On Beauty exhibition: Photographic portraits of staff and students at Cass Faculty of Art. Photograph: Sue Andrews
Not to be outdone by International Women’s Day, women artists, writers, performers and community groups in Tower Hamlets are putting on a range of events and exhibitions to celebrate Women’s History Month.
Talks, art exhibitions, performances, films and comedy will be taking place throughout the month. At East London Idea Stores, the history of women in war will be the focus of a series of events. Photographer Jenny Matthews will be showing her work on the effects of war on women from across the world, there will be a talk on the suffragettes, as well as a screening about British nurse Edith Cavell.
Other free film screenings include Going Through the Change!, the London premiere of a film made for the National Women Against Pit Closures at the Bishopsgate Institute. There’s also Looking for Light: Jane Bown, a moving portrait of the photographer Jane Bown, at the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, as well as an archive screening of Granny’s Girls, a 1960s documentary about the lives of women from a close-knit Bethnal Green family, showing at Tower Hamlets Local History Library.
Art exhibitions to mark Women’s History Month include the Museum of Water by Amy Sharrocks at Chisenhale Dance Space and MMMother at the Darnley Gallery, and over at Rich Mix there’s a full programme of performance featuring a Kathak interpretation of Federico García Lorca’s play Yerma, and contemporary dance from the Hagit Yaker Dance Company.
Sean Verey and Gemma Whelan star in Radiant Vermin at Soho theatre. Photograph: Anna Soderblom
Philip Ridley is not an artist who aims to please. For over two decades he has been writing plays lauded for their lyricism yet reviled for their subject matter. An East End gangster tortured by a gang of girls, child murder, characters who eat cockroaches – nothing is off limits. So the choice of housing as the subject of his latest play, Radiant Vermin, seems comparatively tame. What could be controversial about that?
The play, which opens this month at Soho Theatre, is a comic satire about a young couple desperate to buy a house, and the lengths they are prepared to go to make their home ownership dreams a reality. What those lengths are, one shudders to speculate.
“It’s more an exploration of capitalism and consumerism, that we’re never satisfied in the West and are endlessly wanting to buy buy buy,” explains Ridley amiably over the phone. “So this young couple manage to get the offer of a house, but then you’ve got to furnish it and then you’ve got a baby on the way.”
Moving house ‘trauma’
Now 50, Ridley has a long and varied CV. Radiant Vermin is his 11th stage play for adults. He is also a successful filmmaker, a children’s author and visual artist. His plays are usually set or inspired by East London, where most of them were written. Born and raised in Bethnal Green, Ridley lived in the same flat on Temple Street for most of his life. When he decided to move out last year, mid-housing boom, the trauma of the experience sparked the idea that became Radiant Vermin.
“It’s was like going to war,” he recalls, “this maelstrom of estate agents and solicitors and surveyors. But out of it came an idea of what might happen if someone was offered a process of buying a house that was easier than what I had gone through.”
The experience made Ridley sit up to what was happening to his beloved Bethnal Green. Needing more space so he could start painting again, he found he could not afford the area where he grew up, where all his family had lived, a place he describes as being “in my bloodstream”.
“No one who wants to move out of a local area in East London can afford to stay in that area. And there’s this thing now where you’ve got places with a ten-foot-high iron gate around them, because they are right next door to a council estate where people have got nothing. It reminds me of Hollywood, where you’ve got huge film stars living in villas, and then you go two streets away and you’ve got slums – and that’s an explosion waiting to happen.”
Shock tactics
Whether Radiant Vermin, in its own way, causes an explosion, remains to be seen – though it wouldn’t be the first time. The words ’cause celebre’ have been used to describe Ridley’s work more than most, ever since a charcoal drawing he made as a student, of a man ejaculating a black bird, sent minor shock waves through the art establishment when it was shown at the ICA. Ridley knows the charge sheet well. His third play, Ghost from a Perfect Place, includes a scene where an old gangster is tortured with lighted cigarettes by a girl gang. The Guardian‘s Michael Billington described it as “degrading and quasi-pornographic”. Then there’s Mercury Fur, most controversial of all, a play denounced as “poisonous” by the Daily Telegraph, in which a child is sadistically murdered for entertainment. But the accusation that Ridley is out to shock is something he has always denied.
“If something ends up being shocking it’s because it’s come out of being real. You cannot predict what’s going to cause outrage with an audience. This idea that it can be contrived … that’s not the way the artistic process works. It’s like dreaming. I sit down and I dream the next play. I’m not in control of it in that sense. And then it receives another life when people start to talk about it.”
While Ridley is at the stage now of being more revered than reviled, it is interesting to look back at the vehemence of his detractors. The fevered response to Mercury Fur saw one critic accuse Ridley of being “turned on by his own sick fantasies”, and in 2010, his play Moonfleece, about the rise of the BNP, was banned by Dudley Council. But Ridley argues this says more about how we view theatre, than about his particular brand of it.
“No one goes around saying Cronenberg is a sick human being, or that Tarantino wants to go out and kill someone, you know? In every other art form there’s not that link made, but in theatre there’s still an echo of that Victorian moral values thing, that it should be edifying, a medicine that people are taking. There’s still a patrician sort of etiquette that hangs over it, almost like the subject matter dictates what the thing is.”
Philip Ridley: “No one goes around saying Cronenberg is sick, or that Tarantino want to go out and kill someone”
Ridley points to the double standards applied to the classic plays. In King Lear, a man’s eyes are pulled out; in Medea a woman eats her own children. Their standing is never questioned, we stress their continuing relevance. Yet Ridley’s plays, for claiming to represent the present day, seem more dangerous.
“You sit through a play like Mercury Fur and people say this could never happen, and of course we’ve been through times where that has now happened. No artist wants to die with it written on their tombstone that he or she pleased the critics. I mean that’s the least of my ambitions really.”
Solitary child
Ridley’s determination to stick out may, psychologically, stem from his childhood, which was dominated by chronic asthma, a condition that was not easily treated at the time. He missed a lot of school, and was in and out of hospital and in oxygen tents until he was 13.
“As a result I was a very solitary child. I didn’t really have any friends so that meant that I was sitting up in bed, reading and writing. My interior life had to become my company, because I had no peers of my own. I grew up conversing with adults more than I conversed with other children.”
When Ridley did finally go to school, he was the weird one, a boy who didn’t know how to have a conversation with children his own age. They called him ‘Alien’, and looking back, he says, he can see he was in a very “down state”. Nevertheless, he was high achieving, and when the time came he faced a 50-50 decision of studying English Literature or Art at university. He chose art.
“Going to art school saved me really. St Martin’s at the time was such a thrilling place to be, it was a very exciting, dynamic place. I knew I could always read books and study books, but I couldn’t always get into a lithographic studio or an etching studio and have access to models to paint.”
All rounder
Inevitably, our conversation turns to being a multi-disciplinary artist. As a playwright, Ridley is credited with kicking off In Yer Face theatre, as a visual artist he’s up there with the YBAs. Which is not to mention filmmaking and fiction writing. And song-writing. It’s a subject that fascinates journalists, though Ridley less so.
“It seems to be something that either bothers or interests people more than it does me, he says. “In its most simplistic sense I’m just telling stories. If I think of a story and see two people talking to each other then it’s obviously a stage play. If I think of a story and its images are moving, and there’s not much dialogue then that’s usually a film. If I think of a story and it’s a sequence of images, then that’s either a photograph or a painting. For me they’re not different things at all, they’re all part of the same mountain but just different peaks at the top.”
Lack of affordable housing is a defining feature of our times, especially in East London. Bearing this context in mind, is Radiant Vermin a state of the nation – or state of East London – play? “That’s not for me to say,” he responds coyly. Ridley’s modesty and refusal to look too deeply into the creative process appear to be characteristic traits. Once in an interview he said he admired artists who had a “signature style”, such as Alfred Hitchcock. How would he describe his own signature style?
“I don’t think I have one,” he responds. “Other people tell me I have but I’m not aware of it, and I think that’s right. I don’t want to go into writing the next stage play knowing I’m writing the next play by me. I just want to see where it takes me. It’s the duty of every artist to assassinate themselves every now and then. You’ve just got to kill everything and start all over really.”
Radiant Vermin is at Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1D 3NE from 10 March– 12 April sohotheatre.com
Potter to pedlar: Harry Melling writes and stars in Peddling at the Arcola. Photograph: Nobby Clark
Harry Potter star Harry Melling is hoping to create some magic of his own when his one man show Peddling comes to the Arcola Theatre this month.
The 25-year-old actor, best known for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, wrote and stars in this solo show about a pedlar boy trying to make sense of his life “via the doorsteps of privileged London and the cracks that swallow thousands of young Londoners every year”.
The play, which is Melling’s writing debut, premiered at the HighTide festival last April, and has since been shown in New York.
The play is inspired by an episode in Melling’s childhood, when a young boy knocked on the door of his family home in North London, trying to sell them household goods.
“My dad opened the door, and sometimes we’d buy something but on this occasion we didn’t, and the boy very politely turned away. We closed the door and suddenly we heard this howling and this swearing and things being thrown against the house.
“Ever since then I’ve always been fascinated about where these people are from, what their lives are like, and that was where the idea spiralled from.”
The play follows a character named only Boy, who has been through the care system and now finds himself trudging down Bishop’s Avenue trying to sell sundry items such as marigold gloves, dish cloths or toilet paper.
The play touches on family, identity and homelessness, though Melling stresses it is not overtly political. It is, however, very much a London play, set on Hampstead Heath and with the action taking in various North London locations.
Early indications suggest the play has a Philip Ridley-esque feel, the main character is not named, there’s little background information for the audience to grasp, and there’s an otherworldy sense while being set in the present day.
Most interesting, particularly for a debut play, is Peddling’s language, with Melling writing it in an incantatory, performance poetry style.
“There came a point half way through where I realised it should rhyme, not a regular rhyme but an irregular, spoken word-y rhyme. I guess it came from the fact I want it to be theatrical and magical, in terms of this boy wants a bit of magic to take him out from his not so fun reality.
“I also wanted this boy to be absolutely brilliant. I thought what an amazing thing to show this boy with all this potential, all this gift for language, but who lives such a shit life.”
Peddling is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 28 March arcolatheatre.com
Frieda Thiel and Savannah Gordon-Liburd in Roy Williams’ Antigone. Photograph: Robert Day
In Roy Williams’ modern day Thebes, women are only ever referred to in the basest of terms. They are bitches, skets, yats and skanks. Antigone, powerfully played by Hackney actress Savannah Gordon-Liburd, is herself frequently described as ‘the inbred’, thanks to her Oedipal parentage.
She works in a grubby nightclub owned by her sharp-suited uncle, the self-styled king of the underworld Creo, played ferociously by former Eastenders actor Mark Monero.
Although we never discover exactly what her position of employment entails, it is understood that both ‘Tig’ and her sister Esme (Frieda Thiel), a cleaner at the venue, should be grateful for the work.
This is the landscape of the play. A culture deeply opposed to women that is ripe for an overhaul. In the original Greek text, what follows is a challenge to that dominance by the most unlikely of heroes. A person who, with incredible determination and courage pierces the very heart of the prevailing system of power, prejudice and inequality.
But what Williams’ adaptation gives us is merely the continuation of that system. Facing constant derision on the grounds of her gender, and with her protestations falling on deaf ears, Antigone has no agency with which to challenge her uncle’s will.
Making Creo such an out-and-out bad guy (he wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond movie) proves a disservice to the complex characterisation of Sophocles’ play. Once Creo condemns Tig and sentences her to death, he proceeds to sadistically keep her alive, apparently for days, whilst he endlessly insults her and repeatedly reiterates her fate.
Though the idiomatic script is raw and pacey, it is a shame that this seminal dramatic work needs translating into street slang to make it relevant to a contemporary audience.
Likewise, that it was thought that the best way to appeal to the East London public was through the prism of violence and gang culture, is problematic in the least.
Antigone, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, E15 1BN until 14 March. stratfordeast.com
Oliver Coppersmith and Jonah Russell as Eitan and Avi in The Mikvah Project. Photograph: Mark Douet
The stage is a swimming pool, or more precisely, a mikvah, a type of bath used in Judaism for ritual immersion. The leads are Eitan (Oliver Coppersmith) and Avi (Jonah Russell), two young Jewish men discovering what it means to find and hold on to love. This brave and sexually-charged play from writer Josh Azouz and director Jay Miller, now at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, is quite the spectacle.
Eitan is 17, navigating his way through hormone-ridden teenage years, and arriving at the conclusion that he’s fallen in love with Avi, a 35-year-old married man who’s trying for a baby. They meet at the mikvah to be spiritually cleansed, but it soon becomes clear they’re only there for each other.
Lighting makes effective use of the space in the theatre, the rippling water casting an eerie reflection on the corrugated iron ceiling. There’s a bravery in the staging and the physicality that transcends the small space, and brings the audience right into the mix.
Clever interplay between the two vastly different personalities makes for a highly enjoyable exchange of dialogue and the heavy weight of things unspoken. As Avi says, love is “all types of silence”. Wonderful casting really elevates this production from fringe theatre to a piece that could happily sit in the National Theatre.
Utterly immersive from the outset, the play dissects stereotypes and clichés – both of men and of Jewish culture. It meanders along a relationship between age, experience, longing, desire, admiration and duty, blending startling music with clever dialogue. It’s surprisingly frank and funny, focusing on young male anxieties. Eitan is eager and carefree, Avi has an obligation to his wife – there are very human exchanges of power and control as the two men try to find a place in which they’re happy.
Exploring the boundaries of desire, fantasy and sexuality, and informed by today’s Jewish culture at every turn, The Mikvah Project is a must-see production in the heart of Hackney Wick. Erotic, emotional, extraordinary.
The Mikvah Project is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2a Queen’s Yard, E9 5EN until 21 March theyardtheatre.co.uk
I am Here installation at Haggerston Estate 2009–14. Photograph: Fugitive Images
Looking at some of the other guests at a recent launch event at Hoxton’s PEER Gallery, you got an eerie feeling: the inkling that you’d seen them before, somewhere, but that on the previous occasion their heads had been several orders of magnitude larger and perched some storeys off the ground.
This is because they were the subjects of person-size portraits which used to be installed in the windows of Samuel House, a Haggerston housing block (now demolished). These portraits are included in Real Estates, a six-week project at PEER curated by Fugitive Images, the art collective that made them along with a film about Samuel House called Estates: a Reverie.
Community participation is key to Fugitive Images’ work, which takes a particular interest in what they call “the social organisation of urban space”. And given the chance to organise their own small piece of urban space at PEER they have done so in a decidedly social way, inviting a host of other artists, campaigners and local people to join in over Real Estates’ six week duration, dividing up the time between different exhibitors.
Combined with PEER’s only being open three days a week this can make for a rather fleeting schedule, but also means high variety along with cultural air-time and direct participation for groups that might otherwise be sidelined or made purely passive contributors.
Thus March will see Bekki Perriman’s The Doorways Project, exploring “homeless culture”, the generally ignored day-to-day activities and stories of people living on the street, accompanied by work from Cardboard Citizens, a group which has been making theatre with homeless people for over 20 years, for homeless and non-homeless audiences.
The E15 Campaign – who came to national prominence last year as the ‘E15 Mothers’ protesting their eviction from social housing in Stratford – will exhibit visual art and film about their campaign as well as running “eviction resistance” workshops, while the DIG Collective, a social housing campaign group, will have their own slot in mid-March. Smart Urhoife, a fashion designer who grew up in Haggerston, will be exhibiting work from 25 – 28 March.
As well as exhibitions open throughout the day, Real Estates will host evening talks, discussions and films. It’s got the potential to be a kind of short-course in where social housing and the campaigns around it are at in 2015. There’s a full schedule and an online continuation of the project at real-estates.info.
Real Estates: Fugitive Images residency is at PEER Gallery, 97 & 99 Hoxton Street, N1 6QL until 28 March peeruk.org
Winners: Mat Kirkby (left) and James Lucas (right) celebrate backstage with their Oscars. Photograph: Twitter
Hackney filmmaker James Lucas is celebrating winning his first Oscar.
The Phone Call, which Lucas produced and wrote alongside his friend Mat Kirkby, is the moving story of a woman working for a crisis helpline who tries to persuade a pensioner from a suicide attempt following the death of his wife.
The film, which stars Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent, won Best Live Action Short Film, with Lucas, who lives in London Fields, saying the moment the film won was “the best night of my life”.
“How can you better than that? It was just an incredible experience, very moving, very exciting and just a beautiful experience,” said Lucas, on the phone from LA.
In an interview last year with the East End Review, Lucas said that after Hawkins accepted the role, the project went on hold for ten months until she had finished filming Blue Jasmine.
Then ironically, Jim Broadbent joined the cast just two days later. “You get someone like Jim Broadbent straight away because he would love to do it opposite Sally,” said Lucas.
After an eccentric acceptance speech by Kirkby, in which he referred to the awards as “big buggers” and talked about doughnuts, the filmmakers paid tribute to their mums, and to the film crew, who worked for free on the film.
The pair also spoke of their ambitions to make feature films in the future, with them both hoping to attract the attention of Hollywood producers for new feature scripts.
A move to LA could even be on the cards for Lucas, who was born in New Zealand though has lived in London for 15 years.
“We’re exploring all opportunities and if the right thing was put in front of me you never know, though Hackney will always remain in my heart.”
Catch of the day: Author Peter Kennedy with a fish
Fishermen’s Tales, the self-published debut novel by Peter Kennedy, is the product of seven years of writing. Born and raised in Hartlepool, Kennedy moved to East London with the aim of making it as a writer 20 years ago. After unsuccessfully going down the traditional route of sending his work out to agents, Kennedy decided to do it himself.
“Fishermen’s Tales is a DIY project, bath-tub gin for the working classes,” says Kennedy. “This is a literature that came from the streets, passed on by the people word of mouth – one of my objectives when I was writing it was that my mother would be able to read it. I’m trying to reclaim and romanticise the working class heritage that I came from.”
Kennedy’s novel – a collection of closely linked stories about a village and plague taken from 18th century fishing village folklore, and influenced by the Old Testament, the Brothers Grimm and Kennedy’s mother – showcases some excellent writing. Kennedy lures you in with his fairytale-like prose in stories such as ‘Auto-da-Fe’, writing about a “deep dark forest” and a “strange little man” who has not gone to bed early tonight because “tonight his house is on fire.”
The writing works best when it is clean. Some chapters lose pace in the dialogue, and there are occasional inconsistencies in tone, such as in the final chapter when switching from the more formal – “was not” – to the informal – “gonna” – in the
same sentence.
As a physical object, Fishermen’s Tales is underwhelming; the quality of paper is poor and the front cover is less than inviting. But to use that old cliché, do not judge a book by its cover.
Fishermen’s Tales is reminiscent of Cynan Jones’s The Dig in that it’s a lean book of separate parts, engaging with the environment and feelings of isolation. While not without flaws, it’s a promising debut.
Fishermen’s Tales is published by J Publishing Company. ISBN: 9781907989070
Bookish: A Little Free Library in Clissold Park, Stoke Newington
Perched atop a post outside a house on Victoria Park Road lies a small hut that, from a distance, could be an ornately decorated birdhouse or, less likely, a microwave. But while there’s no food inside, those with an appetite for reading won’t be disappointed, as it holds books, which members of the public can borrow and return without charge.
The Little Free Library project is a nationwide initiative though strongly concentrated in East London. Victoria Park Road and Clissold Park are the two Hackney outposts, then there’s Leyton, Leytonstone, Stratford and 12 in Walthamstow, the erstwhile home of the charity’s manager, Nick Cheshire.
“We’re looking to promote reading, literacy and art, and a sense of community engagement,” says Cheshire, who founded Little Free Libraries UK with his wife, Rebecca, last year.
The libraries are ‘hosted’ by volunteers, who promote them locally and keep an eye on stocks, and they are decorated by local artists wherever possible. One is emblazoned with a handsome red fox, others are inspired by William Morris and Jackson Pollock.
Children and families may be the primary focus of the libraries, though Cheshire insists anyone can make use of them.
“It’s a simple process of take a book, return a book, donate a book and if you want to take a book that’s absolutely fine. If you want to donate or return it that’s fine but you don’t have to. Some people will use them as a book exchange, other people might not be able to afford books and find that it’s nice to have free access to them.”
Little Free Libraries originate in the United States, where Cheshire discovered them and was inspired to bring the concept to the UK.
Given our increasing reliance on technology, the idea of a Little Free Library seems something more suited to a bygone time. But Cheshire says that the tangibility of books sets them apart from their digital counterparts.
“We’re not against the technology of Ipads or Kindles but I think the idea that it’s your copy of a book and you can inscribe something in the cover is really special. We’re trying to promote real books as much as reading in general as well.”
Seared scallops and chorizo with Jerusalem artichoke purée. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
If you walked past Palmers restaurant on Roman Road, you might not make a point to dine there, not least because it’s often almost-empty.
But that would be your loss.
Unlike most new restaurants in East London, Palmers is better than it looks, not the other way round.
This place is decidedly substance over style. Located on the ground floor of a block of new-build flats in Globe Town, it could be mistaken for the dining room of a cheap hotel – cavernous and purely functional.
Large photographs of illuminated produce don’t do the place justice. A close-up of a jar of pickled onions look like a science experiment in preserving eyeballs; another of octopus tentacles illuminated red are actually quite frightening.
Run by a Czech father-and-son team, Palmers serves up modern British cuisine with a French twist – a suitably diverse combination for a neighbourhood restaurant in E2.
The ‘rustic’ food zeitgeist has led too many restaurants to think they can get away with anything as long as it’s served on a board. Thankfully, Palmers hasn’t caught on.
Nothing here is try-hard. Artfully-arranged seared scallops and chorizo with Jerusalem artichoke purée (pictured), and a difficult-to-master Bouillabaise are downright classy dishes, but big enough to be good value – and not a cheeseburger in sight.
Just out of reach of passersby buzzing below on the towpath, Palmers sits at street level near an intersection of the Regent’s Canal constantly traversed by weekend food explorers. In the search for a perfect Sunday roast, too many miss a trick by skipping Palmers out.
The Sunday feasts are a neighbourhood staple, filling the place at around £12 a head, and with portions far more generous than the sceney Empress across Victoria Park.
On a recent visit, a neighbouring diner was so enthusiastic about the beef she invited herself into our conversation to recommend it. She has it every Sunday without fail, apparently.
Beef being sold out, we sprung for the pork belly – a huge slab of the stuff with plenty of crackling and perfectly crunchy roast potatoes, topped with a tart cranberry sauce that should have been apple, but that’s by the by.
