in it. He is a master of short and punchy narratives and possesses a quick and intelligent wit. He managed to get just the right balance between pre-prepared material, improv and audience interaction, which each receiving sufficient attention.
He steered away from lewd humour (save two jokes, both unsuitable for print) in favour of more family based material. This is not to say his show is family friendly and whatever you do, don’t bring your 9 year old to see it. but rather much of the narrative revolved around his two young children and their antics together. Such stories were both delightful and endearing.
Despite confessing to rustling up some of his material on a taxi way to the show, Toulson manages to deliver an everyman’s routine, with flailing limbs aplenty. There are jokes in there to please any demographic so if you want a guaranteed laugh, check out this show.
Written by Olivia Furber for On The Fringe
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