Alex Pownall at the London Parkour Academy. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
As a kid, I used to climb trees, swinging from the branches and jumping off. Sometimes I’d fall, sometimes not. But after encountering parkour, I realise that such physical interactions with the environment can just as easily happen on the streets of London.
Parkour is an athletic activity in which practitioners traverse a usually urban environment in the most efficient way possible. Originating in France, this non-competitive ‘sport’ can include running, jumping, climbing or any other form of movement.
Walking out of Trinity Buoy Wharf’s newly opened London Parkour Academy, the UK’s first purpose-built indoor parkour and functional fitness facility, all perceptions of my direct environment changed drastically. Stairs and ramps became, in my imagination, something I could use to move in unique and challenging ways.
Apparently that is how you become a ‘freerunner’. Francois Mahop, alias Forrest, director of the academy, explains that with parkour “your perception starts to change and you realise that everywhere can be a potential spot to train. There are no more obstacles, only resources to help you move forward.”
With training, the brain of a freerunner becomes accustomed to look at the physical environment and question how it can optimise movement. The beauty is that you need only a few minutes of mind-mapping before being able to operate in the space in exactly the way you had imagined. It is all about problem-solving skills.
Parkour has a strong code of conduct. “It isn’t a chaotic sport,” says Forrest. “The first rule is to respect yourself, you need to be physically strong.”
For this reason the Parkour Academy has an area dedicated to fitness, strength and conditioning. Rule number two is “to respect your environment. It is your playground and you don’t want to damage it.” The final rule is to respect other people and to steer clear of private property.
That final instruction presents a challenge, for doesn’t the adrenaline gained from parkour not at least partially come from the ability to access unique places? On this point Forrest makes himself clear: “The real practitioners like the challenge of a new space but respect the environment and do not trespass,” he says.
This doesn’t make parkour any less interesting; I quickly realised that you don’t need the space to be particularly complex to push yourself hard both physically and mentally.
Parkour is a sport that develops your balance; you learn to be precise in your movements, take controlled risks and to be creative with the way you move. And crucially it forces you to be more observant of your surroundings.
Stuff and nonsense? Petri Luukainen ponders his possessions in My Stuff
Like many of us, Petri Luukainen had too much stuff. But unlike many of us, he decided to put everything he owned into storage for a year.
In doing so, he embarked on an exciting ‘human experiment’ which he chose to film. The end result is My Stuff, Finnish docudrama based on the bizarre personal experiences of the director himself, Petri Luukainen.
After a difficult break-up with his long-term girlfriend, Petri descends into quarter life existential crisis mode. He realises his possessions have come to define his very existence and failed to bring him any real happiness, and he finally reaches breaking point.
To solve the problem, he decides to put all his possessions into storage. He is left alone, naked and possessionless in his empty apartment in Helsinki.
Petri sets aside a year in which he can retrieve one item from storage per day. He also forbids himself from buying anything new during these 365 days. Day one sees him running through the snow butt-naked to retrieve his long coat – luckily this doubles up as a standby blanket for the night.
Cutting through his clutter, Petri reappraises his life via his belongings. Each day, he struggles over what is more necessary – a toothbrush, a sock or a sofa.
On the second day of the experiment, he collects his shoes, on the third his blanket and on the fourth his jeans. As the days progress, Petri discovers he can get by with one hundred things, this includes a laptop, debit card, diary and swimming trunks.
In the attempt to discover what he needs to live a wholesome but comfortable life, Petri learns a lot over the course of the year. In turn, this 29-year old recognises the difference between possessions which he needs and those which he simply wants.
After the screening at a Q&A session, the filmmaker confirmed it was an experiment that took a lot of courage. “I was forced to take control of my life, challenge my needs and actually be honest with myself,” he said.
The film apparently came about by accident: “One day I looked around at all the useless shit in my crowded apartment which I’d bought to fulfil some spots in my soul and I thought ‘what would happen if I transported all this stuff someplace else?’. I needed a fresh start. My friends jokingly suggested I film it so we did.”
As Petri is slowly freed from the burden of his possessions, he falls in love with a new girlfriend half way through the year.
What is more, after his grandmother falls ill, she wisely points out that: “Life does not consist of things and things are just props,” summing up the fundamental message of the film.
Through his own personal journey, Petri’s subtle yet bold documentary manages to shed light on the materialistic nature of consumer society.
Wall in the Elephant actor Gary Beadle. Photograph: Paul Blakemore
Banksy: The Room in the Elephant, now showing at the Arcola, is a double-bill that compares the man with the myth and asks questions about what art is and how we value it. But the central character is not Banksy.
For seven years Tachowa Covington made his home in an abandoned water-tank outside Los Angeles. He lived, literally and figuratively, on the fringe, furnishing the tank with found objects and transforming it into a ‘palace in the sky.’ In 2011 Banksy, in town for the Oscars, spotted the tank and stencilled ‘this looks a bit like an elephant’ on its outside. Suddenly the tank had huge financial value and Tachowa was evicted from his home.
The Room in the Elephant is a one-man, 55 minute play starring Gary Beadle of Eastenders fame, based on Tachowa’s story but making no claim to be factual. ‘Don’t no-one want the truth – they want the story,’ explains the imagined Tachowa. Bristol-based playwright, Tom Wainwright, says he “followed his nose into a giant can of worms where truth and fiction lead each other on a merry little dance,” and the play is a self-conscious attempt to ask, ‘who is entitled to tell whose story?’
The play is followed by the short film Something from Nothing made by the Dallas filmmaker and friend of Tachowa, Hal Samples, comprising material gathered over seven years. It presents Tachowa at home in the tank, through being evicted, then documents his response as he becomes internationally famous through Wainwright’s play.
There is an irony in the idea of artwork by Banksy, who has made his name as an anti-establishment graffiti artist, being used to displace this true maverick from his home. Something From Nothing reveals that this is not in fact what happened – in reality Tachowa had already been given notice to leave the tank before Banksy’s visit. But this information doesn’t detract from the play’s essential point: that art can be a form of social colonialism.
It is also a satire on the contemporary circus around Banksy’s pieces. Over seven years Tachowa had invested in a truly original creation, lovingly upcycling a disused water tank into a quirky but comfortable living space. Before the graffiti appeared, it was viewed as a ‘piece of junk’ by the authorities, but it is now being preserved in storage and is the subject of a law suit, simply because the (somewhat inane) observation ‘this looks a bit like an elephant’ has been spray-painted on it. This looks a bit like the emperor is wearing no clothes.
The Room in the Elephant was a sell-out in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2013. Certainly the script is clever and Beadle gives a strong performance as the charismatic fictional Tachowa. It is Beadle’s talent which carries the show, as there’s little in the way of action.
The film Something From Nothing is illuminating but at times incoherent and disjointed.
The Room in the Elephant raises important questions for anyone interested in art and its politics. Otherwise it feels, like Banksy’s art – a little over-hyped.
The Room in the Elephant is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 26 April.
Eva Feiler as Manuela, Michael Colgan as Anton and Amanda Hale as Thekla in Eldorado at the Arcola Theatre
Eldorado’s cryptic depiction of emotional breakdown amongst the bourgeoisie, played against the backdrop of war, scoops us into a world of undefined destruction and well-delineated interior turmoil in Dalston’s spacious but intimate Arcola theatre.
German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s play – which premiered ten years ago at Berlin’s experimental Schaubühne theatre – alludes to the european myth of El Dorado, a lost city of gold waiting for discovery by an adventurous conquerer, or as so many an exploitative European conquistador supposed.
Director Simon Dormandy’s adaption of the play, translated by Maja Zade, rids us of context and does not allow the audience the satisfaction of knowing exactly what is going on.
The war could be Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan. Fear and claustrophobia haunt the stage, and sometimes the distant thunder of war seems only to embody the characters’ inner disturbance. Aschenbrenner (literally: Ash Burner) opens with a foreboding monologue on a darkened stage.
As helicopters whir threateningly overhead, he paints a scene of futile destruction – animals escaped from the zoo and “refugees’ voices ringing out from the oval concrete,” before ending on a property sales pitch for his company, a narrative that will thread the showcase of broken relationships to which we are party.
Those relationships are the mainstay of the production. The tortured love between Aschenbrenner (Mark Tandy plays a wicked, vivid and intensely humorous harbinger of destruction) and his naive, puppet-like employee Anton (Michael Colgan); that of Anton and his newly wed, neurotic pianist Thekla (Amanda Hale), and the one with her ebullient, infuriating mother (Sian Thomas) and toy-boy husband are sharply, unforgivingly drawn.
Like characters in an Ibsen play, we observe, enjoy (or are distressed by) their interactions, but ultimately are held at arm’s length.
Eldorado is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, Dalston E8 3DL until 3 May.
Poster for The Nine o’clock slot. Courtesy of Ice&Fire
“Welcome to the low-budget slot, the low frills, low grade, high shame, 9 o’clock slot,” intones the hospice chaplain John, having beckoned us from the edgy and industrial Red Gallery bar, through an ante-chamber of trees, soil mounds and angels, and on to the theatre, walled by versatile, but non-descript looking cardboard boxes.
The Nine O’Clock Slot is impressively conceived: the audience begin as an (unusually large) crowd of mourners, gathered unwittingly for a paupers’ burial. In a Brechtian move we are forced to confront the play’s themes head on, not allowed to hide behind the veil of disengagement that often typifies theatre.
Hannah Davies and Annecy Lax’s production with human rights theatre company ice&fire weaves through the lives of four individuals, all very different from one another, but who end their lives in the same way – an anonymous paupers’ burial.
Margaret, an articulate old lady mourns her husband Clive: talks, dances, drinks, plays cards with her beloved husband who is no longer there. This is a particularly strong performance from Anna Barry, who lights up the stage with her quick wit and jaunty liveliness. Whilst Margaret carries her own story compellingly, you can’t help but feel that it doesn’t fit in with the other interlocking narratives, though perhaps this is the point: loneliness, and isolation is all pervasive, and what typifies these individuals’ very different backgrounds and experiences.
Not all the acting is as sharp however, and the post mortem analysis by the mortuary assistants is not only gruesome but also does not ring true. They are talking to the audience partly, sharing insights: “Black pepper lungs tells me he lives in the city…Office monkey? Disaffected data hacker.” “This man was 278204 – the body of an unidentified male,” one mortuary assistant adds, as he peels back the skin of the imaginary body before him. The cruel anonymity of death in London’s underbelly is drawn to our attention, but the acting here is crude, though the lines well drawn.
Chu Omambala shows great versatility, playing chaplain John, the laddish Marcus, and finally a didactic auctioneer, peddling graves to the sombered audience. The number of parts played by a few of the actors also emphasises the anonymity of those passing under the city’s radar.
A highlight of the performance was a heated argument between John and carer Kay (Thusitha Jayasundera) about how to treat someone towards the end of their lives. This debate achieved that fine balance of narrative and didacticism – informative without being preachy, which some of the other scenes on occasion veered into.
Connor (Gary Cargill) is a charismatic, ebullient drunk who held up a persona that was angry, witty and lonely.
“None of this wanky, good practice, tick box bollocks”, he says to his carer Kay when discussing the end of his life. This relationship between carer and patient is raw and touching, highlighting the struggles not only of those whose lives are ending, but those who are tending to those ending lives
The play makes for uncomfortable viewing. Melding video, dance, music and acting, sometimes you feel a simpler set-up would be more effective. Scene changes and some performances could be sharper, but its message resonates loud and clear: thousands of people are dying on our streets, left for uncared for and untended in life and in death, and we prefer to turn the other way. The Nine O’Clock Slot urges us to do otherwise.
The Nine O’Clock Slot is at The Red Gallery, 3 Rivington Street, EC2A 3DT until 19 April.
Cathy and Heathcliff embrace in Wuthering Heights. Photograph: Andy Barker
Kate Bush is not the only Wuthering Heights fan coming to town. Helen Tennison’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s haunting tale will be performed at the intimate Rosemary Branch theatre for a three-week run this month.
Director Tennison is a long-term collaborator with the Rosie and has been central in designing the set, which evokes the wild Yorkshire Moors where Cathy and Heathcliff’s tragic love is played out.
“Like all the best directors, Helen has a particular vision,” says the Rosemary Branch’s artistic director Cecilia Darker.
“The set is so designed that you’re not sure whether you’re on the inside or the outside – it’s overgrown and covered in moss and lychen.”
One of the challenges of this production, Darker says, was adapting the play to very different spaces – from their six by six metre stage to the vast space of Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn where the play will head to later on its tour.
But Tennison is excited about this challenge and says the strength of the acting combined with Brontë’s universally applicable story means it can resonate wherever it is staged.
“Brontë’s asking questions about how we love; I think that’s what draws people to it. We’re drawn to it because Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is so passionate, so raw and so all-encompassing.”
Cathy is played by local actress Lucinda Lloyd, one of the six actors in the young cast, some of whom play up to three parts.
Wuthering Heights is at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Road, N1 3DT until 27 April.
Space simulator in Moscow’s Star City. Photograph Mitch Karunaratne
Russia’s relationship with the UK is a strained one these days, with the crisis in the Crimea and any number of high profile incidents attesting to a deepening divide, culturally as well as politically, between the two countries.
But in Memorial Community Church’s Tower Gallery in Plaistow, a new image of Russia (or at least Moscow), has emerged. Here members of Map6 photography collective are holding The Moscow Project, five individual photography projects conducted on a week-long group trip to Moscow last year.
With minimal plans five group members each explored a different aspect of the city: its infrastructure, its architecture, the lie of the city and its secrets. The results, hung around a spiral stairwell leading up a belfry tower, are a feast for anyone interested in outsider perspectives.
Mitch Karunaratne, a primary school head teacher from Hackney, got access to Star City, a secretive and closed community 30 kilometres outside Moscow, where cosmonauts have trained from the 1950s to the present day.
“It’s a secretive base that doesn’t appear on maps and only recently began to accept its location, but you still arrive to it by train,” she describes. “On the platform there’s no station sign, there’s nothing. You walk through woods and suddenly you’re at this walled city which has apartments, schools, all sorts of stuff inside it as well as the [cosmonaut] training base.”
Getting in isn’t easy – Star City doesn’t take visitors. But through a friend of a friend of a friend – the son of an engineer on the Gargarin space programme – she managed it, posing as his non-Russian-speaking girlfriend.
One photograph shows a blue pressurised capsule, resembling something out of sixties science-fiction, being used as a simulator. “Inside the capsule there are two cosmonauts actually training. You can see the shoes they’ve taken off at the side,” says Karunaratne, pointing to some discarded trainers. Another shot shows the outside of a room thought to contain the Mir space station. “It’s being used as a training facility now,” she adds.
Karunaratne, the group’s spokesperson elect, gives me a guided tour of the exhibition. Chloe Lelliott’s project, Subterraneans, is about the Moscow metro, built in the time of Stalin. The stations are known as ‘the people’s palaces’ for their opulent design and grand structures. Lelliot was underground all day for a week, and experienced no restrictions on taking photos. “She was just amazed at just how many people hung out in the subway as well as the beautiful architecture that’s down there,” says Karunaratne.
The wide boulevards and the weather are two reasons why Muscovites may prefer life underground. Heather Shuker set out to document the city’s ‘kiosk economy’, informal retail spaces lining underground passages that connect streets or stations. They appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union but may soon vanish due to increasing numbers of shopping centres and their generally low stock among ruling elites. Usually they are big enough for just one person to stand in, and are run predominantly by women who often sell only one product, such as rubber bands, tights or skirts.
“People coming home from work would be trying clothes on and then she’d be showing you different colours and getting the mirror out. It was a proper shopping experience but underground,” says Karunaratne.
Paul Walsh is a walking photographer from Birmingham, who took photographs while walking the length of the Moscow circular line from above ground for his project Moscow Circular. This twenty kilometre ring allows trains to orbit the city centre continually, an action Walsh says reflects the cyclical nature of life above ground.
A great urban legend involves the construction of the line. When engineers designing the metro showed their plans to Stalin, he is said to have approved them before abruptly leaving the room, his cup of coffee left on the map. The engineers decided to build a line matching the brown ring left by his cup, in a move showing the ruler’s cult of personality as well as explaining why on maps the line is brown.
The Bolshevik October revolution of 1917 is a rough starting point for the birth of constructivist architecture, an approach that values the socialist principles of function and structure in buildings over aesthetics. David Sterry, himself an architect, photographed examples of early constructivism in his project, The Absence of Idle Elements, as well as later buildings and developments that rejected constructivism in favour of Stalin’s demands for an architecture that promotes prosperity.
People talk about getting lost in a city, but in London it is possible to find your way using tall buildings. In one photograph, by Paul Walsh, a man appears from a tunnel while in the background looms one of the ‘Seven Sisters’, a group of skyscrapers from the Stalin-era built in the ‘wedding cake’, gothic style. The buildings, symbols of Stalin’s power, are visible throughout the city, a reminder of the authoritarian nature of his regime.
Karunaratne explains that when the group went to Moscow in May last year they knew 2014 was going to be the British Concil Russian Year of Culture, but events in Crimea and the Sochi Winter Olympics have made the timing of the exhibition fortuitous, for in global politics Russia (and not Georgia) is always on our minds now.
This gives added substance to an exhibition already full of it. The Map6 collective, its members aged from 30-50, are people with a passion for taking photographs and who do it alongside their day jobs, though judging by the artistic standards on display this is hardly apparent.
The Moscow Project is at The Tower Gallery, 395 Barking Road, E13 8AL until 10 May.
Jenny Molloy (left) with her daughter (right) and granddaughter (centre). Photograph courtesy of Jenny Molloy
“Most kids in care do want to write their story,” says Jenny Molloy, author of Hackney Child. “I think it’s because when you’re in care everything is written about you, you’re not really allowed to read any of it and you’ve got no control.”
It’s Saturday afternoon. Over the crackling phone line Jenny sounds bright, cheerful and very much in control. Since the publication of the first part of her memoir, which recounts in stark detail a childhood wracked by poverty and neglect, life has changed dramatically for the former project manager.
As well as enjoying a spell in the Sunday Times Bestseller List, the book is on sale in Tesco, Smiths and Waterstones, and has proved a popular choice with Amazon shoppers. With such success Jenny has found herself somewhat in demand.
“I was so inundated with requests from social workers and ministers and all sorts of people to come and help them improve the care system that I gave up my job,” she says. “Now I’m a consultant in the care world.”
Over the past few months, she has been working with both the children’s minister’s office and Ofsted, sharing her considerable expertise to help support vulnerable children.
It would be nigh on impossible to question her suitability for the role. At just nine years old she arrived at Stoke Newington Police Station with her two younger brothers, demanding to see their social worker. She had decided it was no longer safe to live at home. Jenny spent much of the remainder of her childhood in care.
This bold and courageous move took place the morning after a mob of angry neighbours attacked their family home with missiles and graffiti, in response to the news that Jenny’s mother had been working as a prostitute. What the group did not seem to know was that the children were home alone at the time.
“It’s funny, we were never asked about that night the whole time that we were in care. It was never resolved in any of us really,” she explains.
While it seems absurd that such a severe trauma should be left untouched, Jenny is reluctant to criticise the care she received. In fact she is remarkably positive about a system in which she found warmth, comfort and solace.
“I’ve had such serious backlash from so many people about me saying the care system was a positive thing for me,” she says.
“The people that put round the bad stories are generally people who’ve either lost their kids or had a real terrible time, but a lot of the terrible times are to do with your childhood rather than being in care, if that makes sense. You know, you confuse the two and it’s much easier to build resentment on the care system than it is on your parents.”
Jenny’s relationship with her own parents is complex. Contrary to what we might expect from this kind of story, there was always love, particularly from her alcoholic father, who died a few years ago.
“With my dad, he constantly tried,” she explains. “There was never a point that my dad gave up trying to see us kids and trying to show us in his own way that he loved us. But his addiction was so serious.”
As an adult Jenny has had the chance to browse her social services files, keen to learn about her history and get to grips with the story over which she had no control. It was in these documents that she learnt both her parents had been brought up in care, themselves the victims of terrible neglect. This commonality has helped her on the road to forgiveness.
“They had hidden their own childhoods and all that shame and guilt and abandonment that was going on within them,” she says. “They never had any joy in their lives that I saw.”
Despite the empathy she now feels, Jenny has decided not to see her mother anymore and does not know if she has read or is even aware of the book.
Keeping care a secret is something to which the author can strongly relate. She originally wrote Hackney Child under the pseudonym Hope Daniels – on the suggestion of a social worker with whom she is still in touch.
“The reason why I had a pen name was because I was never actually going to be doing any of this, no one was ever going to know I was behind Hackney Child,” she says. “I’d kept it a secret for all of my adult life from the majority of people I knew, including my kids.”
But in writing the book, she has found the confidence to identify herself as a care leaver.
“The thing that I learnt was that actually I’m all right. I’m not that kind of horrible person – I’m an all right person. I’m caring, I’m quite generous, I’m empathetic – all the things that the social workers were to me I’ve carried into adulthood. I would never have been able to describe those sorts of assets to you before the book.”
Jenny explains that she began the book having entered recovery for alcohol addiction five years ago. It was there that she started to process what had happened to her as a child and embarked on the therapeutic journey of writing about her life. What she has produced as a result is honest, unpretentious and shocking.
The often-horrifying memories on which she draws are interspersed with rare but poignant moments of gentle joy. She reflects on the kindness she found in the Hackney community of the late seventies and early eighties.
“I remember having different people that I could go to at all different times, whether it was a lovely, kind person in the library up Church Street or someone in the fire station club. It didn’t matter where we went, we always had adults that were kind to us, that knew us, that took the time to get to know us.”
But returning to Hackney has proved difficult. Jenny moved away soon after leaving care to start afresh and has since struggled with the place where she grew up.
“It’s almost like that life happened to someone else. Thankfully, my life now is so far removed from any connection to our childhood that it really does feel like a different world.
“When I go back to Hackney, in particular Stoke Newington, anywhere I look there are memories of my parents, of things that happened,” she explains. “But it’s a really complex feeling because when I go back there I feel like I’m home, but then I don’t want to be there.”
Writing Hackney Child seems to have marked a turning point in this already successful care leaver’s life.
“I’ve found acceptance, I’ve found forgiveness,” she says. “I’ve found all of these things that I never even considered before. I just thought that was my life – I’ve got all these horrible things from it and I’ve just got to accept that my life is going to be a little bit crap, but actually it’s not.”
Hackney Child is published by Simon & Schuster UK. RRP: £6.99. ISBN: 9781471129834. Jenny’s next book is due to be published in July.
Doing the laundry: photograph of Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell
Since moving to London in 1981, Phil Maxwell has always lived just off Brick Lane in an 11-storey tower block. It is the perfect location for somebody who is known as the photographer of Brick Lane and its surrounding areas. “I’ve noticed how the London skyline changes over the years,” Maxwell says.
These changes are documented in Maxwell’s new book Brick Lane by Spitalfields Life Books, an intimate collection of photographs dating back to 1982. The book dispenses with words to let the photographs speak for themselves.
His passion for documenting the inner city began in Toxteth, Liverpool, a place that, Maxwell says, “wasn’t too dissimilar to Brick Lane”. Maxwell admits he is particularly fond of his photographs from the 1980s because the “environment was so disconnected”. Maxwell adds: “The area had lots of corrugated iron, dilapidated buildings and that somehow enabled me to focus on the people better.”
Maxwell’s photography captures moments of humanity that are apparent in all three decades. “There’s a similarity in the faces and a common humanity which I’m interested in capturing in my work,” says Maxwell.
However, Maxwell has been witness to a lot of change in the area since 1981. Maxwell says: “When I moved here, it was quite run down but now it is a playground for people who can frequent the bars. A lot of people have been driven out of the area. I preferred it before it became commercialised like it is now.”
This change has not dampened Maxwell’s enthusiasm for the area. The older photographs are special, Maxwell insists, because it shows how Brick Lane used to be a meeting place for Bangladeshi families. “The houses were quite overcrowded, so people treated the street as an extension of their home. It’s like a theatre where all human life is there.”
Asked if the area bored him, Maxwell says: “I never get bored of the area. If I walked out and took a photograph now, there’d be something new for me. It constantly surprises me.” Against a backdrop of change, Maxwell finds interest in the faces of Brick Lane and its surrounding areas.
“It’s interesting to see the different characteristics and personalities on Brick Lane or in Whitechapel and Stepney,” Maxwell tells me. Brick Lane is a crossroads between the city and the “real east end” with people on lower incomes. His photography thrives on the hustle and bustle of the marketplaces, the interaction between people from different cultures and the faces of the people.
When asked if his work was political, Maxwell replies: “It is insomuch that it values the lives and the tribulations of ordinary people. They came together to demonstrate against the war and the BNP and National Front in the 80s and 90s. I celebrate the people and their lives, and the difficulties they have in trying to survive.”
Maxwell’s book is a heartfelt look at a city and, most importantly, its people. “A lot of our culture celebrates celebrity. I think it’s important to show the other side. I am full of admiration for ordinary people and I want to celebrate them in my work.”
Maxwell’s work shows the change in our city, but also celebrates the undimmed enthusiasm of ordinary people trying to survive in London.
Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell on at the Mezzanine gallery, Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA until 26 April.
Dying light: rehearsals for The Nine O’Clock Slot. Photograph: Phoebe Cooke
A new play exploring the rise of modern-day ‘paupers’ funerals’ is to explore the taboo subject of death using poetry, humour as well as audiovisual and physical comedy.
The Nine O’Clock Slot, by East End-based theatre company ice&fire and directed by Lisa Spirling, retraces the lives of four individuals buried in communal graves and will be the first play staged in Shoreditch’s Red Gallery.
Annecy Lax, who co-wrote the play with Hannah Davies, says they were started writing it after developing a fascination with the death industry and the Dickensian concept of ‘paupers’ funerals’.
“We became really interested that in a city where there is so much and so many people, that people can die alone with absolutely nothing, so that the state has to take care and look after their arrangements,” she says.
Lax and Davies interviewed local hospital chaplains, mortuary assistants, soup kitchen helpers and hospice carers for the play.
They also spoke to women in their 70s, 80s and 90s at a community centre in Tower Hamlets who spoke with humour and levity about dying and inspired the play’s title.
“The 9 o’clock slot is the one nobody wants. It’s a real mark of shame if you have to have an early morning funeral,” Lax explains.
The Nine O’Clock Slot is at Red Gallery, 1-3 Rivington Street EC2A 3DT from 26 March until 19 April. For tickets seewww.iceandfire.co.uk.
