Not all of Shakespeare’s works remain popular, but The Merchant of Venice is well-known and often performed today despite the cloud of controversy surrounding it. Perhaps the reason for this longevity is its capacity to keep audiences guessing. Is it a racist play, or a play about racism? Is the character of Shylock villainous or sympathetic? How did Shakespeare view him, and did he ever even meet any Jews?
The Trial of the Jew Shylock is a new adaption by theatre company Poetic Justice, now showing at the Rosemary Branch. But if the title and promotional blurb has led you to believe this is something fresh and different, you might be disappointed – this is Shakespeare dressed in contemporary clothes, and you’ve seen that before. But that’s not to say this version of the play has nothing interesting to offer.
As the title indicates, the play centres on the character of Shylock. But while it is hard to escape the conclusion that Shylock, with his merciless insistence on claiming his pound of flesh, is a bit of a baddie, this adaptation goes some way to suggest reasons for his behaviour. We see a man continually abused by his Christian neighbours, whose chief complaints against him seem to be his Jewishness and his perceived love of money. Their open anti-Semitism is jarring to a contemporary audience, as is the accusation of greed, since money, as this production is at pains to point out, is all anyone around here wants. His abusers despise him for being a money lender while availing themselves of his services, and his beloved daughter has abandoned him for a Christian man who loves her for her money as much as herself.
This Shylock spends most of his time on the defensive, bitterly conscious of the injustice of his situation, and his choosing to reject the offer of big money in favour of an essentially valueless piece of flesh suggests not greed, but rage.
Ashley Gunstock does a remarkable job of showing the humanity and complexity of a man consistently objectified by everyone around him. His delivery of the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ speech and the final forced conversion scene are particularly stunning, confronting the audience with questions about who is showing inhumanity towards whom. Perhaps the victim or villain? debate applies to more than one character in this play.
The Trial of the Jew Shylock is the Rosemary Branch theatre, 2A Shepperton Road, N1 3DT until 1 June.
In the not so distant past, London’s East End was a place to be forgotten, an area readily associated with disease, overcrowding, alcoholism and crime. Either you had the misfortune of living in one of the area’s slums, or you simply stayed clear.
Or, if you’re George Orwell, you quit your steady well-paid job and hit the streets.
In 1927, after five years serving the British Empire as a police officer in colonial Burma, Orwell traded his uniform for rags and spent a few months living a life of abject poverty in two of Europe’s grandest capital cities. He recounts his experience in Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.
In many ways, this experience defined Orwell’s writing career. The poverty he witnessed in London’s own backyard came as an eye opener after years of service in the Imperial Indian Police. Here was Great Britain preaching enlightenment to all corners of the globe, yet in Spitalfields and Whitechapel the living conditions were as bad as in the slums of Calcutta.
The seeds had been sown. Over the following two decades Orwell would use his words to fight social injustice and imperialist and authoritarian rule. His righteous causes would be developed novel after novel, and ultimately culminated in the publication – sixty five years ago next month – of 1984.
So what has changed since the time of Orwell’s writing? What has become of the East End lodging-houses that played such an instrumental role in his writing career?
The simple truth is that most of the squalor he experienced no longer exists here. Many of the buildings, however, do still stand – though under a very different guise.
The Providence Row Night Refuge “for deserving Men, Women, and Children” on modern day Crispin Street used to provide accommodation for more than 400 destitute people, and did so from 1860 until as recently as 1999. Inmates would get a bed for the night, as well as a ration of cocoa and bread. Nowadays it’s a student residence for the London School of Economics. Students may not have much money but it’s fair to say these are two very different levels of poverty.
Then: Providence Row Night Refuge in 1902. Credit: Bishopsgate Institute archives
The Brune Street Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor opened in 1902 and as it its name suggests used to provide nourishment for the Jewish community of Spitalfields. In the 1960s it was still regularly feeding 1,500 clients. The establishment has now been divided into expensive flats.
Fieldgate Street’s Rowton House, also erected in 1902, offered 816 beds. It is known for a fact that George Orwell stayed there, as did Soviet revolutionaries Maxim Litvinov and Joseph Stalin when they attended the London conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907. American author Jack London called it the “Monster Doss House” packed with “life that is degrading and unwholesome”. Today it is known as Tower House and offers a vast array of luxury apartments, some worth more than £1 million – a far cry from the shilling Orwell had to pay for a night’s rest.
These are but three examples of the many East End establishments that have gone from rags to riches in less than a hundred years. Back in Orwell’s day these institutions existed to assist the poor, now the buildings they were housed in serve a wealthier class of person.
But times have changed and so has the area. Would Orwell roll over in his grave at the thought? Perhaps not. In many ways we have people like George Orwell to thank for this progress.
Jack the Ripper’s infamous murders in 1888 made international news and the area saw unprecedented regeneration thereafter. Orwell’s work brought East End misery back to the forefront of social agendas and ensured the regeneration triggered by the Ripper years didn’t stop there.
Whereas people used to avoid the area and even fear it, nowadays people of all walks of life flock to the area to tour the sites – a celebration of immigration, poverty and murder if you will. Thanks for your help George.
“London is a city built on water” states the publicity bumf for writer and blogger Jenny Landreth’s exhaustive guide to the best places to swim in the capital. Our city gets its fair share of watery weather too, so there is a certain logic to the fact it boasts such a wealth of places to do the breaststroke.
Landreth is an entertaining and witty writer who does not merely dive into her subject but takes a running jump along the diving board and deftly somersaults as she plunges into it. It might seem like there is little to be said on the subject of swimming pools, but many have incredible histories, and the newer ones often have a controversial past (Hackney’s Clissold Leisure Centre is a case in point).
This book also allows readers to discover sumptuous and unusual pools within easy reach of the East End such as Virgin Active Repton Park – a swimming pool in a church (yes, really) and King’s Oak Lido on the cusp of Epping Forest. Closer to home, the pool at Shoreditch House and Walthamstow Forest College Pool are also included.
Then there is open water swimming and so-called wild swimming, both increasingly popular activities. At the risk of rhapsodising on the subject, the experience of propelling oneself through the water in a lake or reservoir surrounded by fish and diving water birds is an amazing way to connect with nature, and thank goodness this experience is available at places like the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds and the Stoke Newington West Reservoir, albeit that you have to pay and wear a wetsuit to swim in the latter.
No true wild swimming opportunities exist in London, unless of course you count the Thames, which Landreth does. Though swimming is banned in the busiest stretch through central London, this book details how and where to plunge into London’s mother-river.
Which begs the question: what about the River Lea? Sure, this notoriously polluted waterway is no doubt dangerous to swim in, and there may well be bylaws banning swimming here. Still, some foolhardy adventurer should try it anyway, if only for the sake of novelty.
Swimming London: The 50 Best Pools, Lidos, Lakes and Rivers from Around the Capital is published by Aurum Press. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781781310960
My favourite restaurants are restaurants that don’t feel like restaurants. They have good, simple food, nice people and a well-stocked bar. They feel more like you’re sitting down to dinner at a friend’s house. Just with waiters.
That’s why Efendi popping up in the neighbourhood was such a pleasant discovery. It’s the latest venture from the team behind This Bright Field, which used to stand in its place on Cambridge Heath Road.
This time owner Emel Sumen is going back to his roots and serving authentic Turkish food. It’s billed as a neighbourhood kitchen and is just that – a light and airy restaurant full of scrubbed wooden tables and a long serving bar where you can see the chefs at work.
One wall is floor-to-ceiling windows, so it’s full of light all year round and outside there are plenty of tables to take in the evening air and watch the bustle as the days get warmer.
We took too long picking, so they started bringing out heaped platefuls to try.
We kicked off with a very decent carafe of house red, mopped up with some freshly baked bread and lemony, garlicky hummus goodness.
Next was a mezze plate laden with everything from sigara boregi – warm little cigars of crispy filo pastry stuffed with feta and herbs – to sucuk – grilled discs of spicy Turkish sausage, to crunchy falafel.
The icli kofte was another highlight – moist little balls of bulgar wheat with minced meat, herbs and walnut – as were the fried squares of juicy halloumi-like hellim from Cyprus. I fear there is no upper limit to how much of that grilled cheese I could eat.
Luckily the mains came out before I could find out for certain. We had an impressive platter of morsels from the grill including gently spiced chicken shish – and lamb too for good measure – as well as lamb ribs.
Emel says nothing goes on the menu without his approval and that’s clear. The food is simple, but delicious.
This is a wonderful, homely Turkish kitchen that will draw you in and post you back out into the night well-fed, well-watered and well looked after.
Field Day is gearing up to kick off the summer festival season in style, with an impressive array of established artists, as well as the cream of new talent, signed up to play at the weekend festival on 7-8 June in Victoria Park.
This year’s Field Day is to be spread over two days, with the inaugural Field Day Sunday featuring a headline set from Pixies, who are set to play their only London show of the year.
Other main acts confirmed for Sunday 8 June are psychedelic-adventurers The Horrors as well as act of the moment Future Islands, who in April wowed the US with an astonishing performance on David Letterman.
The line-up for the Saturday looks strong, boasting the icons such as 80s Swedish artist Neneh Cherry and the legendary Thurston Moore, formerly of Sonic Youth, who now resides in East London.
Headlining the main stage on the Saturday are melancholic electronica outfit Metronomy, who will no doubt be playing songs off their critically-praised new album Love Letters. Other acts joining them on the main stage will be Mercury Prize nominee Jon Hopkins and Seun Kuti, the son of Afrobeat creator Fela Kuti.
Although larger than in previous years, Field Day still has a village fete-style aesthetic and will be providing ample entertainment for those looking for respite from the music in their Village Mentality area.
Expect traditional side stalls inspired by country pastimes and fete games, from classic tug of war, sack races and egg and spoon races to more unexpected and fantastic ones like tea bag tossing and even winkle-picking contest.
Burrata with basil oil, chili flakes and sourdough bread. Photograph courtesy of Bones
Shoreditch has an excellent new eating and drinking hole to wrap your chops round.
You won’t find fussy dishes with overbearing flavours here. As the name suggests, the menu is stripped back to good quality meat, fish and vegetables gently seasoned and put together with light touch and an artist’s eye.
The pigeon salad is outstanding. Delicate slices of meat teamed with hazelnuts and vegetable crisps on bright green leaves. It’s short and sweet, with a perfectly judged combination of textures and flavours. I could happily have eaten it all evening.
Then there’s a plump chunk of burrata to tear sumptuous little mouthfuls off. The creamy mozzarella-like cheese would be beautiful on its own, but the splash of basil oil and scattering of chilli flakes and wafer of sourdough elevates it to glory.
Keeping it nice and light, we tried a lovely plate of sautéed baby squid thrown around in a pan with potatoes and cherry tomatoes. The chilli warms without burning and the lemon brightens each bite, pulling all the flavours neatly together.
At the heart of the menu is the ‘Bones’ section, offering everything from sirloin to salmon and including a stew from Provence made with pearl barley and chicken that sounded wonderful.
We went with a rack of lamb in a fragile herb crust with some braised baby gem that was great and the garlicky bowl of rosemary roast potatoes that came with it were even better.
Another highlight is the aubergine, thinly sliced and gently roasted, then topped with bright blood-red sequins of pomegranate seeds. Another well-judged dressing, this time with chilli and tahini, which adds a nutty layer of flavour and is topped off with a scattering of feta that cuts cleanly across the palate.
Remarkably understated and un- gimmicky for Shoreditch, Bones combines great food with an potent cocktails and is the perfect night out for dates, mates and lates.
Bones 52 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DP 020 7033 9008
Benin City, fronted by Joshua Idehen play at a Sofar Sounds gig. Photograph: Sofar Sounds
Songs from a Room, or Sofar, is an East London-based start-up with a strong vision: to bring good music to eager fans.
Born out of a frustration of background noise at gigs, Rafe Offar and two friends set out to develop a concept to curate gigs in unusual settings. “You don’t connect with musicians at large gigs and stadiums and at smaller ones there are often dingy bars where people talk and text throughout performances,” explains Offar. “For me, hearing a trumpet or sax in a living room adds so much excitement and depth to the music.”
Sofar aims to bring unsigned and unknown musicians and artists to a wider audience. “We wanted to help new musicians get a boost by inviting people who love to spread the word about what they discover to our houses. The result was an atmosphere where you could hear a pin drop – an intimate connection between music and fan. It’s quite ‘pure’ and about the music rather than selling stuff,” says Offar.
Sofar is managing to hold 50 gigs a week hosted in spaces such as basements, living rooms and residential warehouses in over 60 cities around the world. According to Offar though, being based in East London does have its perks. “The music here is considered amongst the best in the world so it helps Sofar have impact,” he says.
There are two rules when attending a Sofar gig: firstly, you must listen thoroughly to the music that’s on offer and secondly, you have to stay until the end of the evening. These rules are gently emboldened at every gig out of respect for the music, but also for the audience to broaden and enhance their experience.
Offar gives the example of virtuoso cellist Oliver Coates as one of the favourite Sofar gigs so far. “I was moved at how he wowed an audience who do not hear classical music often at a Sofar gig. He showed us classical at its most dynamic.”
But in an ever-changing music culture where fast-paced, mainstream pop is ever more the norm, how is Sofar reacting to today’s current state of industry? “We involve art and music students and find a range of local community members and leaders with an appetite for innovation and encourage them to debate who is right for us.” Offar enthuses.
Plans to develop the concept are also underway with a festival under their belt in May last year which attracted over a thousand people. Offar adds: “We like to find music that is just plain good – and worry later about the buzz factor.”
“I have to get this in… I like Hackney. It’s got a lot going for it.”
It’s an interjection begging for a caveat, as Tom Clark, a leader writer for the Guardian, finishes up a detailed analysis of precisely how the Great Recession of 2008 has manifested itself in his home borough.
While the relatively peaceful coexistence of cultures here may be praiseworthy, this is no egalitarian utopia.
“Hackney really does make the point about a divided society very powerfully, doesn’t it?” says Clark.
“You’ve got huge stocks of social housing, you’ve got a lot of recent immigration of people who are on very low pay, people on benefits and people who’ve been living in the same house for years and years and then they find out their house is worth £1 million plus – there are very different types of citizens in Hackney.”
And this had never been more clear than in observing the varied experiences of the recession here, and our attempts to eke our way out of it, as illustrated by Clark’s book Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump.
It’s not a book about Hackney, and even London only gets a handful of mentions.
But the borough, Clark’s home for the past decade, provided endless case studies for his far-reaching analysis of the symptoms of recession in Britain and the United States during their darkest economic moments: the Great Recession of 2008 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In attempting to recover from this most recent slump, the two superpowers took very different approaches: Britain with austerity, the United States with a stimulus package.
And in the latter, Clark points out that for all its irresistible comparisons, likening our Great Recession to the Great Depression is only somewhat useful.
True, in both cases the bankers were to blame, with the concealment of debt via “financial wizardry” wielding disastrous global consequences.
But when it comes to sharing the doom, and sharing the recovery in these two “rich but unequal societies”, it’s not like back then.
That sweeping, universal fall of the Great Depression immortalised by Orwell here at home in The Road to Wigan Pier and by Steinbeck across the pond, sets it widely apart from from the varied experiences of The Great Recession – the one that displays itself, Clark says, in Hackney as well as anywhere, compounded further by two exceptional events: the 2011 riots whose “flaming heart” lay at the “grimy asphalt intersection of Mare Street and Amhurst Road”. And after that, the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The year the riots came to Hackney, Hackney’s dole queue as a share of the working age population had risen from 6.5 per cent in spring 2008, to 10.8 per cent. “Unemployment was peaking – at that point if you were young and you were black you were more likely to be unemployed than to be working and living on very inadequate benefits,” says Clark.
But far more visible on the streets of Hackney are the signals of ever-growing prosperity: the endless opportunities to spend money, and house prices rising faster than anywhere except in Kensington and Westminster.
Clark’s research shows that the slump hit Hackney’s black population harder than its white population, with a higher proportion of Hackney’s black and ethnic minority populations claiming job seekers’ allowance, and for longer (32 per cent of JSA claims lasted longer than a year towards the end of the slump, in 2013, compared to 27 per cent across London).
While the Olympic legacy is a target for debate about who’s making use of the pool and the velopark two years on, Clark credits it with creating jobs that “helped Hackney turn a corner ahead of the rest of the country.”
Even for those worst hit by the recession things are improving. The economy has grown 3 per cent in the past year. But where unemployment figures have improved, zero hours contracts and low pay continue to be hidden, unmeasurable culprits. “Where unemployment didn’t fall, quality work did,” says Clark.
“But if you go around the more prosperous streets” Clark adds, it’s ‘recession? What recession?’”
Yo Zushi examines a rollie. Photograph courtesy of Yo Zushi
Folk music is so ingrained in Yo Zushi that the man once described by Marie Anne Hobbs as “the spirit of Bob Dylan for the twenty-first century” no longer feels the need to call himself a folk musician. “It’s just how I think – I don’t feel I have to say it,” he explains, when we meet on a bench in Clissold Park.
Zushi was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1981, and came to Britain as a child with his family. Some of his relatives still live in Hiroshima, and he has grandparents who survived the atomic bomb.
He found success ten years ago as a singer-songwriter, and has shared bills with Joanna Newsom, Scritti Politti and Micah P.Hinson. This month sees the release of single ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, taken from his new album It Never Entered My Mind, which comes out in July. It’s Zushi’s first album for five years, which suggests he either takes these things slowly or that a lot of effort has gone into it.
“If you’re independently making music you have to take the compromise of basically pacing yourself so you can afford to eat some food at the end of the week,” he tells me. Zushi is a journalist by day, and recounts interviewing the song-writer Liam Hayes and asking him a similar question. “He just said: ‘Well that’s just how long it takes if you don’t have any money and you’re relying on favours’.”
The album is named after a recording of Miles Davis playing an old American show tune. “There is no overarching idea behind the album, it was just this feeling that I wanted to create in a bunch of songs. So we ended up recording about 100 songs and whittling it down to nine,” he says.
Zushi is as much a listener and fan as he is a performer and writer. Certain artists fixate him for long periods of time: Elliot Smith, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen.
“If you get really into a thing you kind of start thinking in their language,” he says, “and when anyone writes a song you automatically inject it with a lot of yourself.
“If something appeals to you on an emotional level, whatever it is you feel becomes part of your experience. So it’s not really an invalid thing to use it in your own music. That’s what everyone does really.”
Zushi’s current obsessions are with Alex Chilton of Big Star and Elvis Costello. On the press release he gives me It Never Entered My Mind is described as: “A story album about love in stolen moments.”
“It means absolutely nothing but it kind of gives you the gist,” he says. “I like writing that is open ended and if you get the guy who wrote the song to say it’s about this … it might not be about that for whoever’s listening.
“The job of someone writing the song isn’t to make mini movies where the songwriter is the main character – you need to make mini movies where the listener is the main character.”
‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ single launch is on 8 May at Powerlunches, 446 Kingsland Road, E8 4AE. It Never Entered My Mind is to be released in July.
Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1965, photographer Zed Nelson moved with his family to East London at the age of four after dictator Idi Amin came to power and the situation became increasingly untenable for his parents, both journalists. Nelson’s career as an award-winning photojournalist took a different turn when the car he was travelling in was ambushed while on assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. Turning his lens to what he describes as the “fault-lines in Western society”, he’s produced critically-acclaimed projects covering issues such as gun culture in America and cosmetic surgery. This month sees the release of A Portrait of Hackney, Nelson’s latest photobook documenting the ever-changing face of area.
When did you move to London and what was it like for you moving from an entirely different continent and culture?
I was only four years old when my family moved back to London from Uganda. Idi Amin had come to power and my father was arrested and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and taken away. He was editor of a newspaper in the capital, Kampala. He was released unharmed, but it was time to leave. I don’t remember the transition to be honest, at that age things just happen.
You have talked about the period after your car was ambushed in Kabul and coming home to news of the Dunblane massacre changing the direction of your career as a photographer. Can you explain more about the significance of that?
As a young photographer I had been driven by an idealistic notion of ‘saving the world’, of shining a light on important and ignored issues. This often led me to focus on the ‘developing world’ – on war, conflict, and human-rights issues. But, over the years, I had increasing concerns that instead of ‘saving the world’ I might actually be reinforcing racial stereotypes. It also became clear to me that the media in which my work was reproduced was unwilling to deal with the complexity of the issues. A turning point in my career came when I was involved in a car ambush in Afghanistan in which a friend and my interpreter were both shot and horribly injured.
After several years of photographing some of the most troubled and conflict-torn areas in the developing world, I was already getting sick of photographing young men killing each other in foreign countries with guns supplied by our own governments. I returned to the UK and turned on the TV to see the Dunblane massacre – Britain’s first deadly school shooting rampage in which 16 children were killed.
I decided it was time to focus closer to home, to reflect on the problems and fault-lines in Western society, and to work on a long-term project where I could work to my own rules. Gun Nation explored the paradox of why America’s most potent symbol of freedom is also one of its greatest killers – resulting in an annual death toll of over 30,000 American citizens. That project was an attempt to show the power of the commercial gun industry in the USA, and to question the realities of America’s gun culture.
“I decided it was time to focus closer to home” – portrait of Zed Nelson. Courtesy of Zed Nelson
In comparison to other projects such as Love Me, Gun Nation and In This Land, A Portrait of Hackney has a very different feel and scope. What interests you about this particular patch of London?
Hackney is a personal project undertaken for no reason other than to remember what it was like to just wander the streets and photograph, to explore and think. I’d been travelling for years, working on quite serious subjects, and I had largely ignored my own country and my own neighbourhood.
I have lived in Hackney all my life. It’s where I went to school, learnt to ride a bike. It was always shabby, and in many ways represented a place to get away from. But it’s changing, and by taking the time to see it I kind of fell in love with the area. The images are a kind of meditation on the confusion of cultures, clash of identities and the beauty and ugliness that co-exist in the borough today.
Can you tell me a bit about how and why you first started photographing Hackney?
Hackney suddenly seemed very alive – crazy and absurd. It was always poor – one of the poorest boroughs in London – but suddenly it became trendy. One day I laughed out loud pedalling home on my bike. Passing someone sporting a crazy ‘look’. I thought, I must document this moment.
Berries by Zed Nelson
What story does A Portrait of Hackney tell?
To try and make ‘sense’ of the place seems futile. Hackney is a socially, ethnically diverse melée. It has violence, beauty, wildlife, concrete wastelands, poverty and affluence jumbled together, vying for space. It is tattered and fractured, but very alive. But I am watching with fascination as the area goes through a metamorphosis – and witnessing an extraordinary contemporary social situation develop in the borough, where fashionable young hipsters, yuppie developments and organic cafés co-exist awkwardly with Hackney’s most under-privileged.
The social landscape for an under-privileged teenager growing up in Hackney is a million light-years away from the new urban hipsters who frequent the cool bars and expensive cappuccino cafés springing up in the same streets. These worlds co-exist side-by-side but entirely separate, creating bizarre juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, aspiration and hopelessness. There is a story of gentrification going on here. And it raises difficult questions that are hard to answer – is it good, or bad? I think people have a way of ‘unseeing’ things – which allows us to ignore that which does not directly affect our own lives.
How do you feel about how Hackney is changing – the rampant pace of gentrification, for example?
I enjoy Hackney today more than I ever have. But I also watch with a growing concern for its identity. As the property developers move in and gated luxury apartments spring up on every street corner you have to wonder how will it end? There’s a reoccurring motif in my images of Hackney, of cracked pavements and walls, melting tarmac and weeds and roots bursting through concrete. It’s as if nature is trying to reclaim the land, and Hackney – under-funded, neglected and poorly maintained – is constantly being sucked back into the earth. It amuses me to see this, as I find other, wealthier areas where nature has been conquered depressing and disconcerting – covered over in tarmac, cemented and de-weeded. I hope the property developers don’t win.
