Review: The Poof Downstairs, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

John Haynes is apologising. Sadly, thanks to family commitments, his fellow performer Charles N.I. Middleton has had to pull out. As has Patrizia Paolini, who, after performing The Poof Downstairs the night before, has decided that she no longer wants to be associated with it. Accordingly, tonight Haynes’ autobiographical three-hander will be performed by Haynes alone.

Or rather, the three-hander won’t be performed at all. It soon becomes apparent that Haynes’ introductory preamble has taken over. There is so much to be apologised for, so much that needs explaining in advance that he never actually gets round to his play. In effect, Haynes is apologising for theatre – even art as a whole – and, more specifically, for its failure to reflect a recognizable reality with any truth. Life, he demonstrates, is not neatly packagable into an hour-long studio-based piece or any other tidy, traditional medium.

Instead, Haynes embarks on a winding narrative that folds into itself with assorted titbits and distractions. His speech becomes a whirlpool of anyways that swirls around an unreachable singularity: his own multifaceted identity. Thus, we hear about his schooldays with Charles ‘Nigger’ Middleton and their first reunion thirty-five years later; we see his parents sitting around the dinner table, father coughing and mother nattering; we hear his neighbours upstairs and their sarcastically coined ‘little darlings’ labelling Haynes “the poof downstairs”; we meet Frank, a camp older friend bearing reduced items from Sainsbury’s. Somehow, through all of this, we get a picture of Haynes himself. Perhaps we even get several pictures of several Haynes’s.

In many ways, it’s the sort of forced meta-theatrical conceit from which, usually, I’d run screaming. However, Haynes manages his jumbled assortment of material with such careful attention that, in spite of its weaving structural complexities, everything settles into place. His handling of other characters, boiled down into stock caricatures of catchphrases and physical tics, is exquisite; both hilariously observed and executed. As the flotsam populace of his life appear onstage, Haynes’ world begins to seem a world of Haynes’s, not dissimilar to the poster for Being John Malkovitch. Nor is that prospect as irritating as it might sound, thanks to Haynes’ likable presence, camp scorn and dry humour.

The Poof Downstairs, as lecture presented rather than play unwritten, makes for an entertaining hour. However, though Haynes makes his point skilfully through form, one is left feeling its content charming but inconsequential. Other than the simple fact that it is his, there seems little reason for Haynes’s identity to be the specific focus as opposed to any other identity. Admittedly, he’s working with what he’s got, but the result is that there is little by way of payoff. Content almost enables medium rather than vice versa or a more balanced relationship of mutual necessity. Still, The Poof Downstairs sees Haynes on strong form.

Review: Watch Me Fall, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

In miniaturizing the super-size, Action Hero present a very British perspective on American culture. Just as A Western distilled the dusty, gunslinging idols of Hollywood with ketchup and novelty Stetsons, Watch Me Fall reduces the stadium stuntsman to truth-or-daredevil, exposing the emptiness behind the icon. The flash bravado and showboating ego remains, but the feats of heroic insanity have all but evaporated. It’s the American Dream as made on Blue Peter.

At the centre of Watch Me Fall is the recreation, or rather retranslation, of an Evel Knievel-esque leap of faith. With two banks of audience astride a strip of stage, making their presence felt through the flash and wind of disposable cameras, James Stenhouse cycles up and over a half-metre high wooden ramp. It’s an act so momentary that you can’t but miss it. No matter how determinedly you try to capture a mental mid-flight image all that ever comes into focus is the resultant crumpled heap of body and bike in the corner.

The majority of the forty minutes is taken up with the tension-building and legend-forging that allows Stenhouse to stand handlebar to handlebar with Knievel. Gemma Paintin, clad in a star-spangled dress, plays commentator – cycling through a history of ‘heeee-did-it’s in a musical American accent – and partner, both professional and romantic. Under a variety of near-pornographic pseudonyms (Dunc Danger, Jonny Legend, Dick Cheney), Stenhouse becomes idol. He stands arms-raised and high-fives his public, he sets his helmet alight, he holds two bottles of cola in outstretched arms for as long as he is able. This time, he assures us, he’s going further, going higher and going faster than ever before.

Action Hero’s success stems from the perfect balance of gentle cynicism and naive eagerness that allows Watch Me Fall to be at once ticklishly ridiculous and dangerously real. Simultaneously the company mine their resources – both visual and textual – to embrace great depth of thought beneath the surface entertainment. They look beyond the obvious question as to why daredevils take such risks to ask why it is we watch them for entertainment and, even more intriguingly, who really suffers. As Paintin kicks Stenhouse repeatedly round the head and later advises us not to touch him, I was reminded of the recent images of Ricky Hatton’s wife, her face cragged with anguish as he lay unconscious in the ring. Somehow the spoils seem dislocated from the potential suffering and, as such, the notion of risk appears skewed.

Likewise, their criticism of America remains temperate and tidily treated. In their presentation of the Maiden of the Mist withstanding the weight of a waterfall, Paintin splutters on a downpour of two litres of Coke, conjuring images of both oil soaked prospectors and victims of waterboarding.

Overall, the piece could itself go further and peak higher: its chest-puffing aggression needs an injection of testosterone and rage. Nonetheless, Watch Me Fall is a little gem that manages to be both spoofishly entertaining and lingeringly thoughtful.

On Cavemen (or The Billington in Me)

Recently, as a result of my day job, I’ve been watching theatre with fresh eyes. Perhaps ‘fresh’ is the wrong word. Blinkered, maybe. Or glazed. You see, for the first time in ages, I’ve been watching theatre as neither a practitioner nor a critic, but as a punter. Well, technically, not as a punter, since I still haven’t been paying for tickets, but more as a professional fan – paid to sit and enjoy, to make the best of and find the good in what’s on show. To watch, relax and enjoy, rather than to work out, to discern, to find insight or inspiration. Accordingly, I’ve been sitting back and absorbing, where usually I lean forward and peer in from beneath a furrowed brow. It’s a matter of watching passively instead of actively.

And it’s startling how forgiving one becomes. One difference is that one’s own reputation is not at stake. Where the critic is forced to forge an opinion – nay, a justified opinion – the unhurried theatregoer need only smile or grimace. Gone is the niggling exasperation and the gurning frustration at questionable decisions and indefensible idiocy. There is no desperate search for a hook on which to hang all else and no purgatorial wait for that moment where everything clicks into place. Instead, I’ve been following – missing just as much as I take in – and allowing my interest free rein to roam around stage, wings and narrative, actors, audience and auditorium.

On top of this, I’ve also been watching a type of theatre with which I have become unaccustomed. A theatre that lives and dies by its conventions. A theatre that is happy to leave its foundations uninterrogated and play quietly, often quite beautifully and intelligently, by its own rules. It is this very theatre that I fell in love with as a naive, slightly geeky and overly-romantic teenager. Yet it is the very same theatre that I have spurned as a naive, slightly geeky and overly-romantic twenty-something.

Over the past few years, I have come to value honesty in performance as increasingly important. As such, I have tended away from performance that does not admit of its own status or leaves its shortcomings unmentioned. Exposure to a more honest theatre feels a bit like the walk out of Plato’s cave: from watching and accepting the shadows flickering on the back wall to seeing the fire that casts them. One’s former notions no longer seem satisfactory, no longer truthful enough. So, in many ways, my recent return to the kind of theatre that relies on the acceptance of conventions to build a fiction has felt like a return to the cave. I can no longer watch the fiction without also seeing the conventions behind it, just as the cave re-visitor can no longer watch the shadows in ignorance of the fire that creates them.

Walking back into the cave, returning to my seat with its wall-view, then, has brought with it a certain scepticism that breeds an unwillingness – perhaps even an inability – to accept dramatic fiction. I have found myself strangely unable to suspend disbelief. (The phrase is one with which I have a tortured relationship after being pulled up on its use in an aesthetics tutorial several years ago: “Yes, but we don’t really believe do we?” How I wish I understood the double negative more fully at the time.) I find it impossible to ignore the realities (some might say distractions) of performance, of stage, of wings, of audience, of choices and non-choices. Watching a play has, for me, become like reading a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory novel; a process of picking apart the signification in order to understand it.

I raise these personal stumbling blocks now because I intend to increase the amount of ‘conventional’ theatre that I review over the coming months. In the past six months, I have sought out work that I want to see, work that I suspect I will enjoy. After all, when reviewing for free, the show itself serves as both subject and reward. Now, I feel that I need to start honing my practice and challenging myself as a critic by reviewing a more diverse range of work and that must include more of the mainstream.

The questions as to whether I can watch such work critically despite an element of detachment from the fiction and, if so, how that criticism might manifest itself seems particularly pertinent. I suspect that there must be a balance. To examine this type of theatre to closely might result in my breaking it, yet to absorb it too readily might be to forgive its faults. How can one remain detached and simultaneously invest in a piece of theatre? How can one both accept and interrogate a fiction? Is it a case of seeing through or overlooking the conventions that are at play? Will my eyes (re)adjust to the dark?

Review: The Bagwell in Me, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

It turns out that if there is another way, nobody told Ann Liv Young. On the basis of her showings at Burst, one can only assume that she handles all material identically: with an overdose of attitude and a dollop of ‘shocking’ sexuality. It all leaves one wondering what else she might apply her ‘technique’ to: the Middle East conflict, perhaps, or a letter to Santa.

The Bagwell in Me, which ostensibly concerns itself with the relationship of George and Martha Washington with their slave Romy Bagwell, uses the very same devices as Solo. Once again she and Isobel gradually fall out of their clothes, perform sex acts and thrust their groins in the faces of audience members. They maul a mixtape’s worth of pop songs at extreme volume and berate the sound technician for the lack of noise, while the same two men run around tidying up after them and filming the action. Only this time they do it in period clothing and periwigs.

Anyway. It’s all, like, well fucking confrontational, yeah? Only constant confrontation becomes, at best, tiresome and tedious. The main problem – and there are many – is that her form is so noisy it drowns out any possibility of genuine content. Her work is so nihilistic that it is devoid even of nihilism; so Emperor’s New Clothes that you can’t but question whether the whole work is a joke at its own meaninglessness. Maybe that’s the point: it’s all, like, totally post-post-whatever, yeah?

By way of example, as a naked Isobel draped in the stars and stripes coated herself in a semen-like liquid, I found myself wondering whether it was milk of magnesium.

Ann Liv Young is the sort of artist that won’t accept her own wrongs. You feel that whatever is said she’ll wear it as a badge of honour. Like a child desperate for attention, the best thing to do is to pay her none.

Photo courtesy of Christy Passagno

Review: Home of the Wriggler, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

Its component parts exploded and dissected like an Airfix diagram, an image of a machine – perhaps an engine – looms large at the back of the stage. Each cog or structure is numbered so as to correspond to the eighty-seven names that somehow serve as dislocated labels. There are three Tippers, two Siddhus and one Anthony ‘Tony’ Blair. Each stands alone yet remains interconnected: part of a whole reliant on each and every one.

Irregularly, these names pop up in stories, or rather fragments – no, smoother than fragments; nuggets – told by four performers. Akram is a smooth, over-gelled salesman shifting cars by the dozen; Mary works in a call centre, guiding road users through a series of onscreen prompts; Karl waits in his car on the motorway, longing for release through a collision that never comes. It is a web of humanity through which we are guided like a roving camera, repeatedly distracted by minor players that become momentary protagonists.

Home of the Wriggler breathes life into the embers of community. Inspired by the insolvency of MG Rover of 2005 and the subsequent dissolution of Longbridge car manufacturing plant in Birmingham, Stan’s Cafe mourn a past more honest, more human, before community was surpassed by communication. They paint a picture of Hovis advert England, jarringly scattered with cluttered items of modern, mobile technology. It is an industrial Under Milk Wood; Birmingham’s own cheery, cheeky Road.

Its neatness comes from using manually powered lighting, tidily tying form and content together. The whir of cycles and hand cranks forms a constant backdrop, as performers appear in the dim, flickering glow to rekindle a blackout spirit of togetherness. Simultaneously serving as a celebration of the worker bee, where the arm that turns the machine is as crucial as its very invention, the honesty of their effort is a lament at the ease of modern life, a reminder of the good that comes from getting out what you put in.

At times, however, Stan’s Cafe are guilty of the sepia sentimentality they seek to avoid, primarily due to a mode of performance that insists on demonstrating and signposting its apparent playfulness. The pretence of discovery is overly-evident, slapping forced faux-play on material better treated as matter of fact. Indeed, when Home of the Wriggler accepts and utilizes its own fixedness, particularly in the echoing gestures of individual routines such as the haulier’s daily steering-wheel salute, the words gain genuine life.

Though it may get over-excited and misty-eyed about its content, Home of the Wriggler is a fitting tribute to a fading England of industry and community.

Review: Solo, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

So post-feminist is Ann Liv Young’s Solo that you can’t actually tell whether it sides with or against feminism. Certainly, it looks and sounds like feminism, subverting the familiar imagery of pornography and staunchly rebutting the objectification of women, but it does so with such ardent aggression that it undermines its political stance entirely. However, Young’s piece functions through its own apparent breakdown.

It is precisely by failing to say one thing that it gets its message across; one that does not wholly align itself as feminist, but rather as being about feminism’s message and its messengers. Young’s trick is to house two shows within one. First, the show you think you’re watching – with its noisy, albeit powerful, clichés of female empowerment – and second, the show that manifests itself through the collapse of the first, whereby the female eunuch more or less castrates herself.

With ear-plugs sitting ominously in hand, one is confronted with what looks like a young girl’s shambles of a bedroom, on which stand two women in cut-short cat-suits and riding helmets. Over the speaker system, at a volume that begs questions of the Old Town Hall’s very foundations, comes an torrent of music, first Ain’t No Sunshine then more aggressive hip-hop pop. In a gradual upping of the ante the two women half undress and half fall out of their clothes, gyrating more and more forcefully and slipping into clumsy pornographic routines with carrots, sliced bread and milk. All the while, two men in seventies attire arrange furniture and film the action.

At several points, the microphones stop working and Young stops the show to abuse the sound technician Greg and, increasingly, her audience. That this never confirms itself as intentional allows both layers of meaning to come through – we project that of the first and simultaneously refuse to be force-fed it.

Yet this lack of confirmation proves to be Solo’s downfall. Even after half of her audience has left at her behest Young continues in the same vein. There is no reward for sticking with her, only more of the same aggro-feminism. Undoubtedly, Solo is uncomfortable and challenging viewing that hits all sorts of targets with unswervingly accuracy and power, but one can’t help but think that there must be another way.

Photo courtesy of Christy Pessagno

Review: Monsters, Arcola Theatre

The surveillance footage is seared into our public consciousness: three uneven figures, hand in hand, walking in grainy stop-motion along an anonymous supermarket aisle. Sixteen years on, something lingers as if wounds have not fully healed, scabs have not yet scarred over. However, the murmuring stir that has greeted the British premiere of Niklas Rådström’s performance-text about the James Bulger case owes more to the lazy sensationalism of others than any of its own. Instead, Monsters is a sombre, sober dossier on the two year-old’s abduction and subsequent murder that offers neither diatribe nor explanation.

Played in an open space scattered with suspended televisions, playing nineties flashbacks and gritty CCTV style images, Monsters feels like a collection of loose pages ordered half-arbitrarily. While he repeatedly returns to police interviews with Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, which are read seemingly from genuine transcripts, Rådström interrupts any linearity with apparently fictionalised monologues and choruses expressing multiple standpoints, often contradictory or puzzled. Not only are we left interrogating the factual status of everything presented, we must also determine our own perspective on the case. Where with one hand it lays blame with the parents, it attacks those thirty-eight witnesses that failed to intervene with the other; then the children themselves or the goading media. Just as it laments our increasingly amoral society, it lists a series of similar incidents from the past four hundred years.

In fact, Rådström appears to corner us into a position where the only perspective possible is one of abstention. Humanity is capable of the unspeakable and, accordingly, the play of children will occasionally make manifest such destructive impulses. Far from being monsters, then, Venables and Thompson are entirely human. Though this smacks unstomachably of determinism, it doesn’t seek total absolution. Rather it spreads responsibility thinner across us all. However – and this is where Rådström’s attempt to pin some culpability on the audience for our own inaction falls down – that responsibility is for different actions. Venables and Thompson are responsible for torturing and killing the infant; those thirty-eight witnesses are individually responsible for their own inaction relative to their own perceptions; and we are responsible for our failure to intervene in a re-enactment, though this cannot – as Rådström implies – be the same responsibility of those thirty-eight. Nor, and herein rests Michael Billington’s refusal of implication, is that responsibility one that ought to weigh too heavily on our conscience, since no children were harmed in the making of Monsters.

Whatever reservations one may have about Rådström’s text, however, Christopher Haydon’s direction is superb, remaining unfaltering faithful and endowing the performance with enormous honesty and – in tandem with Jon Bauser’s clinically industrial design – a slick stylishness. Veering towards re-enactment and unfussy embodiment rather than full-blown representation, Haydon deftly avoids hijacking a personal tragedy, yet still manages to create an affecting and judder-inducing atmosphere.

Sedate but frank performances from an engaging foursome (Lucy Ellinson, Sandy Grierson, Jeremy Killick and Victoria Pratt) balance distance with empathy, finding the gentlest infusions of character without coming close to identification. It is as if the room is haunted by the case’s ghosts, lingering half-present above them.

Sadly, the text veers off-course on the final straight, almost as if Rådström was unable to leave out his favourite sections but also unable to quite place them. Nonetheless, Monsters is a gripping and disconcerting perspective on humanity’s tendency towards destructiveness. Since it stokes the emotions precisely by remaining emotionless, one cannot feel that it could benefit from a touch less over-thinking.

Review: England, Whitechapel Gallery

Written for Whats On Stage

Fittingly enough, in another chamber of the recently refurbished Whitechapel Gallery, Bloomberg happen to be hosting their annual awards. After all, without them, we wouldn’t be here. In fact, as Tim Crouch’s densely thoughtful text insists on reminding us, there are a lot of people to thank for our presence here. Not only those that have made the Whitechapel’s renovation possible, but a broad network of humanity on which our own continued existence depends.

With this reliance established, England becomes a meditation on value. It examines the value of existence itself and those with which we fill it; those values held by our culture and those of others; monetary value and something more intrinsic - beauty, perhaps, or love. Again, the trickle of financiers’ applause seeps through the walls.

Crouch’s text is a single narrative voice split between two performers, Crouch himself and Shunt’s Hannah Ringham. They talk of an absent boyfriend – an international art-dealer – and a breaking heart, gradually failing and awaiting transplantation. They talk of taking art out of galleries and into people’s lives. They have a William de Koening on the wall of their converted jam-factory home in Southwark. They implore us to look, but never define quite how or at what we should be looking.

England’s two halves, like the beating of the diseased heart, function at very different rhythms. The first weaves around an exhibition – here, Isa Genzken’s Open Seasame – with the genial manner of smiling tour-guides; the second, in the gallery’s lecture hall, is sterner and more confrontational, as the transplant at the centre of the story is revealed to be a deal of its own.

By relying so heavily on words, England’s content has a tendency to disappear before you’ve fully grasped the ideas contained within. The result is a misty muddle of thoughts, all intriguingly ponderous, but often outweighed by questions. At times, Crouch and Ringham seem a touch too serious, lacking the playfulness to engage with us as people rather than idea-recipients.

For all that, England remains a quietly touching and intensely thought-provoking sermon. If anything, with the art market teetering towards total collapse alongside the rest of us, Crouch’s piece has gained urgency and pertinency since its inception at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery two years ago. Its call for a complete re-evaluation need heeding now more than ever.

Piecemeal Praise

There's a new post over at the Guardian blog here in praise of theatre that seeks something other than polished perfection in relation to Improbable's Panic. I'm not totally sure that I managed to capture exactly what I had hoped about what proved quite an intangible subject matter, but hopefully it makes sense and appeals to a certain type of theatregoer. As much as I enjoyed it, watching Time and the Conways at the National last night made me realise quite how detached one can feel from a pristine beauty. Perhaps I'll jot some thoughts on that here soon.