Review: Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy, Barbican Silk Street Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

More than any other theatrical medium, puppetry has the ability to shatter the boundaries of possibility. A well-manipulated puppet can not only reflect humanity as acceptably as any actor, but also perform feats utterly beyond the human body. One need only look towards Blind Summit’s Low Life, Complicite’s Shun-kin or Improbable’s Shockheaded Peter to recognize puppetry’s knack for flicking from the mundane to the magical and its capacity to blend metaphor and reality as one.

Ronnie Burkett’s marionettes, however, are a different breed of puppet. Sure, they evoke humanity, but they never threaten to truly uncloak its inner-life; they reflect us without revealing a great deal about us. As such, they feel strangely old-fashioned, somehow constrained by their own peculiar limitations. Controlled by sixteen strings rather than the usual nine and operable with only one hand, Burkett’s marionettes are undoubtedly complex creatures. Yet the technical mastery involved in their construction and manipulation never transforms into wizardry. Indeed, in comparison to the eloquent, expressive puppetry around today, it is the clumsiness of the marionette that shines through.

Instead, Burkett’s puppets work best when still. The detail in their faces and physiques makes them blank canvases ripe for the projection of emotion and thought. Their empty eyes seem, at times, to well with tears; their starched cheeks to flicker with amusement. This subtle capturing of humanity is the asset by which Burkett’s marionettes become the puppet-world’s answer to Strasberg’s Group Theatre.

Strange then to see such formidably convincing actor-puppets paraded in the cruise-ship cabaret of Billy Twinkle (played by, and arguably interchangeable with, Burkett himself).

Twinkle is a disillusioned marionettiste reduced to overseeing a glitzy, gag-ridden circus of strings aboard an ocean liner. Visited on the brink of suicide by a bunny-eared glove puppet of his former mentor, Sid Diamond, Twinkle resolves to tell his life’s story in search of self-worth. Thus, we see the marionette Billy manipulating his own marionettes, growing gradually older, fatter and increasingly disillusioned, but never abandoning his artform.

The thing is that Billy Twinkle: Requiem for a Golden Boy looks and feels like an off-off-Broadway show as pastiched by The Simpsons. Burkett channel-hops between cartoon voices to conduct conversations with himself and litters a sweet story with camp asides. Perhaps this is intentional. It certainly fits with the puppet Twinkle’s dilemma between high art and lowly entertainment: whether t’is nobler to present puppet Shakespeare or striptease. Seen in such a light, Burkett’s piece appears to focus precisely on the limitations of his material co-stars. However, the amateurism and self-indulgence never quite confirms itself as deliberate.

In fact, the highlights of the evening are the self-contained moments of entertainment, each a routine in itself: the dancing bear on roller-skates, the recreational preacher complete with singing glove-puppet Jesus and, best of all, the hobbling pensioner exposing himself to reveal a pink balloon that swells in size.

Burkett’s battle has long been to restate puppetry as an art-form for adults. Here his tactics seem along the lines of South Park or Avenue Q, simply allowing them a crudeness at odds with their cutesy exteriors. The result leaves Burkett’s marionettes looking stuck in adolescence while puppetry elsewhere has grown up and flown the nest.

Review: The Hounding of David Oluwale, Hackney Empire

Written for Whats On Stage

On the 4th of May 1969, David Oluwale’s badly beaten body was heaved out of the River Aire. An immigrant from Lagos, Oluwale had spent the past twenty years as a Leeds resident, living homeless for the majority of that time.

Oladipo Agboluaje’s adaptation of Kester Aspden’s novel reimagines David’s life from the perspective of the internal enquiry that took place after his death. Inspector Perkins, cutely played by Ryan Early, pictures a man pursued ruthlessly by local police, constantly moved on and attacked for blood sport. We see Oluwale – his name mispronounced and misspelt –disintegrate in the midst of a society unable to see past the colour of his skin. Seeking a conviction for murder, Perkins is finally left to contend with a half justice as a verdict of assault is pronounced on his perpetrators.

Only towards its end does Agboluaje’s play admit even slightly of its own subjective bias. For ninety minutes, it tells its story convinced of its victims and its violators, discarding those elements that don’t fit its charges. Its final declaration of perspective, however, is too half-hearted to properly throw its previous events into doubt.

Nor does Agboluaje attempt to truly understand the society that casts Oluwale aside. His play reeks of liberal hindsight, presenting a racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-elitist Neanderthal of a community that sits in harsh conflict with the archetypal version of England that seduced Oluwale from his home country.

Whether right or wrong – and this depends entirely on the perspective from which you approach the work – Agboluaje’s over-empathetic position saps much of the drama and flattens the action.

The Hounding of David Oluwale might make good television. Here it appears repetitive and over-long: the stage-violence lacks real punch and the city of Leeds is consciously painted rather than appearing as background. Despite a commanding central performance from Daniel Francis, Dawn Walton’s confused direction leads to a jumbled ensemble that wavers from caricature to sympathetic naturalism.

“Pick your battles,” advises David’s mother before he leaves Lagos. In presenting an acceptable modern perspective on history, Agboluaje has certainly followed it.

Review: The Overcoat, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for WhatsOnStage.com



Studio-based theatre, for so long the preserve of the frivolous and the makeshift, has truly come of age, bursting the seams of its former home and graduating onto main stages. By marrying grand spectacle that would sit comfortably in the West End with an integrity seldom found therein, The Overcoat proves physical theatre to have thoroughly outgrown its chrysalis.
A freely inspired telling of Gogol’s story of the same name, Gecko’s latest is a meaty mix of politics and philosophy that nourishes the eyes as much as the mind.

They twist Gogol’s tale into that of an impoverished paper-pusher, Akaky, enslaved by his nine to five routine and grappling with his own meagre existence. His run down appearance is mocked by his colleagues, such that he strives only for the new overcoat offered as a bonus by his megalomaniac boss. From his cramped single flat, Akaky concocts romantic fantasies where the coat is springboard to a better life of love, success and self-worth. Finally, his desperation leads to death, as his search spirals into depression and, finally, suicide.

What has become clear is quite how well physical theatre can serve existential fiction and the focus on the individual imprisoned by a mechanized society. Director Amit Lahav cracks open the urban, capital-driven existence and serves it sunny-side down, swimming guiltily in its own greasy juices. Modernity seems an unfulfilling and unforgiving place, in which everyone else seems better off. We sprint only to fall behind, we toil only to come second, we assert ourselves only to slip into the anonymous crowds. The Overcoat pounds with a paranoia and self-loathing all too familiar.

Its brilliance stems from Gecko’s ability to bind Akaky’s inner-life – his lust-filled dreams and nightmares – so tightly to the external world of work and the city that we see everything through his eyes.

Though, at times, the narrative leans from ambiguity to obscurity, Lahav’s directorial flair is mind-boggling. Add an immaculately precise ensemble and thrillingly expressive design, lighting and sound from Ti Green, James Farncombe and Dan Steele respectively and you have a night made for the theatre.

As Akaky sinks through his single bed and into a dream-world seen from a birds-eye view, he seems to clutch at all of our unreachable desires. The Overcoat is a beautiful examination of the insufficiency of the self and the everyday tragedy of inescapable inadequacy. In that, not only have Gecko created a work of universal meaning, they have become standard-bearers for physical theatre.

I've never five-starred a show before, so, by way of celebration, here is something of a taster. Don't settle for the grainy youtube clip; get out and see it live.

The Rise and Fall of the Ceiling

A new Guardian Theatre Blog post here. Not sure, how this one will go down, but we'll see. In the meantime, I seem to have (almost) found some sort of rhythm in managing writing around a 9-5, so expect a slurry of reviews over the next few days.

Review: Hysteria, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Has evolution led to this? A dinner date so tremulous that it makes one long for the good old days of hunter-gathering and ritual mating. Modern life, it would appear, is not only rubbish, but dangerously close to extinction through neurosis. We totter in high heels, we quiver in toilets and we tremble with nervous laughter, desperate to avoid the pending awkward silence. Welcome to the 21st Century, where only the fitful survive.

Thanks to its gorgeous sense of magical realism, whereby minute moments in time expand into crippling fantasies, Hysteria maxes out the volume on the everyday anxieties that resonate at a frequency familiar to us all. As the niggling pressures of love and work, health and happiness threaten to become overwhelmingly catatonic, it induces an equal measure of laughter and sweat in its audience. We see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our frailties and our coping strategies reflected with such savage honesty that, just as for the piece’s inhabitants, the only possible response is the fine line between hilarity and hysteria itself.

While we may be over-accustomed to the gaucheness of the restaurant scenario, the addition of Lucinka Eisler’s androgynous waiter proves exactly the ingredient to improve the recipe. In Eisler’s obsessive compulsive clown there is a satisfying mix of Hitchcock, Pinter and Woody Allen with a nod to the two soups of Julie Walters thrown in for good measure. Her ceremonial laying of the table so as to stave off apocalypse verges of comic genius.

Equally necessary in surpassing the situational comedy is the interspersed lecture diagnosing “the modern condition”, which combines fanciful jargon (enforced ecopraxia, anyone?) with absurd non-science fit for Brasseye.

However, it is in the sheer skill and harmonization of all its individual elements that Hysteria excels. Katharine Williams’ lighting and Carolyn Downing’s sound do wonders for the surreal shifts of both time and mood. Moreover, Eisler, Guilia Innocenti and Ben Lewis perform the piece to perfection. Every beat is hit with split second timing and every movement, exquisitely pronounced and punctuated.

If there is a shortfall, it is the general feeling of slightness that begs Lecoq’s question as to whether the clown can ever pack a real political punch. However, for something quite so beautifully formed it hardly matters. Hysteria will have you laughing all the way to psychatrist’s couch.

Review: New Electric Ballroom, Riverside Studios

Written for Culture Wars

In form, Enda Walsh’s latest is almost the exact mirror image of his previous play, The Walworth Farce. While the latter’s male household has been supplanted by a female one, there is the same claustrophobic inertia and the same enforced, inescapable and everlasting ritual, played out daily to its death. New Electric Ballroom, however, offers none of its predecessor’s hope: though it presents the same moment of choice – a beckoning crack of light from the outside world – opportunity slips away from its inmates, leaving them at the mercy of a hollow cycle of isolation.

Inside an Irish cannery, Ada, Breda and Clara whittle away the present by attempting to recapture the past. Broken only by the frequent intrusions of their fishmonger Patsy, the women repeat vast beat poems harking back to their youth and, specifically, The Roller Royle’s visit to the titular dancehall. Their relived traumas – like a tape stuck on regret – suggest a community ill-equipped to survive the invasion of glitzy Americana; a place best left to its own locality without the notion of elsewhere, of an unreachable “Wondrous Place”.

The combination of Walsh’s expressionistic text and the gentle disco glisten of Sabine Dargent’s industrial design create a dream-like quality that muddles with the strangely concrete setting. It is a real world, albeit one that seems controlled by a Beckettian puppet-master: sunsets fast-forward, time dissolves, nothing much happens.

Words and the act of speech take centre stage. Walsh’s characters vocalise only to fill the void of the immediate future. They are “people talking just for the act of it. Words spinning to nothing. For no definable reason.” Stuck limpet-like to the past, the women’s words become a vain search for catharsis, as if, somehow, this time around the ending might be different. For all their fixated repetition, however, history remains fixed.

As Ada, Catherine Walsh instils a huge intensity. She wields a lipstick at her elders as if it were a police baton, conducting the beautifully spoken, yet trembling, nostalgia of Ruth McCabe and Rosaleen Linehan. Mikel Murfi’s jittery Patsy, dragged in and dolled up in the shiniest of blue suits, is played to perfection. He cowers behind a babble of words, before affecting a startling transformation into the rock ‘n’ roll icon of their memories.

However, the superb quality of the performances and Walsh’s own spot-on direction cannot evade the fact that the play’s academic successes do not translate well into performance. The quirkfire density of the text, delivered in thick Irish accents, leave you straining to keep pace and snatching to comprehend. Moreover, the fiction finds itself in a constant battle with the reality of the theatrical event.

In both New Electric Ballroom and The Walworth Farce, knitted together like yin and yang, there is the most unexpected of comparisons: the work of Forced Entertainment. With its focus on the oddities of mimetic representation, The Walworth Farce resonates with the rushed chaos and crass costuming of The World in Pictures or Emanuelle Enchanted. New Electric Ballrom, in turn, shares its fascination for the conjuring power of words with Spectacular and, one presumes, the forthcoming Void Story. However, where Forced Entertainment have made an artform out of boredom, Walsh cannot grant the same level of permission to his audience. The fiction must hold our attention, rather than challenge us to keep watching, as do the reality-centred performances of Forced Entertainment. Walsh simply slips off the tightrope between postdramatic and undramatic too often.

It is a touching piece well-presented, but, for all its merits, New Electric Ballroom cannot escape the fact that it works better on the page than on the stage.

Review: Mission Possible - Lads and Dads Move!, The Place

Written for Culture Wars

Looming large for any abstract investigation of gender are the dangers of stereotyping. After all, in taking maleness as its subject, Mission Possible attempts to capture something of a property shared by forty-eight percent of the world’s population. The attempt to generalise, to pin down some universal quality or other, is met by almost three and a half billion messy particularities, each proving an exception to the rule.

The three short pieces that comprise State of Emergency’s latest offering tackle this problem with varying degrees of success.

Jeanefer Jean-Charles presents the most hackneyed version in It’s A Boy – an exploration of the moment of response, where two alternate paths open: ugly violence and peacefully amicable. Using an unashamedly modish urban physical language in which House Dance combines with a jaunty contemporary style, Jean-Charles suggests a pack mentality that overtakes individual decision-making. Here maleness bubbles over into a picture of competitive masculinity – chest-puffing and chin-thrusting – that aims to undercut and humiliate. Respect comes from others rather than the self, bred from image rather than self-worth. With masculinity imposed and imposing the animal male begins to resemble stags immersed in a courtship ritual without an object over which to do battle.

Wilderness proves a playfully tender piece concerned with the father-son relationship set around a weekend camping. In aiming at loose narrative, however, Kwesi Johnson blurs the picture somewhat with a third dancer playing a range of hazily defined roles around the parental dynamic. That said, there are flashes of real wit and invention in the choreography; not least in the charmingly performed duet between Carl Harrison and a tent, whereby the lightness of the latter provides a joyfully contrasting accompaniment to the human body. At times, the tent escapes Harrison; at others it chases him, like a nightmarishly springy slug tracking its prey. Occasionally, the two merge to become a single animal, before separating as if by mitosis. In spite of this, Johnson’s piece feels slightly piecemeal and its tendency towards overplayed humour leaves it feeling slightly weightless.

In contrast, Colin Poole’s 4s:kin is a densely packed and intoxicatingly pure piece that, in spite of throwing the widest angle on gender in focussing directly upon it, presents a swirling picture of maleness. Solely reliant on the interplay of male bodies and light carving up the stage, 4s:kin achieves a mixology of masculinity and femininity that combines to form a vision of classical Man. With muscles arched and heads held high, whether grappling in wrestled combat or comradeship, the company seem to have stepped from a Greek Vase or biblical illustration. Poole instils a nobility, a majesty, a mischief and, moreover, a deep-set attractiveness into the male form and mentality that swells with grounded self-confidence.

Rather than overlaying symbols of character as Jean-Charles and Johnson do, Poole is content to use his dancers as the men they are, as examples displaying something altogether above and beyond themselves. Through the elasticity and stillness of these bodies, we glimpse real personalities and, more than that, the suggestion of a universal or abstract term sharing the space with us. In this, 4s:kin confirms itself a complex, passionate and thrilling piece and marks Poole out as a choreographer at the top of his game.

Review: Hallelujah, Theatre 503

Written for The Stage

If ever a play had its finger on the pulse, it is Jane Bodie’s wry funeral parlour comedy. From Alexandra Burke to recent snowstorms, Hallelujah’s exploration of the current economic climate is packed with cultural references of the past few months.

A fortnight after his suicide - a six-storey plummet in the slipstream of his finances - Frank’s body remains in the freezer awaiting a burial that will cost at least £2,600. Outside, in the relative’s waiting room, his son Martin (Mark Arends), mistress Edna (Aoife McMahon) and first wife Brenda (Joanne Howarth) are fighting with faux-grief and bickering over payment.

Using the gradual hollowing out of Leonard Cohen’s modern hymn Hallelujah, from Buckley to Burke, Bodie suggests a society tarted up, devoid of care, content or concern for the future. Though there are some loosely-tied ends within, Hallelujah is so rooted in the present that its shortcomings can be overlooked in favour of its sharpness.

Lorna Ritchie’s witty design of nauseating pastel shades and air-freshener neatly compliments Bodie’s gently scathing tone, while director Gemma Fairlie keeps the pace snappy throughout.

Despite occasionally doing too much, Arends, McMahon and Howart prove a quirky trio with a comfortable chemistry that steers the play away from its slight tendency to resemble a three-sided debate.

A 'Plague' on Both Their Houses

Just as violence begets violence, criticism has this week spun itself into a cyclone in a teacup over Plague Over England. Usually, I despise those that wade into online debates with the opening: “I haven’t seen the play, but...” However, here the play’s own qualities, on which I am in no place to comment, seem to me entirely irrelevant. Rather, the issue at stake is the responsibility of the critic(s).

Plague Over England has, both at the Finborough and in its recent West End resurrection at the Duchess, received a mixed bag of reviews. Some have been positive (Bravo, Charles!), some ambivalent (Bravo, Ian!) and some less than positive (Bravo, Rhoda!). In turn, the positive amongst those reviews have themselves received a truly awful set of notices, which, in the process, sling a quiverful of arrows at de Jongh’s play itself. Not least among them John M Morrison’s piece for the Guardian Theatre Blog, which goes so far as to label it a “limp apology for a play”. The accusations of unprofessional conduct, that the critics have rushed to praise one of their own, have in turn led to defensive parries from Michael Billington, Mark Shenton and, less formally, Ian Shuttleworth. Now, the purchasing masses are stirring in revolt against the Critics’ Circle, brandishing ticket stubs and placards reading, “Death to dead white males!”

One comment on Michael Billington’s blog entry sets out a peculiarly absolutist stance on the notion of personal connections between critics and artists: “It strikes me as incredibly obvious that no critic should review anything produced by people they have a personal relationship with. That means no writers reviewing books by their friends, no rock critics covering their mates' albums, no music reviewers writing about the orchestra their girlfriend plays in etc etc.” The comment brings to mind a recollection of Lyn Gardner describing the critic’s existence as a lonely one. The critic, she implied, can never be friends with the artist for the sake of judicious impartiality.

However, the passionate critic – and these are the critics that are truly fit for purpose – necessarily, or at the very least, inevitably, builds a personal relationship with the work of artists, if not with artists themselves. Art speaks. It speaks about us. It speaks about the world. It speaks about what it is to be alive now and about what it is to be human. Moreover, it speaks to us. And it speaks to us in different ways. In speaking it wraps us up in itself, it consumes us and spits us out somehow different, it affects our everyday lives. Art alters. It alters us, but it does not do so universally. Personal relationships with work cannot but intermingle with criticism. Criticism revolves around perspectives as much as taste. It is as relative as it is subjective. Lyn Gardner recently gave Shun-kin a two star review on the basis of comparison with Complicite’s canon, whilst admitting that there was much to admire. Benedict Nightingale awarded it four in comparison, presumably, with a wider spectrum of theatre. Was either wrong or misleading? I wouldn't say so.

Of course, the notion of personal relationships with work affects and involves taste. No sane person can disallow a critic the right to taste and preference. To do so is to insist on unfeeling critic-o-meters and impossible scales of comparison. Thus, up crops Hume and his standard of taste, whereby the subjective opinion of the ‘true’ critic can approach and even stand in for objectivity.

This is where Morrison argues that failures have been made with regard Plague Over England: the critics say one thing, the audience say another – therefore, the critics have ‘got it wrong’. (A fairer analysis of this particular situation, as Ian Shuttleworth has pointed out, is that some of the critics say one thing and some of the audience say another.) Regardless, Morrison equates good criticism with a reflection of audience experiences, preferences and tastes. It is the alignment of subjective opinion with the majority view (or better, the view of a qualified majority) that allows the critic to judge on our behalf. Here, critical authority is conferred by conformity. The critic’s responsibility is to the potential audience, to the readership as a whole entity.

However, a subtler view is that the critic acts as representative of those that share his/her tastes; their own particular readership, as it were. Here, the critic’s responsibility is to him or herself – it is to recognize as precisely as possible one’s feelings about a production and to relate them with clarity and honesty. Such criticism admits of its own subjectivity and, importantly, its own fallibility. Crucially, in this model the readership have their own responsibility. The individual reader must appreciate the critic’s personal taste (admittedly, based on inductive reasoning) and make judgement on reviews accordingly. In actual fact, then, the critic is representative of no one bar him or herself, but may be elevated or elected as authoritative or representative by the individual reader.

Increasingly, I feel that the critic has no responsibility to any readership that might use a review as recommendation. Instead, I see the critic as having responsibility to a readership totally incapable of witnessing the production for themselves, to a readership of the future, to a readership with its own opinions willing to enter into debate, to history and to the artist and, most importantly of all, to the artwork itself. For, even with the age of recording equipment, it is through such responses that theatre lives on in some refracted, reflected but truthful, meaningful sense. And if we view criticism in such a way, the names and causes of artists, practitioners and makers become of far less import than the work itself.

Criticism as record. As service to art. As witness statement.

Art, therefore, as incident.

I am not entirely sure how much sense the above makes as a whole. While writing, thoughts entangled and twisted out of recognition. It veered from one topic to another before nestling somewhere it never intended to pass through. Hopefully amidst the non-sense there are some fragments of coherence.

Gaza: An Alternative Viewpoint

What with the flurry of debate that has spilt from our stages and dominated the Guardian Theatre Blog, it seems to me that the attempted activism of Tim Minchin feels just as relevant, as necessary and as urgent today as it did at the Gilded Balloon in 2005.