East End Review

Category: STAGE

  • Waiting for Godot to get modern makeover for Arcola production

    Waiting for Godot
    Waiting for Godot: Tom Stourton as Estragon and Tom Palmer as Vladimir. Photograph: Chloë Wicks

    Citizens, the wait is over. Waiting For Godot, by common consent one of the most significant English language plays to emerge from the twentieth century, is coming to a theatre near you as the Arcola prepares to raise the curtains on Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece.

    Traditionally casting older actors in the lead roles of Vladimir and Estragon, this performance will see comedy duo Totally Tom – which you may recognise from viral YouTube hit High Renaissance Man – take up the mantle, in a move aimed at turning traditional treatment of the text on its head and engaging a broader audience.

    The Hackney Citizen caught up with director Simon Dormandy for a peek behind the scenes. So what can we expect from the show?

    “It’s very funny, extremely sad, deeply weird and completely wonderful,” says Dormandy. “Everyone should see the play at least once in their life, and a good production is something you never forget.”

    Written after the end of the Second World War, I ask if the play is still timely.

    “It has in recent years started to feel like a period piece, at risk of becoming choked by its 1950s roots. Audiences at the Arcola production will see it set free from those roots and played as a completely contemporary play, about two young rough sleepers and the mad world they find themselves in once all sense of direction is lost.

    “By casting two brilliant young comedians [Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton] in the roles normally reserved for elderly classical actors, we hope to bring out the play’s immense humour and show that it is absolutely of our time,” Dormandy says.

    So how true does it stay to the original exactly? Very, by the sounds of things, though I wonder how they have made the play relevant to contemporary audiences.

    “By setting it in a recognisable contemporary world, with clothes, settings, props and verbal rhythms that are absolutely of this moment, by treating it as if it were a play written yesterday and allowing ourselves to respond freely to what it suggests, while honouring the text to the letter, and by casting two brilliant young comedians in the leading roles,” says Dormandy.

    So is this aimed at Beckett fans who are familiar with the play, or is it accessible to newcomers?

    “Both. I’m a Beckett fan, as is everyone involved in the production, and I hope we will flush out and throw up some new ways of seeing this magnificent play through our approach,” says Dormandy.

    “But I also want people who have never seen a Beckett play and are a bit put off by all the white wigs, inch-thick make-up and grey clothing normally associated with productions of his plays to feel confident they’ll get a completely accessible and thoroughly entertaining evening.

    “Yes, Beckett can and should be highly entertaining as well as profoundly challenging and, ultimately, life-enhancing.”

    Waiting For Godot
    7 May –  14 June 2014
    Arcola Theatre
    24 Ashwin Street
    E8 3DL

     

     

  • Scan Artists: review – cancer choir’s hymn to self-expression

    Scan Artists
    Bridge Theatre company present Scan Artists at The Yard Theatre. Photograph: Richard Davenport

    Sitting at the front awaiting the start of Scan Artists, it was hard not to wonder if I was about to behold a future household name.

    This production of Evan Placey’s play, about a group of young cancer sufferers who form a pop choir in their group therapy sessions, is by the Bridge Theatre Company, formed of graduates from the Brit School of performing arts, whose famous alumni include Adele and Amy Winehouse.

    A circular area in the centre of the stage is the ‘braided circle’, a place where the ten youngsters meet to discuss their experiences. It’s a serious subject treated atypically, with choreographed movement, music and loud colours everywhere. As the group members battle to come to terms with cancer, and amid adolescent anxieties and rebellions, a love story unfolds.

    Amy Smurthwaite is Jenna, an 18-year-old recently diagnosed with lung cancer, who blurts out her amorous intentions to her soon-to-be boyfriend, box salesman Angus (Sean Byrne), before declaring: “ I’m not a slag, I just have cancer.” As their comically awkward exchange continues, the rest of the cast, outside the main circle of the stage, sing a rousing acoustic rendition of The Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen In Love’. Stylish stuff.

    During the sessions Jenna meets Rox, a northern singer-songwriter played by Zoe West, who inspires her to let go of her inhibitions, dance and fall in love properly. And so the healing power of self-expression is weaved into the narrative.

    The play wants at turns to tug at the heartstrings and subvert sentimentality. It doesn’t particularly achieve either, but the performances are all strong, and the cast’s grasp of the musical side of things particularly impressive.

    Harmomised versions of Outcast’s ‘Hey Ya’ and ‘Survivor’ by Destiny’s Child are convincing, and the use of a loop station on stage shows how a basic grasp of music technology can really enhance a theatrical performance, such as when a snippet of voice repeats during a monologue, like the workings of a troubled mind.

     Scan Artists is presented at The Yard Theatre by The Bridge Theatre Company.
    Until 10 May 2014
    The Yard Theatre
    Unit 2a Queen’s Yard
    E9 5EN

  • New season of drama at Hackney Downs Studios

    Flyer for Baby/Lon, now showing at Hackney Downs Studios
    Flyer for Baby/Lon, now showing at Hackney Downs Studios

    Hackney Downs Studios announces a season of new drama. A triptych of hard-hitting, daring and evocative theatre.

    Season One presents theatrical work on an epic scale 

    The season promises three promenade productions of exceptional quality and provocative content, each exploring the vulnerability of the human condition. The season takes its audience on a journey, a life-cycle of pregnancy, birth, displacement and death, concluding with a tale of astonishing rebirth and renewal.

    Hackney Downs Studios is working with The Big House (theatre company in residence), Renato Rocha for LIFT festival and Living Structures, all innovative theatre companies who believe that theatre and art can transform lives.

    BABY/LON

    Apr 14th – May 3rd Written by Andy Day Directed By Maggie Norris

    Press Night and Season One Launch Thurs 17 April, for tickets email lou@creativenetworkpartners.com

    Dear Daughter, If you never meet me…I want you to know that my first thoughts of you were full of hope. As you grew inside me, I knew nothing about you, and I was still so deeply in love with you that I could hardly think.

    Inspired by the real-life stories and experiences of a care-leaving cast, The Big House return with their second show exploring the harsh realities of having a child taken into care.

    Press Release | bighousetheatre.org.uk

    TURFED

    Jun 9th – 21st

    Directed By Renato Rocha
    Press Night Wed 11th June, for tickets email lou@creativenetworkpartners.com

    Inspired by the ‘beautiful game’, Rocha and an international team of young artists use spoken word, sharp choreography and stunning visuals to explore experiences of homelessness in London and across the world in a production that will make you see your home, family and friends in surprising new ways.

    Created in partnership with Street Child World Cup and part of the 20th LIFT festival.

    LIFT 2014 Press Release | liftfestival.com

    LEVIATHAN

    Jul 5th – 26th
    An homage to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick Created by Living Structures

    Press Night Wed 16th July, for tickets email lou@creativenetworkpartners.com

    A stunning reimagining of Captain Ahab’s relentless pursuit of the great white whale, Leviathan is imbued with the monochrome colours, geometric shapes and functionality of Russian Constructivism. Pioneers of immersive theatre – Living Structures – take its audience through an adventurous journey of stunning landscapes, choruses of singers, giant objects, sailor aerialists and hauntingly beautiful songs that fill you with wonder and break your heart.

    Press Release | livingstructures.co.uk
    Tickets from £5 at hackneydownsstudios.com | @HackneyDStudios | #SeasonOne

  • 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.

  • 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.

     

  • Banksy: The Room in the Elephant – review

    Wall in the Elephant actor Gary Beadle. Photograph: Paul Blakemore
    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.

  • Eldorado – review

    Eva Feiler as Manuela, Michael Colgan as Anton and Amanda Hale as Thekla in Eldorado at the Arcola Theatre
    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.

  • The Nine O’Clock Slot – review

    Poster for The Nine o’clock slot. Courtesy of Ice&Fire
    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.

  • Wuthering Heights – preview

    Cathy and Heathcliff embrace in Wuthering Heights. Photograph: Andy Barker
    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.