Written for Culture Wars
Ask a British actor about their first experience of theatre and expect tales of wide-eyed wonder and pantomime dames. Given such formulaic frivolity, how refreshing to find children’s theatre so freeform, so sumptuously continental as Speeltheater’s Perô or the Mysteries of the Night at the Unicorn Theatre.
Based in Holland, Speeltheater (literally Theatre Game) have been making children’s theatre for over 30 years, colliding puppetry, music and dance in playful performance. No surprise, then, that Perô, Guus Ponsioen’s charming adaptation of Michel Tournier’s Pierrot ou Les Secrets de la Nuit, is a skilful balance of delicate storytelling and broad tomfoolery.
Using doll-like puppets, two performers (Inez de Bruijn and Tim Velraeds) enact a commedia dell’arte love triangle between baker Perô, his sweetheart Columbina and the lusty Paletino. It is essentially a touching, dainty fable about the attraction of opposites. Living in identical neighbouring houses, flour-coated Perô and spotless Columbina lead opposite lives of whiteness – he bakes nocturnally, she washes clothes by day. The explosion of noise and colour that arrives with Paletino the painter is enough to entrance Columbina. Their whirlwind marriage and elopement is enough to break Perô’s heart forcing him to close up shop due to lovesickness.
As the story is so quaintly predictable and its puppets more demonstrative than emotive, we do not find ourselves caught up in its narrative. Instead we are whisked into the world of the performance itself, played out with fervour and playground flirtation between the gently ghoulish de Bruijn and Velraeds, as they side with characters and vie for our attention.
Most enchanting, however, is the rich totality of the design. Two gorgeous dolls’ houses, outlined with a softly macabre Tim Burton quality, contain an array of tiny surprises, from working washing machines to chimneys spilling wisps of smoke upwards. Nor are Speeltheater afraid to take on large-scale theatricality: an entire fold-out countryside transforms through the seasons until Columbina, returning to Perô, finally succumbs to a snowy wilderness.
There are hints of classical epic theatre at play here as well, with Annemarie Haas and a delightfully melancholic Ponsioen overseeing proceedings as the celestial bodies, offering up an opulent musical score making Perô as pleasing on the ear as the eye.
With its warmth and passion, Perô is the theatrical equivalent of a sun-soaked, gelato-filled Mediterranean family holiday.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Review: Unfinished Realities, Hannah Barry Gallery
Written for Culture Wars
Welsh-German collaborators Awst & Walther are clearly concerned for humanity. Unfinished Realities, their first solo-exhibition in London, is an exploration of potential and consequences. Setting the material in conflict with the human, it presents oppositional reactions towards our role in the world, at once celebrating and berating our impulse of exploration and enquiry. Combining installation and performance, it is a densely complex work that struggles to fully engage its audience.
On entering the sparse warehouse of the Hannah Barry gallery one is confronted by Temptation: an apple and a grenade on a single plinth, both glistering in gold. Seductive and celebratory, the one seems the culmination of the other, mapping out the history of human sin. Inside, a bell made of ice is illuminated, weighty and perilous, above a heavy-set ashtray-like vessel collecting its drips. Dramatic in its beauty, I’ll Be Your Mirror, stands as warning and accusation about our gradual destruction of the world.
Nothing, however, is merely as it seems. Each piece holds unnoticed potential that only becomes apparent once Awst & Walther interact with their works. The apple and grenade of Temptation are gold-plated plaster. The dark-grey basin – like the barrier over which we have stepped – is not the solid we expect, but rather a semi-fluid wobble of gelatine.
Over ninety minutes, the pair carve up a bisected rectangle with bell and basin acting as centre circle. Walther scrawls white chalky lines with the plaster grenade; Awst plucks feathers from her dress with which to mark her space. Using rods of frosted glass as tools, they tap, bang and prod at the ice and gelatine, testing – and slowly breaking – its limits. By turns, the artists resemble primitive beings, methodological scientists and the nymphs of the Narcissus myth.
The attraction here is in the process: from the sides, we will their destruction on. The final mess of unctuous matter – chaotic and irrevocably spoilt – is a hollow reward for which we are equally culpable.
Unfinished Realities is the sort of work that begs the question of being pretentious. While it is packed with enough conflicting substance to avoid the term, its minimalist and achingly slow style makes for a frustrating experience. The pair enact their demolition with ponderous deliberation and protracted curiosity, forgetting about the audience along the way; the diminishing numbers testifying to the long stretches of boredom.
While, by the end, they have hit their target, the event could do with shortening, tightening and defining. The rules by which they play are always unclear and their actions are dragged from neatly ritualistic to unduly repetitive.
Awst and Walther are clearly promising artists, but Unfinished Realities is too sluggishly self-indulgent to convert its strong vocabulary and firm message into something spectacular.
Welsh-German collaborators Awst & Walther are clearly concerned for humanity. Unfinished Realities, their first solo-exhibition in London, is an exploration of potential and consequences. Setting the material in conflict with the human, it presents oppositional reactions towards our role in the world, at once celebrating and berating our impulse of exploration and enquiry. Combining installation and performance, it is a densely complex work that struggles to fully engage its audience.
On entering the sparse warehouse of the Hannah Barry gallery one is confronted by Temptation: an apple and a grenade on a single plinth, both glistering in gold. Seductive and celebratory, the one seems the culmination of the other, mapping out the history of human sin. Inside, a bell made of ice is illuminated, weighty and perilous, above a heavy-set ashtray-like vessel collecting its drips. Dramatic in its beauty, I’ll Be Your Mirror, stands as warning and accusation about our gradual destruction of the world.
Nothing, however, is merely as it seems. Each piece holds unnoticed potential that only becomes apparent once Awst & Walther interact with their works. The apple and grenade of Temptation are gold-plated plaster. The dark-grey basin – like the barrier over which we have stepped – is not the solid we expect, but rather a semi-fluid wobble of gelatine.
Over ninety minutes, the pair carve up a bisected rectangle with bell and basin acting as centre circle. Walther scrawls white chalky lines with the plaster grenade; Awst plucks feathers from her dress with which to mark her space. Using rods of frosted glass as tools, they tap, bang and prod at the ice and gelatine, testing – and slowly breaking – its limits. By turns, the artists resemble primitive beings, methodological scientists and the nymphs of the Narcissus myth.
The attraction here is in the process: from the sides, we will their destruction on. The final mess of unctuous matter – chaotic and irrevocably spoilt – is a hollow reward for which we are equally culpable.
Unfinished Realities is the sort of work that begs the question of being pretentious. While it is packed with enough conflicting substance to avoid the term, its minimalist and achingly slow style makes for a frustrating experience. The pair enact their demolition with ponderous deliberation and protracted curiosity, forgetting about the audience along the way; the diminishing numbers testifying to the long stretches of boredom.
While, by the end, they have hit their target, the event could do with shortening, tightening and defining. The rules by which they play are always unclear and their actions are dragged from neatly ritualistic to unduly repetitive.
Awst and Walther are clearly promising artists, but Unfinished Realities is too sluggishly self-indulgent to convert its strong vocabulary and firm message into something spectacular.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Review: The Ethics of Progress, Southwark Playhouse
Written for Culture Wars
Quantum physics is a magnetic subject, at once attractive and dauntingly repellent. It promises answers and provokes headaches, throwing up counter-intuitive marvels and mysteries in the face of our everyday Newtonian understanding of the world. Unlimited Theatre’s The Ethics of Progress – a performance lecture delivered with likeable charm by Jon Spooner – neatly removes the fear-factor but fails to capture the astonishing topsy-turvy beauty of it all.
Spooner’s supposition – following a throwaway remark by his collaborator Professor Vlatko Verdal – is that quantum physics is not difficult stuff. In his hands, thanks to careful and patient elucidation, its principles straighten out into clarity. It works because Spooner, bouncing out onstage in a short-sleeved check shirt, is so obviously not an expert; he is one of us, an amateur enthusiast, empathetic to our struggle. He delivers delicate, jargon-free content accompanied by cutely illustrative projections.
Having steered us through the principles of superposition (whereby a particle can exist in two places simultaneously) and entanglement (whereby two distinct particles can exhibit identical properties), Spooner posits the possibility of teleportation with skilful precision, patience and, at times, flair.
Here, The Ethics of Progress turns its focus from the tiniest building blocks of our reality onto humanity, offering up conspiracy theories, epistemology, moral conundrums and questions of identity. Spooner’s concern, it becomes apparent, is not science but humanity’s response to and responsibility towards it. Technology happens, he says: “The thing about the future is, by the time it happens...it’s already too late.” What matters is our approach to that inevitable progress. A wheel, Spooner declares, is just a wheel, equally enabling ambulances and the transportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Technology can always be horribly convenient.
While Spooner has admirably grasped the art of explanation, his explanation never manages to satisfy as art. To do so, there must be something more. Consider Marilyn Monroe’s explanation of relativity to Albert Einstein in Terry Johnson’s Insignificance; or the wrangling of Werner Heinsenberg and Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Here there is more at stake than mere science, there is humanity in all its fragile fallibility.
Like musical comedy, a performance lecture must wholly succeed on two separate fronts simultaneously in complete synthesis, whereby both forms entangle to enrich one another. The Ethics of Progress succumbs to the pressures of its multiplicity, with neither element emerging enhanced from the collision.
As performance, The Ethics of Progress never interrogates its own form: it exists as script delivered in front of us, with the illusion of spontaneity. Spooner’s hovering over words as if carefully selecting them in the moment serves only to diminish liveness and genuine connection with his audience. The lack of risk becomes apparent in the unscripted post-show Q&A session. Here assured recital gives way to vulnerable struggle to explain, scientific truth mingles with guesswork and conjecture, fact and fiction collide. In exposing his own status as enthusiast playing expert with honesty, Spooner struggles woefully, watchably and wonderfully.
Without this risk, the self-assured lecture becomes solely educational, succeeding and failing according to the individual’s personal understanding and learning. If one is already familiar with the ideas presented, there’s little to gain. As lecture, The Ethics of Progress suffers from a preference of breadth to depth and an inclination to offer questions in place of possible answers. While individual topics and principles are explained with clarity, Spooner’s connections between them often blur.
With a topic as grand as theoretical physics, it all feels strangely lightweight. Sitting somewhere between Dave Gorman’s stand-up and the Royal Institute’s Christmas Lectures, The Ethics of Progress is illustrative and interesting without ever illuminating.
Quantum physics is a magnetic subject, at once attractive and dauntingly repellent. It promises answers and provokes headaches, throwing up counter-intuitive marvels and mysteries in the face of our everyday Newtonian understanding of the world. Unlimited Theatre’s The Ethics of Progress – a performance lecture delivered with likeable charm by Jon Spooner – neatly removes the fear-factor but fails to capture the astonishing topsy-turvy beauty of it all.
Spooner’s supposition – following a throwaway remark by his collaborator Professor Vlatko Verdal – is that quantum physics is not difficult stuff. In his hands, thanks to careful and patient elucidation, its principles straighten out into clarity. It works because Spooner, bouncing out onstage in a short-sleeved check shirt, is so obviously not an expert; he is one of us, an amateur enthusiast, empathetic to our struggle. He delivers delicate, jargon-free content accompanied by cutely illustrative projections.
Having steered us through the principles of superposition (whereby a particle can exist in two places simultaneously) and entanglement (whereby two distinct particles can exhibit identical properties), Spooner posits the possibility of teleportation with skilful precision, patience and, at times, flair.
Here, The Ethics of Progress turns its focus from the tiniest building blocks of our reality onto humanity, offering up conspiracy theories, epistemology, moral conundrums and questions of identity. Spooner’s concern, it becomes apparent, is not science but humanity’s response to and responsibility towards it. Technology happens, he says: “The thing about the future is, by the time it happens...it’s already too late.” What matters is our approach to that inevitable progress. A wheel, Spooner declares, is just a wheel, equally enabling ambulances and the transportation of Jews to Auschwitz. Technology can always be horribly convenient.
While Spooner has admirably grasped the art of explanation, his explanation never manages to satisfy as art. To do so, there must be something more. Consider Marilyn Monroe’s explanation of relativity to Albert Einstein in Terry Johnson’s Insignificance; or the wrangling of Werner Heinsenberg and Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Here there is more at stake than mere science, there is humanity in all its fragile fallibility.
Like musical comedy, a performance lecture must wholly succeed on two separate fronts simultaneously in complete synthesis, whereby both forms entangle to enrich one another. The Ethics of Progress succumbs to the pressures of its multiplicity, with neither element emerging enhanced from the collision.
As performance, The Ethics of Progress never interrogates its own form: it exists as script delivered in front of us, with the illusion of spontaneity. Spooner’s hovering over words as if carefully selecting them in the moment serves only to diminish liveness and genuine connection with his audience. The lack of risk becomes apparent in the unscripted post-show Q&A session. Here assured recital gives way to vulnerable struggle to explain, scientific truth mingles with guesswork and conjecture, fact and fiction collide. In exposing his own status as enthusiast playing expert with honesty, Spooner struggles woefully, watchably and wonderfully.
Without this risk, the self-assured lecture becomes solely educational, succeeding and failing according to the individual’s personal understanding and learning. If one is already familiar with the ideas presented, there’s little to gain. As lecture, The Ethics of Progress suffers from a preference of breadth to depth and an inclination to offer questions in place of possible answers. While individual topics and principles are explained with clarity, Spooner’s connections between them often blur.
With a topic as grand as theoretical physics, it all feels strangely lightweight. Sitting somewhere between Dave Gorman’s stand-up and the Royal Institute’s Christmas Lectures, The Ethics of Progress is illustrative and interesting without ever illuminating.
Review: Fight Face, Lyric Hammersmith
Written for Culture Wars
With its whirligig of characters swarming around an inner-city kebab shop like a horde of stray animals, Fight Face ends up as messy and unsubtle as the broken society it portrays. Its cacophony of uncivil urbanites seem so couched in casual stereotype that one wonders whether writer Sophie Woolley turned to anything more than Little Britain and the Daily Mail for research.
Like The Frontline, recently seen at the Globe, Fight Face follows in the tradition of Jim Cartwright’s Road, attempting to capture the essence of a community in picturing its individual inhabitants. However, where these offer oppositions, clashing the poignantly desperate with the humorous, Fight Face remains at one level; always trying too hard and coming up short.
Woolley’s script surrounds Real Taste, a fast-food outlet at the centre of the community collapsing under violence and arson. Behind its counter, unsuccessful romantic Jenghiz mimics his gun-toting, knife-wielding Hollywood heroes. Around him a collection of Poles and pole-dancers, pissheads and pets threaten one another, raise their fists and fight for territorial control, while community support officers, Mary and Charlie, bumble love-struck through their patrol like cheery ramblers in a National Park.
Woolley performs alongside David Rubin, physically mapping out each character with a broadly, cartoonish gestus, most of which lack detail, imagination or precision. As the pace of the piece swirls ever faster, eventually culminating in a chaotic fight scene between several characters, Woolley and Rubin lose control, characters blur and rules change. Increasingly, it grows to resemble a Beano style cartoon riot, where only disembodied fists and boots can be distinguished from a ball of dust.
Morgan Large’s set, however, is the perfect playground: a chipboard skateboard park, bordered and boarded up. In the middle, a thigh of sweaty kebab is impaled on a spike like the spoils of street warfare. Douglas O’Connell’s projections are best when they suggest location: his canopy of neon signs gets to the heart of the urban wasteland of morality. However, at times they become dramaturgically confused, as clip-art mingles with animation.
The main problem is the piece’s surtitling. Admirable though it is for accessibility, the overtly (and often immaturely) performative design of the text distracts, pre-empting gags, sapping empathy and drawing attention from lines delivered to lines missed or morphed.
There are a couple of nice ideas in Fight Face – the builder-philosophers overseeing the world, invisible in their reflective jackets, have potential – but it all feels like a work in progress. We’ve seen all of this before, bigger and with more bite.
With its whirligig of characters swarming around an inner-city kebab shop like a horde of stray animals, Fight Face ends up as messy and unsubtle as the broken society it portrays. Its cacophony of uncivil urbanites seem so couched in casual stereotype that one wonders whether writer Sophie Woolley turned to anything more than Little Britain and the Daily Mail for research.
Like The Frontline, recently seen at the Globe, Fight Face follows in the tradition of Jim Cartwright’s Road, attempting to capture the essence of a community in picturing its individual inhabitants. However, where these offer oppositions, clashing the poignantly desperate with the humorous, Fight Face remains at one level; always trying too hard and coming up short.
Woolley’s script surrounds Real Taste, a fast-food outlet at the centre of the community collapsing under violence and arson. Behind its counter, unsuccessful romantic Jenghiz mimics his gun-toting, knife-wielding Hollywood heroes. Around him a collection of Poles and pole-dancers, pissheads and pets threaten one another, raise their fists and fight for territorial control, while community support officers, Mary and Charlie, bumble love-struck through their patrol like cheery ramblers in a National Park.
Woolley performs alongside David Rubin, physically mapping out each character with a broadly, cartoonish gestus, most of which lack detail, imagination or precision. As the pace of the piece swirls ever faster, eventually culminating in a chaotic fight scene between several characters, Woolley and Rubin lose control, characters blur and rules change. Increasingly, it grows to resemble a Beano style cartoon riot, where only disembodied fists and boots can be distinguished from a ball of dust.
Morgan Large’s set, however, is the perfect playground: a chipboard skateboard park, bordered and boarded up. In the middle, a thigh of sweaty kebab is impaled on a spike like the spoils of street warfare. Douglas O’Connell’s projections are best when they suggest location: his canopy of neon signs gets to the heart of the urban wasteland of morality. However, at times they become dramaturgically confused, as clip-art mingles with animation.
The main problem is the piece’s surtitling. Admirable though it is for accessibility, the overtly (and often immaturely) performative design of the text distracts, pre-empting gags, sapping empathy and drawing attention from lines delivered to lines missed or morphed.
There are a couple of nice ideas in Fight Face – the builder-philosophers overseeing the world, invisible in their reflective jackets, have potential – but it all feels like a work in progress. We’ve seen all of this before, bigger and with more bite.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Review: Sons of York
Written for The Stage
In picturing England’s winter of discontent under James Callaghan, writer James Graham turns Doomsayer-in-Chief. With another unelected Labour prime minister facing an economic crisis, Sons of York is as pertinent as it is period. We are, as the placard says, all in this together.
As Hull freezes over, Jim (Barry Aird) moves his wife and son in with his father (William Maxwell). Charting the demise of Jim’s mother (Colette Kelly) alongside the looming general strike, Sons of York proves an engaging study of the family unit as micro-parliament within a tumultuous political landscape.
Graham has crafted a marvellous, if old-fashioned, script; drip-feeding us the plot and twisting the thumbscrews of tension with remarkable precision and rhythm. He demonstrates a good ear for a line and a gifted eye for an image – a grandfather air-freshening over his elderly wife’s incontinence, a teenage boy wrestling with towel and dignity to bath in the drawing room.
Its chief success is in the veracity of the family itself, as silences – comfortable and uncomfortable – collide with bickering, mockery and arguments. Under Wasserberg’s subtly skilful direction a talented cast excel: Maxwell, Aird and a superb Steven Webb offering adroit contrast between three generations.
With fewer sentimental flashbacks, a strict edit and an injection of pace, this illuminating play could become luminescent.
In picturing England’s winter of discontent under James Callaghan, writer James Graham turns Doomsayer-in-Chief. With another unelected Labour prime minister facing an economic crisis, Sons of York is as pertinent as it is period. We are, as the placard says, all in this together.
As Hull freezes over, Jim (Barry Aird) moves his wife and son in with his father (William Maxwell). Charting the demise of Jim’s mother (Colette Kelly) alongside the looming general strike, Sons of York proves an engaging study of the family unit as micro-parliament within a tumultuous political landscape.
Graham has crafted a marvellous, if old-fashioned, script; drip-feeding us the plot and twisting the thumbscrews of tension with remarkable precision and rhythm. He demonstrates a good ear for a line and a gifted eye for an image – a grandfather air-freshening over his elderly wife’s incontinence, a teenage boy wrestling with towel and dignity to bath in the drawing room.
Its chief success is in the veracity of the family itself, as silences – comfortable and uncomfortable – collide with bickering, mockery and arguments. Under Wasserberg’s subtly skilful direction a talented cast excel: Maxwell, Aird and a superb Steven Webb offering adroit contrast between three generations.
With fewer sentimental flashbacks, a strict edit and an injection of pace, this illuminating play could become luminescent.