East End Review

Blog

  • Hackney playwright’s murder musical to be made into film

    Anita Dobson as June in London Road
    Anita Dobson as June in London Road

    Hackney-based playwright Alecky Blythe is one of the UK’s leading verbatim theatre practitioners, with her plays created from real dialogue and real life events. Last year she used it to great effect in Little Revolution, about the London Riots. Now she is involved in a film adaptation of her greatest triumph to date, the acclaimed musical London Road, about the serial murders of five sex workers in Ipswich in 2006.

    What drew you to this dark story?
    At the time I was collecting material for my film The Girlfriend Experience – the women were saying I should go to Ipswich, because that’s where the story was. Eventually I did, in case I found anything I could use. It was so interesting, so dynamic. It was an extraordinary time that people just wanted to talk about. For ages the material sat on my shelf. I returned for the trial 18 months later to gauge the temperature, and that’s when I found out about London Road in Bloom, a flower competition residents were running. My focus then became specific, and London Road became central to the story. It was one that hadn’t yet been told, about a community coming together to heal itself.

    What you do on the stage is very innovative. How does it translate to film?
    The big challenge is that film is more visual. Verbatim is by its nature wordy, so it was my intention to consciously pick up active material on the street. I spoke to people when they were shopping, or at work, though I still did have to invent scenes and create a different type of stage direction. In film, viewers want to indulge their visual sense, so I tried to tackle that.

    How important was it to you that the killer had no part in the film?
    I didn’t want that to be the focus. I wasn’t asking about him or the women in my interviews; verbatim isn’t gossip, it’s about how people are affected. I wanted to know what it was like living on the same street as a serial killer, and people responded well to that. They didn’t want to talk about sensationalist stuff, they just wanted to offload.

    Why do you think music works so well in London Road?
    I’d always wanted to make a musical. In my play Cruising, there’s a scene where a couple dance a waltz to Stevie Wonder. It’s such a relief from all the talking, and it gave me the idea to make a verbatim piece with music for release. Later, I attended a workshop at the National Theatre with several writers and composers. I took some stuff to experiment with – material I’d collected at the time of the Ipswich murders. The composer Adam Cork and I just found that music worked so well with the interviews of scared women and chivalrous men. They were bitty and fragmented, but the music glued them together and enriched the subject matter. Adam was so brilliant, so forensic with the detail that there was a real joy in the challenge of lifting the speech. We found originality in the patterns.

    How do you think people endure this kind of event?
    Through coming together. Cultural and social boundaries don’t matter in an extraordinary situation. Friendship and connecting in a shared experience is what got them through. The people of Ipswich dared to go out and found that, through awful circumstances, they connected. It’s a commonality in all my work.

    What do you hope viewers take away from this?
    Ultimately it is uplifting. There’s a bittersweet ending. These people now have friendship and each other, and a community that looks out for them. I want viewers to take away the power of community.

    recordeddelivery.net

  • Play about Jimmy Savile is an ‘incredibly important story’

    Alastair McGowan as Jimmy Savile. Photograph: Helen Maybanks
    Alastair McGowan as Jimmy Savile. Photograph: Helen Maybanks

    No subject, it seems, is too raw for Jonathan Maitland. After using drag to depict Margaret Thatcher in his debut play Dead Sheep this year, the journalist turned playwright is now tackling the most notorious sex abuser of recent history: Jimmy Savile. An Audience with Jimmy Savile is based on real events, uses almost verbatim dialogue, and stars the renowned impersonator and actor Alastair McGowan. While the play might sound more frightening than entertaining, Maitland insists it is an important story that needs to be heard.

    Why did you set out to write play about Jimmy Savile?
    I’ve been a journalist for 30 years and I think it’s an incredibly important story because of how it impacts on the way we deal with allegations of abuse, our cravenness before celebrity and the libel laws. My first instinct was to cover it journalistically on TV, but after Dead Sheep I realised you can tell a story more effectively and get to a greater truth (that’s a bit of a cliché but it’s true) by doing a dramatised form of journalism. It was a revelation to me that you can get to truth more effectively by using a little bit of drama.

    What is the play’s narrative focus?
    There are two bits to the narrative: a TV show with a This is Your Life-style audience, where the great and the good and famous line up to praise Savile, and he acts the fool and the clown; and the other, more important narrative is following the struggle of someone he’s abused to be believed, to be listened to and to find justice. It’s based on real life as there was a woman who tried to confront him, and this takes it to that next logical step which shows her getting an audience with him and confronting him. The play’s two key themes are: how did he get away with it, and how do you come back from the abuse and not being believed, which was for some people the worst bit. Ultimately we’re trying to make a play about forgiveness and redemption and hope and renewal, something I hope will come through very strongly by the end.

    What makes theatre the right medium for tackling the subject of Jimmy Savile?
    There wasn’t a camera there when young women or girls were telling their parents what happened in private. You can’t get that across in a TV documentary. At best you might have someone in silhouette talking about it. But in a play you can recreate what happened in private, which is an incredible eyeopener and gobsmacking for the audience. You can also in a play – which we have done – recreate a police interview with Savile, which happened about six years ago in which he runs rings around them. It’s an incredible gift for dramatisation and an incredible public service to bring to life the moment where he got off the hook. I think theatre’s more immediate and more in your face literally. And it can be more powerful.

    How did you write the play?
    It’s not 100 per cent verbatim, but if there’s such a thing as ‘part verbatim’, then it’s that. It’s based on police interview transcripts, public inquiry reports, interviews with abuse victims, YouTube – which is very useful – and books by and about him. It takes quotes from him and it’s based on real events. Some of dialogues have been imagined, though I’m very happy that he either said or could have said everything in the play.

    And part of the research was that you spoke to and consulted with abuse victims?
    Yes, and I’ve met with Peter Saunders, founder of NAPAC [The National Association for People Abused in Childhood]. He’s very supportive and if the show makes a profit a substantial proportion will go to his organisation. He understands what we’re trying to do and he’s called us an important part of the conversation that we need to be having about abuse.

    Is it true that you have received a “tsunami of abuse” about the play?
    It wasn’t a tsunami, it was more of a small trickle. But yes I got a few insults on Twitter and I engaged with them all and explained what I was doing it for, and a lot of critics became supporters once I’d explained it, which was very gratifying.

    What does Alastair McGowan bring to the part of Jimmy Savile?
    He’s very compelling, he’s very unnerving, he’s very skilled at portraying the full gamut of the personality: the entertaining, eccentric side, but also more importantly the horrible, nasty, dark and psychopathic side.

    What do you say to people who think it is ‘too soon’ for a play about Jimmy Savile?
    He died four years ago, and there’s not a flag that goes up to say right it’s now okay to do a play or TV drama about Jimmy Savile. I think you have to take the opinions of those who are most closely affected by it, and that is the victims. And the ones I’ve spoken to don’t think it’s too soon at all. In fact their only issue with timing is that this story and their stories weren’t told sooner. There have been 44 NHS reports, four police reports and God knows how many articles and documentaries, so now seems the right time to try and make sense of it all in one piece of dramatic journalism.

    An Interview with Jimmy Savile is at Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, N4 3JP from 10 June – 11 July.

  • Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage – stage review: between a ruck and a hard place

    The cast of Crouch, Touch, Pause Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman
    Tackling discrimination: Crouch, Touch, Pause Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman

    In 2007 the Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas published the first of his two autobiographies. In the introduction he writes “As soon as I was made captain of Wales, I pledged to be honest to myself and honest with everyone around me.”

    Two years later he came out as gay and has since called the book “one big lie from beginning to end”.

    Thomas’s journey is re-told in Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage, a new play by Robin Soans created by Out of Joint Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Wales. Using text from real-life interviews, the play sees six actors play Thomas, who is known by his childhood nickname ‘Alfie’, with each taking their turn to sport the Welsh jersey and catch the rugby ball, which indicates a change of actor.

    Thomas says he wasn’t scared that people would reject him because of his sexuality, but because “suddenly you turn around and tell them you’ve been lying to them for twenty years”.

    As is so often the case, his best friend Compo had known all along. But his wife and parents hadn’t – and nor had his fans.

    But it’s not just a play about Thomas. As he suffers the taunts and jeers of the crowd, and his secret gradually becomes public knowledge, we also hear the testimony of a young girl whose own taunts and jeers drove her to edge of the void.

    Darcy, played with tenderness and humour by Lauren Roberts, is a character created from interviews with two suicide attempt survivors from Bridgend, South Wales.

    Both parties live to fight another day and even meet to share their experiences, Alfie confessing: “There’s so much of me I see in you.”

    The show comes to a close with a demonstration of the scrum – the inspiration for the title – the forwards huddling together before crouching to engage their opponents.

    The pressure and excitement of various big match encounters punctuate the story as it unfolds and we are frequently presented with a huge gladiator of a man – strong and brave, and totally unequipped for the labours that face him.

    Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 20 June.
    arcolatheatre.co.uk

  • Senior moments: a photographer’s brush with old age

    Errands in the Snow. Photograph: Kyoko Hamada
    Errands in the Snow. Photograph: Kyoko Hamada

    Photographer Kyoko Hamada spent the last two years as an octogenarian trying to come to terms with getting old.

    The 42-year-old Japanese-born artist regularly put on latex makeup and a grey wig, and took photographs of herself around New York as fictional character Kikuchiyo-san.

    Photographs of Hamada’s exploits as an older woman are on show this month at Dalston’s Maybe a Vole gallery, with a book in the pipeline, pending the outcome of a Kickstarter campaign.

    Hamada says she can’t remember when or how her interest in ageing began, though she cites little things like the discovery of her first grey hairs, as well as bigger losses such as the death of her father.

    I Used To Be You dates back to when Hamada, who lives in New York, was doing voluntary work visiting older people who live alone in the city.

    Photograph: Kyoko Hamada
    Difficult Button. Photograph: Kyoko Hamada

    She says: “I always wanted to photograph older people but it’s hard to meet them, so I thought it would be a really nice way to make friends and eventually they’d let me take photographs of them. But they kept saying ‘I’m too old to be photographed,’ or ‘What you want to do that for?’”

    Then one day a friend told her about some ageing make-up; liquid latex that makes skin look wrinkly. Next she found what she calls the “perfect grey wig”. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, Hamada saw someone else – a person she wanted to photograph.

    “She didn’t have a name at first but when I had a good amount of pictures I thought she should have a name. I wanted her to have a unisex name and an old Japanese name. I then heard of this old Japanese comedian whose name was Kikuchiyo-san. I thought it was hard to pronounce perhaps but a good name.

    The photographs show Kikuchiyo-san doing everyday things: taking an afternoon nap, doing up a button on her blouse, carrying shopping or walking through the park.

    “I’d figure out a location and what she would be wearing, using a self-timer for indoor shots,” explains Hamada. “For outside I brought a friend along because I felt uneasy about leaving a camera in the middle of the street.”

    Photograph: Kyoko Hamada
    Spring Flowers. Photograph: Kyoko Hamada

    Although Hamada wasn’t always wandering the streets of New York as an older woman (“I have rent to pay, you know,” she says) she would set aside a weekend every three weeks or so to be Kikuchiyo-san.

    “It’d be from morning to night and I’d bring three different outfits. I’d be using the subway and public transport, hanging out at a restaurant, eating lunch…”

    Being nonplussed when confronted by a public show of eccentricity is something big city dwellers do well. But wasn’t she worried about getting found out?

    “Yeah I was always paranoid,” she says. “One time it was a hot summer’s day and I was wearing a wig and body suit with body stuffing, running around carrying a camera. Then I got on the subway and people started looking at me horrified. When I caught myself in the reflection I saw my makeup was running and my wig was almost falling off.

    “But as long as the makeup is good you really can blend in to the city, no one will bother you. They will also maybe help you with bags, give you space and let you go through. It was so sweet though I did feel guilty. I kept thinking don’t treat me with respect, I am deceiving you!”

    Hamada has mixed views about whether her experience of being 80-something has allayed any fears about getting older.

    “Maybe in some way I’m relieved,” she says, “because I already feel I’ve met that person. It became a very close reality to me. But as long as we live this is where our vessel is going, it’s in one direction you know? It’s nature. We’re slowly deteriorating.”

    I Used to Be You is at Maybe a Vole Gallery, 51a King Henry’s Walk, N1 4NH from 4 June
    maybeavole.com

    Photograph: Kyoko Hamada
    Afternoon nap with watermelon. Photograph: Kyoko Hamada

     

  • Why life as an outsider isn’t what it seems

    Robert Kelsey
    Outsider theorist: Robert Kelsey

    Feeling cheated by an education system “too linear and too rigid” to accommodate those who didn’t conform, Robert Kelsey left school with only one O-Level.

    But instead of allowing feelings of inadequacy and ignorance to paralyse him, he has gone on to become the owner and CEO of a successful PR agency and a best-selling author too.

    Kelsey’s latest book The Outside Edge, sets out to help fellow ‘outsiders’ succeed despite their disadvantages.

    The Hackney-based author suggests London is the outsider capital of the world, with Hackney having the city’s highest concentration.

    In the book Kelsey argues that spotting an outsider is not a matter of race or gender, but a combination of up to twelve characteristics including sensitivity and cynicism.

    However, unlike other social observers, Kelsey denies that being alternative is a prerequisite to success.

    “Despite the myth peddled by [Malcolm] Gladwell (and others), the attributes of genuine outsiders are usually highly disabling – with most successful outsiders no more than insiders with an attitude,” he writes.

    The book is a manual towards identifying one’s own outsider status and reframing disadvantage or suffering towards success.
    Kelsey sees Hackney as a destination for outsiders and argues that “it has managed to stay relevant through all of the changes, from something almost anarchistic to entrepreneurial”.

    In particular, he sees the transformation of Shoreditch into a hive of entrepreneurship as a logical mutation of the radicalism that characterised Hackney through the 1970s and 80s.

    In his opinion, Hackney has an attitude of ‘anti-collectivism’ – a refusal to conform, and instead maintains a population of fierce individualists.

    Frequent references to contemporary culture and popular philosophers make the book’s theory more accessible and engaging.

    Above all, Kelsey’s mission is a human one, as he states that an original perspective on the world more often leads to suicide than to conquering the world, “a depressing conclusion that every word in this book is aimed at preventing”.

    The Outside Edge is published by Capstone ISBN: 9780857085757 RRP: £9.99

    Outside Edge 372

  • Why it’s time for a Virtual Reality check

    Shafi Ahmed, Virtual Surgeon
    Shafi Ahmed, Virtual Surgeon. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    Do you ever feel overwhelmed by technology? If so, you are not alone. However, tablets and smartphones are only the start. With Virtual Reality on the rise, you will soon be immersed in it. Literally.

    Without leaving your living room, you’ll be able to travel the world, feel what it is like to live in a refugee camp in Jordan or visit your new flat before it is built and decide on the interior design.

    “Virtual Reality first came around 25 years ago, but people’s imaginations heavily outweighed the technology,” says Steve Dann, a digital media specialist who runs the East London Augmented Reality Meet Up Group.

    Now technology is catching up with the imagination, and East Londoners are using Virtual Reality in new and diverse ways, from making virtual art galleries to treating brain injuries and training surgeons.

    Storytelling

    News journalists and documentary makers could soon be telling stories using Virtual Reality, giving those turned off by conventional news coverage a new way to engage.

    Hoxton-based Edward Miller, Head of Visuals at Immersiv.ly, is one of the very first to have filmed an immersive news documentary using 360-degree video.

    Hong Kong Unrest, about the city’s pro-democracy protests, was filmed using six Go-Pro cameras clustered in a 3D-printed rig around the size of a Rubik’s Cube.

    Louis Jebb, CEO of Immersiv.ly, explains that Virtual Reality is “taking the mediation out of media – or reducing the mediation”.

    “For a news piece for example, you feel as a viewer that you are the news editor. For an art gallery you feel like you are the art critic,” he says.

    With Virtual Reality, spectators need not be passive or static. The format allows them to change viewpoint, and as they physically enter and move in the space with the help of motion trackers, they can interact, participate and comment.

    “With that comes a lot of responsibility,” Jebb adds. “When you take someone into the virtual world they’re going from a place of reality into a place of Virtual Reality so you’ve always got to think about how you bring them back. It is a powerful tool.”

    Patients’ recovery

    Staring at four walls in hospital is nothing if not boring, but doing so whilst recovering from a brain injury is potentially harmful.
    “We know that the environment of post-recovery is incredibly important in determining the extent of your recovery,” says Dr Paul Penn, a lecturer in psychology at the University of East London.

    Research co-authored by Penn that was published in 2008 demonstrates the benefits of virtual environments in paediatric neuropsychological rehabilitation following traumatic brain injuries.

    Penn explains that creating an enriched and stimulating environment in the real world of the hospital is difficult because of health and safety, cost and time implications. “So if we can’t take a person to a real enriched environment why not take an enriched virtual environment to them?” he asks.

    Penn’s research finds that improving the quality of a patient’s environment in the recovery stage “will act as a catalyst for the plasticity that occurs in your brain to help you recover from that injury”.

    Penn says that since the hardware is now financially accessible “it is crazy we are not using it in a more applied medical, psychological sense”.

    For Penn, gaming can be the perfect way to provide auditory, visual and tactile stimulation, and offers the possibility to monitor patients simultaneously, as well as helping patients visualise their own progress.

    Virtual Art gallery

    Hackney-based American artist Gretchen Andrew, 28, is an early adopter of Google Glass, a form of hands-free wearable technology that she uses to record her work whilst
    she paints.

    For four months the artist worked with digital media firms on a Virtual Reality replica of the Los Angeles gallery that represents her, and where she had a show earlier this year.

    As you put on a Virtual Reality headset it feels like stepping into the physical gallery, but as you approach each individual frame something happens that is specific to the medium of Virtual Reality.

    One of the paintings morphs into the photograph that inspired its creation, another frame shows behind the scenes videos of the paintings being made with Andrew speaking to you, providing insight into her world.

    “I want to try to create a conversation around how all of this is real,” Andrew says. “By thinking about it in that way it is easier to think about how we exist both physically and digitally. Our Facebook profiles, our lives on emails, all of that is important and real information about who we are.”

    Gretchen Andrew, opening night VR, 17 April 2015
    A Virtual Reality headset. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    Medical Realities

    A year ago, surgeon Shafi Ahmed made history by removing a tumour from the liver and bowel of a patient at the London Royal Hospital whilst live streaming the operation to students using a pair Google Glasses.

    “If you pre-record the operation that is okay and a good educational tool, but with live streaming you are watching exactly what is happening from my point of view,” Ahmed says.

    As well as the live element, the software being used allows people to type in questions that can be answered in real time by their peers.
    There are now three to four live surgeries carried out every month from general surgeries and orthopaedics, to cosmetic surgery and casualties.

    Early in 2015, Ahmed co-founded Medical Realities, a group offering medical training products that specialise in Virtual and Augmented Reality.

    He says that using Virtual Reality is better practice for students than working with a dead body. “With the interaction, you can create problems… blood loss, for example and if something goes wrong you have to deal with it. It is not just about doing a technical exercise.”

    Ahmed estimates Medical Realities is one year away from being able to create an effective Virtual Reality simulation of an operating theatre.

  • Jenny Lewis: the photographer behind One Day Young

    Jenny Lewis, March 24, 2015
    Birth-day snapper Jenny Lewis. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval

    “Can you stop talking to strangers?” ask six-year-old Herb and eight-year-old Ruby, as their mum Jenny Lewis chats to women at playgroups and playgrounds, reassuring them about their pregnancies. “Don’t worry about it, you’re going to be fine,” she can be heard saying. What struck me when I met Lewis was her positive and contagious energy.

    Giving birth is both one of life’s marvels as well as it’s most fundamental experience. Lewis captured this by photographing 150 Hackney women at home with their one-day-young babies within the course of the past five years.

    There is something deeply emotive about the 40 portraits published under the title of One Day Young. Each picture is strong individually but it takes the series to realise the similarities between them all. Only then do you notice how Lewis has systematically managed to capture the domestic surroundings of one of the most intimate moments of a woman’s life with true honesty and real intensity.

    All of the photographed women seem grounded with a similar inner strength, confidence and selflessness. There is a combination of tenderness and raw intimacy in the relationship photographed. But there is also a much less tangible relationship that filters through: the one the photographer had with her subjects.

    In each of the portraits, you can detect the sincerity of a photographer who cares about the women she photographed who are essentially all her “next door neighbours”, living in the same borough and who, in her own words, she finds “fascinating and inspiring”.

    The captions that pace the book hint on the depth of the open-hearted discussions Jenny might have had with some of those women, evoking life and death, anxieties and hopes for the future.

    One Day Young is published by Hoxton Mini Press. ISBN: 9780957699885 RRP: £12.95

    Meredith and Lina One Day Young - Jenny Lewis
    Meredith and Lina, taken from One Day Young. Photograph: Jenny Lewis
    Jen and Nora – Jenny Lewis
    Jen and Nora, taken from One Day Young. Photograph: Jenny Lewis

     

     

     

  • Stratford group Assemble is first collective to receive Turner Prize nomination

    Greenhouse view: Granby Four Streets by Assemble. Photograph: Assemble
    Greenhouse view: Granby Four Streets by Assemble. Photograph: Assemble

    East London-based collective Assemble has become the first architecture and design studio to be shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

    Assemble, a group of 18 architects and designers based in Stratford, has been nominated for the prize for a series of projects that engage with the public sphere.

    These include the Granby Four Streets project, in which the group collaborated with local residents to transform a group of neglected terraced houses in Toxteth, Liverpool, refurbishing and painting empty them as well as establishing a monthly market.

    “In an age when anything can be art, why not have a housing estate?” said Alistair Hudson, director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and a Turner Prize judge.

    The group’s objective is to “address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made,” with their projects providing a stark contrast to “homogenous urban landscape which unfolds under processes such as design-and-build, and post-recession strategies of regeneration and gentrification”.

    Assemble started working together in 2010, with previous projects including Blackhorse Studios in Walthamstow, where the public can learn and practise manual skills, and 2011’s Folly for a Flyover, a public art space in Hackney Wick situated underneath the A12.

    Assemble is the first collective to be put forward for the Turner Prize in its 31-year history.

    The group will be up against artists Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers for the £25,000 prize, which is awarded annually by Tate gallery to a British artist under 50.

    The winner of this year’s Turner Prize is to be announced at a ceremony in Glasgow at arts venue Tramway on 7 December.

  • Bromance explores male intimacy on the streets of Shoreditch

    Bromance
    Wrapped up in each other: a still from Bromance

    Running for just two minutes and 53 seconds, Bromance might seem like a challenge to write about, but it’s not.

    This strange film from photographer-cum-director Bertil Nilsson is packed with ideas and style.

    The piece opens with three male friends meeting in a grey East London street. They shake hands and proceed to wrap themselves around one another, entwining their arms and tangling their bodies together.

    This obscure warm-up routine sees the characters exploring each other’s personal space with complete trust and comfort, both of which are pivotal to what follows.

    With the thump of ‘One Loopy Beat’ by Mikaël Bres rising from the hushed sounds of city traffic, we join the half-naked trio in a brilliantly lit and high-ceilinged kitchen as they practise daring acrobatic feats, boldly reimagining the limits of domestic space.

    Played by members of the Barely Methodical Troupe – an experimental circus group – the artists communicate their closeness through movement and contact; Nilsson notches up the volume as flesh slaps against flesh so that every contact is heard and felt.

    As the pace increases, the camera returns to the streets where the leads come tumbling in twists and somersaults along the pavement, helped along by each other’s physical gestures of friendship and support.

    Amongst all the fun of the high-energy tricks and manoeuvres, a poetic thread runs throughout. Nilsson’s work looks at the body and what it can do and say in unfamiliar environments. The shots are gorgeous and the emotional delivery utterly unique.

    Half music video and half abstract documentary, Bromance is a cool, sensitive short film about friendship and intimacy – it’s like nothing before it.

    Bromance from Bertil Nilsson on Vimeo.

  • Money trouble for Musical Theatre students in two shows at Stratford Circus Arts Centre

    City of Angels
    From last year’s production of City of Angels. Photograph: JK Photography

    Audiences will have the opportunity to see Trinity Laban’s talented 2nd and final year students perform two musicals over two weeks this summer – Spend, Spend, Spend (11-13 June) and Lucky Stiff (19-21 June).

    Spend, Spend, Spend is the story of Viv Nicholson, a Yorkshire woman who won her fortune on the Football Pools, and charts the tragedy, comedy and love story of Viv’s journey that took her through five husbands, fast cars, bankruptcy and booze.

    One week later, final year students perform their graduate show, Lucky Stiff, a musical based on the novel The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. A classic, fast paced musical comedy, Lucky Stiff follows the real life story of an English shoe salesman who must pass off the embalmed body of his recently murdered uncle as alive in order to inherit six million dollars.

    Trinity Laban has developed an unparalleled reputation for its unique Musical Theatre performance training experience. Distinctive in preparing creative practitioners equipped with a wide range of skills applicable to a variety of musical theatres roles, Trinity Laban graduates appear in Musical Theatre productions in the West End, international and UK touring productions, and film and TV, as well as within the wider entertainment industry.

    So come along to Stratford Circus Arts Centre this June for two award winning musicals, promising two evenings full of laughs and entertainment.

    For more information and to book tickets, visit the Stratford Circus website.