East End Review

Author: East End Review

  • Baby/Lon review – ‘This is not just about entertainment’

    Tough times: in Baby/Lon
    Hard hitting: Baby/Lon. Photograph: George Ramsay

    The Big House brings another gut wrenching production to Hackney Downs Studios with Baby/Lon, based on the lives of the young cast who have all recently left care.

    In the Big House’s favoured promenade delivery, the visceral story is played out in an emotional dance which tears at your senses, while a barrage of visual and audio projection create an unsettling backdrop.

    The show expertly tackles a myriad of issues affecting some children brought up by the government without their families, spanning from gang affiliation and teenage sex to mental health and homelessness.

    In a world of entwined tragedies where almost everyone seems stuck in a hopeless cycle, the main character, Madeline, feels abandoned in life and paranoia is enveloping her.

    Constant analysis and labels assigned by social workers and mental health professionals ricochet through her dreams and enhance her self-hate in an echoing cacophony of judgement.

    And with a lack of role models and a deep seated mistrust of social services, danger is her destination.

    Floating between groups with her desperate need for love translating into promiscuity, she claws for attention from empty connections and is left pregnant.

    With a desire to protect her baby conflicting with past failings and parallels of rejection, Madeline isolates herself more and more.

    And although some of the strongest characters eventually succumb to their assumed predestinations, Madeline’s one true friend, the enduring voice of reason, Estelle, offers an alternative ending.

    The tense, violent finale at the rear of the theatre opens into the real world, heightening the fact that these heart breaking situations have actually happened to the actors and this is not just about entertainment.

    Echoing the Big House’s success in helping the most marginalised young people, one actress, Zoe Finlay, 18, says: “This is my first big showcase performance and it has been a life changing experience. There are pieces in the show which are close to home and some nights I’ve just sat behind the stage and cried. But it is a good way to deal with things – now we have a voice and people are listening.”

    Baby/Lon is at Hackney Downs Studios, 17 Amhurst Road, E8 2BT until 3 May.

  • Wuthering Heights – review

    Heathcliff (xxx) and Cathy (Lucinda Lloyd) on the wild and windy North Yorkishire Moors
    Heathcliff (Jack Benjamin) and Cathy (Lucinda Lloyd) on the wild and windy North Yorkishire Moors

    Emily Brontë’s tale of unyielding, wilful love is familiar to many, but this new adaptation at the Rosemary Branch theatre breathes fresh Yorkshire gales into the 19th century novel and sharply evokes the pain of Cathy and Heathcliff’s self-thwarted love.

    Cathy (played by Hackney-based actress Lucinda Lloyd) is tempestuous, provocative, child-like – a delight and a nightmare. She haunts the play and Heathcliff, himself conveyed by Jack Benjamin with exactly the right blend of hang-dog forlornness and rough jealousy.

    A necessary anchor to the story, loquacious housekeeper Nelly Dean provides the human bridge between different narrative times and strands, conveying the extreme passions of those she cares for. She is both a narrator and a player, as essential to the story as Cathy, or Emily Brontë herself. Emma Fenney is fantastic in this role – sympathetic, busy-bodying and far-sighted.

    Cathy and Heathcliff’s at times fraternal, at times sensual (though unfulfilled) love and its increasing elements of jealousy and possession is captured by the moans and jangles of the Yorkshire moors – music composed by Ben Davies especially for the production, which flits through the narrative like the ghost of Kathy and the shadow of Heathcliff’s resentment.

    In the book the reader’s sense of time is distorted as Nelly narrates the story through up to three different speakers, going back and forth between her present-day conversation with Lockwood and the past of the Heathcliffs, Lintons and Earnshaws. The continual reinforcement of Wuthering Heights as a story is conveyed in Helen Tennison’s production by the emphasis on reading – as a catalyst for the love of young Catherine and Hareton, a prop in the simple, yet dramatic choreography, and an acknowledgment of the text’s faithfulness to the original.

    The sense of time winding onwards, and the intricate interweaving of the family’s fates, seemingly inevitably, often catastrophically, is complemented by the cast changes – George Haynes and James Hayward play up to four characters each, whilst Helen Watkinson doubles up as Isabella Linton and young Cathy.

    A story like Wuthering Heights could easily become claustrophobic in the close confines of theatre, but Tennison’s production keeps us engaged through the haunting play of light and shadow, jangling music and the portrayal of Cathy and Heathcliff’s raging love.

    Wuthering Heights is at the Rosemary Branch, 2 Shepperton Road, N1 3DT until 27 April.

  • Masters of the Airwaves: The Rise and Rise of Underground Radio – review

    Patrick Vernon and Trevor Nelson
    Patrick Vernon and Trevor Nelson

    The ‘VJ’ in Dave VJ stands for ‘vinyl junkie’, and the book he has compiled with Lindsay Wesker collects the stories of people addicted to music and records in the 1980s – soul, RnB, early hip hop and rap. At its heart are the pirate radio stations which were for almost everyone the principal way they could listen to the music they loved – most prominent is Kiss FM, where Wesker and VJ met and which started as a pirate station in 1985.

    Masters of the Airwaves is a collection of interviews with almost everyone who was active in some way in the 1980s black music scene in the UK, including artists, DJs, journalists, promoters and record company people. VJ and Wesker, concerned that “a big part of the UK’s radio music history could be completely passed over if someone didn’t document it”, contacted everyone they could think of from the scene who was still alive with a basic questionnaire: who are you, what did you do, what’s happening now – tell us your story. The book prints their responses word for word.

    The stories are good: the constant danger of on-air electric shocks from the wires running all round the leaky office Kiss FM used as its broadcast HQ in the early days; producers who slept in their studios, with breakfast show presenters stepping over their bosses’ ‘guests’ from the night before; vanished jobs like being a ‘dinker’ (the person who punches holes in records for juke-boxes); DJs who spent the night on rooftops armed with baseball bats in case rivals attacked their station’s aerial to steal its slice of frequency; malfunctioning sound desks and advice from Dave VJ as to what to do if this happens: “PRESS EVERY BUTTON in the vicinity of the turntables AND PRAY!”.

    Bound in a cover the size and shape of a vinyl record and filled with many beautiful photos of album sleeves and eighties fashion, Masters of the Airwaves is something of a collector’s item. Its format of disjointed detail, passionately set-down, isn’t for beginners, though there are a few primers, such as the list of “the big tunes of 1986” or “essential British black music purchases” – to bring the story into the modern era, those are two great Spotify playlists right there.

    Masters of the Airwaves: The Rise & Rise of Underground Radio is compiled and written by Dave VJ and Lindsay Wesker, edited by Patrice Lawrence and published by Every Generation Media. RRP: £30. ISBN 9780955106880

     

  • Dishoom – review

    Taste of Bombay? A Dishoom bacon naan roll
    Taste of Bombay? A Dishoom bacon naan roll

    There isn’t much that beats a fiery Bloody Mary first thing on a cold rainy morning. By the same stroke there isn’t much worse than a disappointing one.

    I’ve had some that tasted like a glass full of watery ketchup, some that tried to be way too clever and many where whoever made it can perhaps only ever have seen a picture of one and tried to make it based on that.

    At Dishoom, a Bombay cafe in the heart of Shoreditch, they’re cold and refreshing, the recipe made with tequila instead of vodka, which gives them a bright and zesty flavour. I can advocate having two of them as you peruse a breakfast menu that is bursting with excellence.

    I felt compelled to try the bacon naan because I’ve heard a lot of hype. Believe it. Warm, freshly baked soft bread, chargrilled bacon and a chilli tomato jam to sweeten the mouthful and brighten the palate. Cream cheese
    and fresh herbs elevates each mouthful to brilliance.

    We also tried the akuri: spicy scrambled eggs whacked on ‘fire toast’ – soft white bread chucked on the grill – and served up with an oven-roasted vine of sweet cherry tomatoes. It too was excellent.

    ‘Cafe’ might be a bit misleading for this sophisticated joint, but does resonate with the relaxed atmosphere of the place. Breezy and open-plan with fans idling on the ceiling, it’s the kind of place you could easily while away a morning watching people streak past on the busy high street outside the window.

    If daytimes at Dishoom are tranquil, night time certainly isn’t. I’d seen the dinner menu and was curious to see what it was like so headed back a week later.

    You can’t book and there’s a queue in the bar and out of the door practically all night. And that’s no surprise. It’s stylish, the food is exceptionally good and the atmosphere is buzzing. Get down there as soon as possible.

    Dishoom Shoreditch, 7 Boundary Street, E2 7JE

  • Merchants Tavern – review

    Roast loin of venison with braised red cabbage and sprout tops. Photograph: Patricia Niven
    Roast loin of venison with braised red cabbage and sprout tops. Photograph: Patricia Niven

    This may be the first time I’ve been seduced by a restaurant’s furnishings before putting anything in my mouth. Like a boozy sojourn into Don Draper’s Mad Men, I loved the low slung leather seats, the discreet little booths and intimate lighting at Merchants Tavern.

    It’s a joint venture between culinary power couple Neil Borthwick and Angela Hartnett, and needless to say it’s exceptionally good, knocking the ball out of the park at every single level.

    The cocktails will blow your mind. We tried the Old Street Fashioned – a sleek tumbler mixed with ten-year old French brandy that hit an empty stomach with a glorious buzz, and the Jane Shores Sour, a pretty little glass of pale yellow with a delicate curl of lemon rind on top.

    Gliding to the table after the fortifying sharpeners, we made short shrift of some deep fried oysters with a zingy garnish of ginger and chilli – the crust crisped to perfection and the meat inside beautifully soft. The raw version, which comes with pickled cucumber and buerre blanc sauce was also divine and dispatched rapidly.

    Next up more cocktails, and this time we tried the Ezra St Runner, made with rum, mint and lime juice, sweetened with agave syrup and rinsed with absinthe. That’s right. Rinsed with absinthe.

    The ham hock ravioli with buttered cabbage in chicken broth was out of this world. A delicate disk of pasta with beautifully flavoured and tender meat tucked inside – the simplicity was deceptive.

    And the quail, so often proving a battle to extricate a mouthful from millions of tiny bones. Here the meat was so juicy and tender it must be cooked on the bone and then pan fried to crisp up the skin. There’s a square of fried fois grois to deepen the flavour, hazelnut pesto and a flick of salty reduction that is just perfectly judged.

    On to mains and a beautiful piece of pollock with a crunchy sourdough breadcrumb crust. The fish came resting in a delicate emulsion made from sorrel and lettuce that’s feather-light and spring-like in its flavours without being in any way intrusive.

    The Jacob’s Ladder – or short ribs – was also cooked to perfection. The tenderness of the meat went beautifully with the slight bite of the lentils, with capers and dill giving it a nice earthy flavour.

    If the menu looks slightly out of range, there’s a lunch deal for £18 or three for £22 that are definitely worth checking out. The staff are incredibly lovely and know the menu backwards, the food is exquisite and the drinks will knock your socks off.

    Merchants Tavern
    36 Charlotte Road, EC2A 3PG

     

  • How We Used to Live: a love letter to London

    Travis Elborough
    Hackney-based author Travis Elborough, author of How We Used to Live

    How We Used To Live, which screened at last year’s London Film Festival and looks set to run on limited release this spring, is a love letter to a London that no longer exists, to that peculiar era after the Second World War when empire was dismantled yet Britain, and its capital city in particular, inspired a global cultural revolution.

    Hackney-based writer Travis Elborough was one of a team of four who crafted the picture, along with members of pop group Saint Etienne Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, and the director Paul Kelly.

    “As someone who usually writes books alone, I found it all enormously enjoyable and creatively quite liberating,” reflects Elborough.

    The film is a story of the city told through footage collected from the BFI National Archive, with music from Saint Etienne and melancholic musings from Ian McShane’s narrator.

    Setting the scene of the film, Elborough addresses its titular conceit: “The London of How We Used to Live is a London of landlines, vinyl records and cassettes, newspapers and news bulletins, its working days more readily defined, if not nine to five then something closer to it, its public transport still in public hands, ditto its utilities and much of its housing.”

    But for all that the film is a celebration of yesteryear, How We Used To Live does not resort to ‘good old days’ sentimentality.  “We can and probably do all worry that too much of the old stuff is getting lost, but equally the place would ossify if nothing ever changed,” Elborough says.

    The film drifts back and forth in time and has a hypnotic, dream-like quality. This is best illustrated in a sequence where a curly-haired skateboarder glides down Tower Bridge, just barely avoiding pedestrians, while the music swells.

    “That scene is just one of those absolute gems that you unearth when producing a film like this,” enthuses Elborough.

    The narrative, spoken in McShane’s distinctive tone, amplifies this sense of London as a dream but is firmly rooted in reality. “The narrator is intended to be the kind of voice of memory, so we have things like defunct telephone dialling codes, the shipping forecast, and we have snippets of nursery rhymes, the names of roundabouts and road junctions, and quizzical remarks and questions, as well as thoughts about the city and London.”

    An atmospheric documentary without coherent narrative is always going to be tough to sell to audiences, so how would Elborough pitch it? “How We Used to Live is The Spirit of ’45 for fans of Kent 45s – the classic northern soul label whose releases were cherished by mods back in the day,” he says. And if you understand that reference then this film was most certainly made for you.

    See How We Used to Live at Curzon Soho on 16 April.

  • Grimm Tales for Young and Old – review

    Annabel Betts is Little Red Riding Hood in Grimm Tales. Photograph: Tom Medwell
    Annabel Betts is Little Red Riding Hood in Grimm Tales. Photograph: Tom Medwell

    Immersive theatre comes to Shoreditch Town Hall this month with a stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old.

    Audience members are guided through the stunning fairytale world assembled in the basement catacombs of Shoreditch Town Hall. This unique space, a web of dark subterranean rooms, has been transformed into a forkloric neverland, with faded white dresses hanging from the stairwell and scraps of poetry and old photographs lining the walls.

    Five fairytales have been plucked from Philip Pullman’s 2012 book. Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel will be known to everyone, but are told here in full macabre detail. Simon Wegrzyn is a wonderfully wicked wolf, fleet of foot and devilishly sly, the perfect foil for Red Riding Hood, played with wide-eyed naivete by Annabel Betts.

    The staging and set design is exemplary. Granny’s bed is vertical, so the audience, assembled on two sides of a long room, see the gory denoument from above, and in Rapunzel the tower prison is layed across the stage floor. This production has clearly not been done on the cheap, though some of the best details are simple ones. A chest in the centre of the room in The Three Snake Leaves, a tale of misplaced love and treachery, becomes a tomb, a boat and an instrument of war, while in The Juniper Tree a murdered boy seeks revenge on his stepmother by becoming a bird, represented on stage by an umbrella. Director Philip Wilson’s adaptation of Pullman’s text is swiftly-paced and clever; characters narrate the tales as well as being part of them, a nod to the oral tradition from which Grimm Tales originated.

    The humour is dark and edgy and there is a well-developed sense of the bizarre in stories such as Hans-My-Hedgehog, a tale of a half-man, half-hedgehog creature who rides a cockerel and herds pigs while sitting in a tree playing the bagpipes. The Brothers Grimm may well have approved.

    Grimm Tales for Young and Old is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT until 24 April.

     

  • Fernando Messulam: the restaurant owner with a ‘steak’ in opera

    Fernando Mussalam, 30 March 2014
    Catering for opera: Fernando Messulam. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    Performing arts is part of Fernando Messulam’s life. Originally from Rosorio in Argentina, he used to live in front of the city’s Opera House. His mother was a ballet dancer, as were all his nannies.

    Unsurprisingly, he too entered the arts, but in a less traditional discipline – breakdancing. Later, while auditioning for a musical, he discovered he was able to sing opera as a tenor.

    But alongside artistic ambitions, he started catering and managed a café located inside the Opera House. His waiters were mimes and there was a tap dancer at the bar. It was “quite a bohemian gathering”, he says. “Beyond food it was about the social experience.”

    It is this experience that Messulam decided to reproduce in London. Since last year, he has managed De La Panza, an Argentine steakhouse on Southgate Road. He tries to be different but not “mechanically different”, preserving the local feel of the restaurant alongside the kind of vibe you might find in an Argentine bodega.

    Music is a big part of this, and once a month on a Sunday musicians gather to play and sing. “Cinderella here is the Opera” he insists. “It is not rehearsed, there are no numbers. We all know what we are doing, so we just bring it on!”

    The next Opera Day is on 27 April when Messulam will be accompanied by tenor Yuri Sabatini and Orpheus Papafilippou on violin. The event will last from 2-7pm and people are welcome to stay all afternoon, as if they were in their own living room. “The only thing is that they don’t have the keys!” he quips.

    De La Panza
    105 Southgate Rd, N1 3JS

     

     

  • Yoko Ono? Oh yes!

    Yoko Ono at Cafe Oto. Photograph: Dawid Laskowski
    Yoko Ono at Cafe Oto. Photograph: Dawid Laskowski

    Do some free association on Yoko Ono and what do you get? John Lennon, New York, the Beatles’ split, world peace, dark glasses, bed-ins, Fluxus/performance art. Looming over all of these is John’s shadow, and the fact she may be viewed by many as an appendage to his latent messianic complex. Yoko herself may well be aware of this, as much of the evening involved a febrile self-explanation that at times boiled over into self-justification.

    This started explicitly – not just in the sense of the opening video close up of some ambulant buttocks with interstitial vulva in evidence – but with a collaged biopic accompanied by a succinct narration: “Yoko is provocative, confrontational and human”. We saw Yoko playing piano aged around five, the bed-in with swarming press photographers, Yoko the flâneur in New York, and then her naked body being traipsed over by a fly.

    Just as the fly was preening itself over her mons pubis, the real Yoko appeared to rapturous applause, a sprightly 4′ 10” in trainers and dark glasses. The expounding then continued, with brief descriptions of her views on fracking and an obligatory nod to some perennial world peace obfuscation, interspersed with instructions on “not to try” when hugging, dancing and making love. In something of a knight’s move, there was a stern word about not taking photos during the show.

    Then the music started. Stellar names get stellar backup, and tonight Yoko was joined by Thurston Moore (guitar) and Steve Shelley (drums); both members of recently disbanded Sonic Youth.

    Something other than self-explanation next supervened: the fact that Yoko is 81 and in her dotage. This was born out by a ticking wrist watch held to Moore’s neck pickup, to which Yoko plangently listed all the things she might one day miss, “clouds, mountains, trees, snow, city lights”. Shelley joined the throng with rich cymbal swells, before Yoko deflated everything with a long sigh.

    This sigh together with her vocal delivery – bridging the gap between narration and music – combined the fly-on-the-pudenda film, led me to the possibly facile idea that in inhabiting the liminal zone between music, performance art and – on this occasion at least – short film, appraisal through the prism of one of these was impossible. It did however allow Yoko to exploit their intersections to maximum effect.

    This was exemplified by the next piece. It started with a fragile call and response between Yoko’s octogenarian pulmonary reserve and a tremulous metallic sliver from Moore’s Fender. Both were mirrored physically with Yoko exhorting Moore with outstretched arms, just as his body contorted with every stuttered response. This then built up as the fly decamped to Yoko’s areola, whilst she began to unfurl a spectrum of abstract ‘ahhh’s’ ranging from sarcastic hyena snicker to paroxysmal post-lacrimal gasping. The emerging cacophony plus its associated delivery neatly mirrored what was being projected. The buzz of the fly, Yoko’s scissors cutting black cloth and a purple bra being unclasped were all obliquely recreated by the band.

    Things then swirled around on this frenetic inter-disciplinary level before the denouement really sealed things. Yoko and Moore prowled around each other – both wearing but not playing guitars – in a fashion combining some kind of mating ritual with hunching Japanese deference, before they suddenly came together clashing strings with the ensuing feedback abruptly bringing things to a close.

    Yoko has been through a lot (bereaved; estranged from a child; never viewed outside prism of John; mauled by popular press), and it is inspiring that at 81 she’s still going for it. If not exactly liberated from this historical baggage herself, seeing her deal with it in her cross-disciplinary way was in itself liberating. Would Yoko Ono be who she is without John Lennon? An answer in the negative would be a truism, not a criticism. After all she’s human – and provocative and confrontational.

    Yoko Ono played Cafe Oto, 18-22 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL on 23 March 2014. 

  • Record Store Day vinyl countdown in Shoreditch

    Feeling Vinyl: Sir Paul Smith. Photograph: Carsten Windhorst / FRPAP.com
    Feeling Vinyl: Sir Paul Smith. Photograph: Carsten Windhorst / FRPAP.com

    A big part of buying vinyl has always been the sleeve design, with the covers of albums such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon being arguably as distinctive as the music contained within.

    For Record Store Day this month (19 April), 700 original vinyl sleeves including designs by Dinos and Jake Chapman, Jeremy Deller and Sir Antony Gormley will go on sale for £45 each with the proceeds going to the charity War Child.

    The project, called Secret 7”, is now in its third year. Members of the public as well as invited artists design a record sleeve for a song chosen from a list of seven. The tracks are a mix of genres by new and established acts, who range this year from Lorde and Jake Bugg to Black Sabbath.

    Secret 7” is so-called because, on the day of the sale at Downstairs At Mother in Shoreditch, none of the buyers will know which artist created the sleeve or which song it is for until they have parted with their money.

    Founder of Secret 7” Kevin King, says the project engages with the aims of Record Store Day by fostering an appreciation of the vinyl format. And although there is the option to submit digitally, taking part otherwise means visiting your local record store to pick up a design pack.

    “You can do with it whatever you will. We’ve got sleeves made of wood, sleeves made of metal, sleeves that people have put felt on or cut bits out,” says King.

    This year’s project was launched on 7 January, and King has personally received 3000 sleeve designs since then. Many of them came through the post.

    “It was a bit like Christmas every day with the postman knocking on the door with a handful of sleeves,” he jokes.

    The submissions have been whittled down to 700, which the public can view on the weekend prior to the sale.

    Secret 7” is at Downstairs at Mother, Biscuit Building, 10 Redchurch Street, E2 7DD from 12-13 April (exhibition) and on 19 April (sale).