Review: Contigo, Linbury Studio

Written for Culture Wars

In September 2003, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary called Jump London that transformed the capital into a adventure playground. The programme followed three free-runners – or traceurs, to use the technical term – as they scaled, somersaulted over and slipped through its major architectural landmarks, including the Royal Albert Hall, HMS Belfast and the National Theatre. Parkour, the art of movement, had arrived and what were once considered obstacles had become challenges. Buildings as blank canvases.

Traditionally, the Chinese Pole is characterised by steely strength and sturdy rigour. Muscles unfurl sinew by sinew and tighten to sheer solidity. Contigo retains that concentrated intensity but re-attacks the apparatus with the explosive energy and fierce machismo of static parkour.

Joao Paulo Dos Santos squares up to the white vertical pole – which is held in place by taut wires at the top – and confronts it head on. It is less a demonstration of skill and core strength as a determination to conquer. There are moments when, with his hulking shoulders bulging out of a black vest, he resembles Robert de Niro threatening his own reflection in Taxi Driver, as if the pole has become an adversary concocted from spare time and deranged hermitage.

That single-mindedness pays off in the grasp that Dos Santos has over his audience. We come close to whiplash each time he drops twenty feet, stopping himself just before smacking the floor. Such is his skill – shown in the collectedness demonstrated by the careful dropping of a marble to match its descent and catch it softly at the bottom – that we come to trust him over time, settling in to a calm admiration. His precision, even when holding himself stiffly parallel to the stage, is phenomenal. Each body shape remains perfectly geometric, always steady rather than strained.

However, Contigo fails to translate into anything more than man and apparatus. There is a vague sense of self-imposed exile, akin to a spirit-walk or some other rite of passage, but there emerge no legible themes. It’s as if the medium itself is too powerful to carry any other signifiers – the Chinese pole struggles to signify anything more than itself.

Astounding, then, but also uninspiring. Contigo invites us to marvel at a man seemingly able to become weightless at will, but mind is left hanging.

Review: Pan-Pot, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Written for Culture Wars

The festival brochure has already described Pan-Pot as “a fireworks display of brilliant juggling.” There’s not much more one can add to that. It has the sort of beauty found in the recent Sony adverts; the same ability to astonish and seduce your eyes to the point of melting. Add in the fact of its liveness and the feat becomes so impressive it leaves you incredulous.

The stage is bare: interlocking wooden slats lit in heavy autumnal colours. Sometimes portions of it are left in darkness, sometimes not. To the side is a grand piano. On the stage, in various combinations and formations, are three dark-suited men. If one can identify any expression on their faces beyond blank neutrality, it might be described as blasé or hangdog. Maybe it’s worse than that: boredom; empty stares that let slip utter disinterest; unimpressed and hollow.

Perhaps this explains the Beckettian overtones. The three men seem, quite ridiculously, to be passing time, filling it with juggling for want of anything more (or less) meaningful. Often, they seem like abstracts, lacking individual characteristics but standing in for all of us, in the same way that Beckett’s beings can. When they turn to face upstage, we see three suits – each catching the light identically – with elbows flickering smoothly, such that white balls loop, whir and whizz between them unthinkingly. They stare straight ahead, as if they are overlooking a landscape; simultaneously seers and fools on a hill.

As for their juggling itself, it embodies the governing qualities of Kantian aesthetics, welding together the sublime and the ridiculous.

Each routine starts from a sliver of something – a ball caught and received in such and such a way – and grows outwards in complexity, such that the pattern transforms, picking up minor mutations as it rolls on. They clacker through with speed and agility, drilled with mechanical precision. At times you can’t be sure whether they are moving into catching positions or simply located by chance, such is the constant whir of reformation. It has that same transfixing blur of a Rubik’s Cube solved at full pelt. Your eyes are always playing catch up and can’t be removed for even a nanosecond.

As for the ridiculous, there is always a glint in the eye and a flicker of mischief lurking in Pan-Pot. Its comic edge has a certain purity, relying on rhythm, routine and unexpected variations. A throws to B, B throws to C, C turns and flings the ball into the wings. Or let’s it fall. Or just stares back. These three men are a clownish clash of pomposity and futility. They bestow their ball-handling with import: there’s the focus, the courtly bows, the churchly echo of clicking heels and, most of all, the concerted effort not to drop anything. Then they let it slip, as a ball thuds to the stage. And they stare. And they start again. Add in a couple of similarly suited manikins, who stand always ready to receive and always untrusted, and the inexplicably innate humour of gravity and Pan Pot can really raise a titter.

But it’s not content to do so alone. What makes Pan-Pot so impressive – what draws the ongoing, animal applause from us – is its half-concealed philosophy. It speaks of time and failure, of attempted poise and gracelessness, of humanity and the oddity of its existence. With balls. Lots of them and very little else.

Brave New World

Review of Kefar Nahum at the Barbican Centre and Rankefod at the ICA

Written for Culture Wars

“O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here?” begs Miranda in The Tempest, her eyes newly opened to fresh possibilities. We might do the same when faced with the similarly brave new worlds – each populated with animals so exotic, they defy classification – that crystallise together in these two Mime Festival shows.

In both Kefar Nahum, by Belgian duo Compagnie Mossoux-Bronte, and Kitt Johnson’s Rankefod our brains flicker to make sense of what our eyes are receiving. The impulse to zoomorphise, or further still anthropomorphise, is here turned in on itself, such that we become caught up between the illusion and its actual component counterparts. In the former, Nicole Massoux creates an entire alien ecosystem out of a jumble sale’s worth of junk, animating allsorts into peculiar lifeforms. Johnson’s raw material, by contrast, is her body alone, which she twists and contorts – with a little help from smart and tricksy lighting – into all manner of animals, loosely tracing evolutionary history.

At one level, we experience the two pieces in much the same way – always struggling to identify both the resemblance and its source. With Johnson, we are engaged in anatomical study, tracing the configuration of joints to comprehend the human arrangement that can trick us into seeing insects, reptiles and celluar organisms. When Massoux is at work, we must look beyond constitution to the simpler material properties of the object – shape, say, or texture – to snag on its identity.

However, where Rankefod is a satisfying puzzle – an affront to your spatial reasoning – that swallows your attention, Kefar Nahum seems mundane, little more than a sequence of objects briefly manipulated then tossed aside.

The difference is that Rankefod seems like an enquiry as opposed to theatre for theatre’s sake. Sure, it may not have the urgency of, say, overtly political work, but Johnson’s aim is concrete and admirably over-ambitious. (In the programme notes, she writes: “by reaching for the impossible one stretches the limits of the possible”) Around these aims, there is also a sense of progression; a logical through line that allows each particular formation to function in relation with those immediately preceding and following it.

None of this can be said of the object manipulation of Kefar Nahum, which thrives on a certain charm and, even, cutesy appeal. Admittedly, the funny little things are each the perfect product of the individual source object, but as a whole they seem a haphazard menagerie. The governing principle seems simply to be whatever works, whatever looks good or amuses, and, as such, anything goes. With this lack of constraints, of boundaries, there comes a certain self-indulgence which serves only to undermine Massoux’s manipulation. Too often we see her plainly. As a wigged woman with a sock on her hand.

Review: The Mill, Linbury Studio

Written for Culture Wars

You expect a certain showy bravado of circus, as if half the performance is about showing off specialist skills. Shouldn’t it look easy? Shouldn’t it boggle and bemuse, leave you slack-jawed in appreciative awe and rouse impulsive, impressed applause?

Well, no – not if it’s the work of Ockham’s Razor. For the celebrated British aerial troupe, circus is vocabulary that must be put to a purpose rather than displayed for its own sake and self-indulgence. Accordingly, for their first full-length work, they have eschewed glossy grace and flourishing finishes for something more honest and thought-provoking: graft.

The specially designed contraption at the heart of The Mill couldn’t be more suited to their chosen theme of work. It is, basically, an oversized Hamster’s wheel (affectionately referred to as ‘The Tumble Drier’) that serves as the central motor for a giant system of pulleys, ropes and human cogs. In order to keep the whole intricate mechanism whirring, a performer must, in turn, power its rotations from within by hauling its frame into action and running on the spot. Ease is replaced with a calm efficiency.

But to what end? The machine itself serves an unseen purpose – perhaps, even no purpose at all – and yet on and on the four uniformed workers toil in their respective responsibilities, driven on by the absent voice of a drill sergeant-like loudspeaker. Until, that is, an intrigued outsider bursts in and upsets the carefully regimented routine, running amok as if a child on a climbing frame.

What Ockham’s Razor manage is to beautify the tedious and arduous without dissolving those qualities. Their movements retain the muscular exertion of manual labour and, with repetition, harness the monotony of work. Accompanied by Derek Nisbet’s score, which pinpointedly captures the honesty and satisfaction of a day’s work, they tumble to fill the time spent in production maintaining a very human playfulness that marks a refusal to be browbeaten by one’s vocation. They may be a uniformed unit, but each staunchly remains his own man.

Of course, by the time we get onto the balance of life, the snugness of performance style and content really comes to the fore. However, though never expressly stated, The Mill’s themes presented are always a little too close to the surface. The mind map quality that promotes breadth over depth leaves everything too readily legible and even, at times, predictable. The paradox is that we are watching work as leisure and, soothing though it may be to watch, The Mill demands too little of us. Like an overly helpful guest, it is neat, tidy and excellent company, but insists on doing all the hard work for you.

Review: USSR Was Here, ICA

Written for Culture Wars

On and on rolls this conveyor belt of horrors; all more or less human in form, but their humanity is so distorted that it seems, at times, entirely absent. They are, instead, mechanized playthings and Frannkenstinian monsters; wild-eyed clowns and jangle-brained drunks; disfigurations and detritus of humankind, as if made alien by pain. As if snapped, twisted and burst, pot-boiled and pressure-cooked. As if tortured to the point of reconfiguration.

There came a certain point, about half an hour in – probably more, possibly less – where I felt a quiver of panic. What if it never ends? What if this proves purgatorial? Or worse: a slow descent, ever-more grating as it extends, moment by moment, into infinity. This must be what it feels like to become trapped in an acid trip, where each repetition frays your mind that little bit more.

BlackWhiteSky’s piece is, therefore, more endured than it is enjoyed. It is described as an impressionist portrait of disintegration and, in that, it certainly fulfils its promise: coiling vine-like around you and dragging you down with it. Its underlying spark, though you’d only know from the programme notes, is the collapse of the Soviet Union and the forty million victims of World Wars and dictatorships.

That explains the sound, which grows increasingly immersive throughout, swallowing you with volume. It is a clunky, misshapen beat of burst pipes and whistles of pressure, screams, explosions and gunfire, clanging metal and collapse. The machine is falling to pieces and the demented behaviour before us is the panicked result.

Because on these creatures march and shuffle from the void, each created from the careful, counter-intuitive movement of the astounding Marcella Soltan – a wiry spider of a woman – and Egor Moiseev – a stocky, smooth-headed man. They stalk each other like shadows, agonising as they go. One creation rips out his own heart, another scratches wildly at itself. One gnaws at the flesh on the other’s face. There is a double-headed monster (an illusion slickly achieved by Soltan) who tries to yank off her (real) head and an awkwardly adult babe in arms.

Lit in a discordant clash of colours – queasily bold reds, greens and blues – the whole effect is nightmarish, but strangely flat in texture. Though it is the ongoing series of entrances and exits that wear you down, it remains hard to stay engaged once you realise that nothing will change or grow. The contortions will not themselves contort. And for all that that is momentarily a terrifying prospect, it is quickly replaced by a glance towards the glowing green of the exit sign.

Review: The Rivals, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Time Out


Unlikely bedfellows, Beyonce Knowles and Richard Sheridan. Yet it's her booty-shaking anthem Single Ladies, neatly remixed as a Greensleeves-style romanesca, that kicks off this piquant production of his comedy of manners.

The same arch knowingness continues throughout as Sheridan's romantic competitors pile into Bath to seek the hand of Miss Lydia Languish, who - inspired by slushy novels - is intent on marrying for love alone. Her aunt, meanwhile, the linguistically-challenged Mrs Malaprop, has promised her to the eligible Captain Jack Absolute. Only, of course, he's already set her swooning under the guise of the cavalier Ensign Beverley.

Director Jessica Swale handles this contrived tangle by turning it against itself, tossing everything outwards with a cynically raised eyebrow that embraces its skittishness. Sure it keeps you giggling, but at the expense of any deeper interrogation. The outside perspective means that nothing really matters. In playing characters for laughs alone, it absolves them too readily of naivety and narcissism.

Not that the talented cast seem to mind too much. Harry Hatton-Powell is the perfect balance of swagger, charm and smarm as Captain Absolute. As Mrs Malaprop, Celia Imrie is brilliantly dim - she glides over the bungled vocabulary, smartly leaving its selling to others - but never justifies the label of "she-dragon". Though a touch under-sentimental, Charity Wakefield is suitably dainty and there's superb comic support from Christopher Logan and Robin Soans.

It's all great fun, but ultimately Red Handed's production proves its own worst enemy: it's so light and breezy that it blows itself away.

Review: Eschet, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Death is always present in the puppets of Etgar Theatre. They are immaterial waifs: empty, trailing shirts that float with a ghostly grace. Their fleshless heads, gaunt bone-white creations with sooty sockets for eyes, hover just above the collar. In fact, they don’t so much seem puppets as lost souls trapped in a timeless morality tale and forced to endlessly retread their regrettable actions.

Eschet (literally ‘Wife Of’) works its way steadily through the Old Testament tale of Yehuda and his three sons, the eldest of whom is married off to Tamar before dying without fathering a child. In accordance with the law transferring his marital obligations onto his brothers, Tamar weds Onan so as to preserve the family name. In turn, Onan dies, as divine punishment for his refusal to impregnate his brother’s wife, and Tamar ought to pass to Yehuda’s youngest son, Shelah, still in infancy. Finally, out of desperation to conceive, she disguises herself as a prostitute and seduces Yehuda himself.

It is a story without absolute sinners and saints; one of forced hands and impossible positions. The puppeteers are simultaneously guard and guardian, enforcer and protector. They strap themselves into a chest place, drape a shirt around their lower torso and share legs with the creature, literally walking them through their painful deeds. At times, they throw off their puppets out of sympathy, standing up against the injustice done to them. Elsewhere, they force that of other, plunging heads downwards and dragging by sleeves.

Besides this external impulse, these puppets – Tamar in particular – are stalked by dissociation and rupture of self. In the throngs of true love and sexual passion, their heads float from their bodies, as if elongated necks entangling one another. At other points, the self splits for the skull to witness the trials of the body. Loss of identity, of Tamar’s identity as always defined in relation to another – wife of, mother of – is brought to the fore.

However, while the lightness of these puppets suits love, it is less accomplished in portraying the weightiness of grief, which is more often where the narrative thrust lies. Grief only comes when the performer is burdened with an object, literally weighed down by the awkward wooden tabletops that double as graves.

There are a couple of wrong turns. Onan’s sin is treated as an act of lust, his hands crawling over Tamar’s legs before intercourse, where the text – sung in the original Hebrew and projected in translation – suggests a guilty inability to cope with the situation and we could certainly make do without the bluntness of a pregnancy slideshow.

Simple, muted and perhaps unable to send the mind spiralling, Eschet is nonetheless a very human piece, always in touch with the impulses and emotions that drive it forwards.

Review: Öper Öpis, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

From a selection of building blocks scattered around the stage, Martin Zimmerman carefully constructs a makeshift chair. From afar, it looks no different to all the other chairs onstage: a simple, spindly wooden skeleton. Only we know that it can’t function in the same way; that it would not suffer being sat upon. It is a chair in form alone, wholly at odds with those chipped and bow-legged examples that surround it.

This duality hovers over the whole of Öper Öpis, which translates from the Swiss as ‘Something Something’. Its stage is split into two: above the stable floor is a platform raised on a central pivot, which lurches and tilts as performers reconfigure themselves on its surface. The shifting sands of this higher plane seem a fluid realm of ideas, home to a world infused with vibrant colour and circus. The everyday becomes extraordinary; not just actions, but human hydraulics. Performers contort and loop through the air, become weightless, become rigid, become super-human, become ideal. It is an Escheresque city of stretched possibilities and multiple perspectives, always familiar and always fantastic.

Into this, through a trapdoor that lowers onto his head, pops the wiry Zimmerman, as wide-eyed as we are. It is as if he has drifted into his own headspace, where the world and its inhabitants are seen through the rose-tinted glasses of personal insecurity. Everyone is stronger, fitter, faster, better. In short, they are spectacular and Zimmerman must struggle to match them.

Only, of course, he can’t. The individuals are extremes – burly strongmen or elastic contortionists – and Zimmerman is the everyman in their midst. To us, however, with our outsider’s view unburdened by the nit-picking subjectivity of the self, he is entirely their equal. We see a blend of freakishness and idealised beauty, both the strengths and weaknesses to which Zimmerman himself is blind.

However, Öper Öpis is far more than mere confidence-bolstering. It thumps with existential enquiry, begging questions of identity, imperfection and our place within the world. Repeatedly – and often quite literally – human forms become objects and what was inanimate becomes oppositely anthropomorphised. Actions and reactions ripple around the space as if the Butterfly effect were the sole governing principle.

On top of all this is the awe-inspiring scratch score created live onstage by DJ Dimitri de Perrot. Constructed with wit, de Perrot uses an array of techniques, including the graze and scrape of needle on vinyl, sampled LPs that he sends fizzing off into the wings after use and, best of all, looped recordings taken from the onstage action, such that the slap of hefty, sweaty thighs becomes the base beat for a gym work-out sequence. It’s so immediate and synergetic that you begin to question whether the music isn’t dancing to the choreography.

All that said, the actual experience of Öper Öpis is less exuberant than one might expect. As a piece it suffers from being strangely detached and even dispassionate. The rhythm can feel relentless, almost to the point of monotony, where we could use the opportunity to savour its spectacle. There is something almost too cool, too self-satisfied about it, as if each gaspworthy feat is followed by a quick glance in the mirror. That vanity strips Öper Öpis of a vital humanity and prohibits it both from stretching itself towards the tipping point of failure and a wholehearted subscription to the rules of counterbalance that the dual stage requires.

As it turns out, then, the ideas are all there, but the blemished reality is all too often airbrushed out.

Review: Miracle, Leicester Square Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Reza du Wet’s play is like cling-film: thin, transparent, but not entirely without the potential for perverse enjoyment. That’s not to say that Miracle falls into the so-bad-it’s-good category, rather that, in spite of almost everything (natural laws included), it remains just about watchable on its own terms.

A troupe of travelling actors pitch themselves in a crypt in the home-town of their leading man Abel, preparing to give a performance of the medieval morality play, Everyman. Under the stick-and-carrot leadership of actor-manager Du Pre (Tim Woodward, thesping it up like its 1955), the bickering escalates with the arrival of Abel’s coldly congenial ex-wife. Before long, real life imitates art: death makes its presence and purpose known only for Everyman – I mean, Abel – to escape its claws at the last.

Stephen Stead’s translation more or less strips the original of its South African setting, presumably to imbue the work with universality. However, given that the location remains implicit – outside large dogs howl over a barren landscape – the actual effect is to purge it of real pertinence. The multiplicity behind the troupe of actors – and the power politics therein – targets on a general system of government rather than a specific regime and, in doing so, blurs into triviality.

The real criminal in all this, however, is the space itself, which simply won’t allow for our presence to go unacknowledged. Belle Mundi’s design, serviceable though it is, feels like a museum approximation with its clutter of vague gothic crap and painted on stones.

All of which might not be so problematic were the acting style consistent – both with its surroundings and itself. As it is we get Woodward pulling off playing up while Susannah York, as a vintage ‘dahling’ actress, doesn’t. York is fine when acting herself, but her attempts at reaction are so open-mouthed and wide-eyed that, each time, one fears she may have suffered a stroke. Similarly, as the pregnant Lennie, Kate Colebrook downplays sweetly, where Rowan Schlosberg does so to the extent that he forgets to engage us at all. In fact, as Abel, Schlosberg drips with such melancholy that each line seems the opener to a lament for a lost generation. Only Christopher Dingli as the sizzled Antoine pitches his performance at the right level.

And yet, despite all this and the niggling touch of Scooby Doo about proceedings, its not a frustrating watch. Linnie Reedman keeps the pace snappy and hurtles through the plot with a lightness of touch that circumvents its more awkward clunks. Joe Evans’ dusty accordion soundtrack, though it could do with more than two repeated motifs, manages a neat eeriness without which the melodrama would collapse.

Neither can get around the fact that de Wet’s play is a curious relic: more mirage than miracle.

Review: David Hoyle's Licking Wounds, Royal Vauxhall Tavern

Written for Time Out

Don’t be fooled by David Hoyle’s title of choice – he’s not the sheepish type. Instead, the artist formerly known as Divine David returns to the RVT with his trademark combination of grizzled camp, cutthroat humour and gnashing teeth. The result is a ramshackle cabaret-cum-chat-show that’s more of a catharsis than a comedy.

Hoyle, who opts for a ‘1940s rape victim’ look on opening night, is held with reverent respect on the alternative scene. He remains a vociferous revolutionary: his topical first-half routine feels like stand-up with the punchlines replaced by pure pugilism. Tonight there is particular fierceness reserved for Iris Robinson, NSPCC advertising campaigns and disengaged youth. However, his gutsy honesty occasionally swells to the point of disarming itself and Hoyle can come over as a fairground pariah dishing out witty fanaticism for show.

As such, his guests have the vital role of keeping the second-half anchored and entertaining; a task to which the fantastically (gl)amicable Scottee Scottee rises with panache. Though it sags in parts, their conversation is – at its best – fascinating, lighthearted and grippingly heartfelt. It’s Radio Four for a parallel universe or ‘Loose Women’ with brains and balls. Future guests include Bourgeios and Maurice, Boy George and Dickie Beau.

‘Licking Wounds’ could use a firmer structure and more preparation, but there’s no doubting its urgency, intelligence and bravura.