Yo Zushi examines a rollie. Photograph courtesy of Yo Zushi
Folk music is so ingrained in Yo Zushi that the man once described by Marie Anne Hobbs as “the spirit of Bob Dylan for the twenty-first century” no longer feels the need to call himself a folk musician. “It’s just how I think – I don’t feel I have to say it,” he explains, when we meet on a bench in Clissold Park.
Zushi was born in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1981, and came to Britain as a child with his family. Some of his relatives still live in Hiroshima, and he has grandparents who survived the atomic bomb.
He found success ten years ago as a singer-songwriter, and has shared bills with Joanna Newsom, Scritti Politti and Micah P.Hinson. This month sees the release of single ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, taken from his new album It Never Entered My Mind, which comes out in July. It’s Zushi’s first album for five years, which suggests he either takes these things slowly or that a lot of effort has gone into it.
“If you’re independently making music you have to take the compromise of basically pacing yourself so you can afford to eat some food at the end of the week,” he tells me. Zushi is a journalist by day, and recounts interviewing the song-writer Liam Hayes and asking him a similar question. “He just said: ‘Well that’s just how long it takes if you don’t have any money and you’re relying on favours’.”
The album is named after a recording of Miles Davis playing an old American show tune. “There is no overarching idea behind the album, it was just this feeling that I wanted to create in a bunch of songs. So we ended up recording about 100 songs and whittling it down to nine,” he says.
Zushi is as much a listener and fan as he is a performer and writer. Certain artists fixate him for long periods of time: Elliot Smith, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen.
“If you get really into a thing you kind of start thinking in their language,” he says, “and when anyone writes a song you automatically inject it with a lot of yourself.
“If something appeals to you on an emotional level, whatever it is you feel becomes part of your experience. So it’s not really an invalid thing to use it in your own music. That’s what everyone does really.”
Zushi’s current obsessions are with Alex Chilton of Big Star and Elvis Costello. On the press release he gives me It Never Entered My Mind is described as: “A story album about love in stolen moments.”
“It means absolutely nothing but it kind of gives you the gist,” he says. “I like writing that is open ended and if you get the guy who wrote the song to say it’s about this … it might not be about that for whoever’s listening.
“The job of someone writing the song isn’t to make mini movies where the songwriter is the main character – you need to make mini movies where the listener is the main character.”
‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ single launch is on 8 May at Powerlunches, 446 Kingsland Road, E8 4AE. It Never Entered My Mind is to be released in July.
Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1965, photographer Zed Nelson moved with his family to East London at the age of four after dictator Idi Amin came to power and the situation became increasingly untenable for his parents, both journalists. Nelson’s career as an award-winning photojournalist took a different turn when the car he was travelling in was ambushed while on assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. Turning his lens to what he describes as the “fault-lines in Western society”, he’s produced critically-acclaimed projects covering issues such as gun culture in America and cosmetic surgery. This month sees the release of A Portrait of Hackney, Nelson’s latest photobook documenting the ever-changing face of area.
When did you move to London and what was it like for you moving from an entirely different continent and culture?
I was only four years old when my family moved back to London from Uganda. Idi Amin had come to power and my father was arrested and dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and taken away. He was editor of a newspaper in the capital, Kampala. He was released unharmed, but it was time to leave. I don’t remember the transition to be honest, at that age things just happen.
You have talked about the period after your car was ambushed in Kabul and coming home to news of the Dunblane massacre changing the direction of your career as a photographer. Can you explain more about the significance of that?
As a young photographer I had been driven by an idealistic notion of ‘saving the world’, of shining a light on important and ignored issues. This often led me to focus on the ‘developing world’ – on war, conflict, and human-rights issues. But, over the years, I had increasing concerns that instead of ‘saving the world’ I might actually be reinforcing racial stereotypes. It also became clear to me that the media in which my work was reproduced was unwilling to deal with the complexity of the issues. A turning point in my career came when I was involved in a car ambush in Afghanistan in which a friend and my interpreter were both shot and horribly injured.
After several years of photographing some of the most troubled and conflict-torn areas in the developing world, I was already getting sick of photographing young men killing each other in foreign countries with guns supplied by our own governments. I returned to the UK and turned on the TV to see the Dunblane massacre – Britain’s first deadly school shooting rampage in which 16 children were killed.
I decided it was time to focus closer to home, to reflect on the problems and fault-lines in Western society, and to work on a long-term project where I could work to my own rules. Gun Nation explored the paradox of why America’s most potent symbol of freedom is also one of its greatest killers – resulting in an annual death toll of over 30,000 American citizens. That project was an attempt to show the power of the commercial gun industry in the USA, and to question the realities of America’s gun culture.
“I decided it was time to focus closer to home” – portrait of Zed Nelson. Courtesy of Zed Nelson
In comparison to other projects such as Love Me, Gun Nation and In This Land, A Portrait of Hackney has a very different feel and scope. What interests you about this particular patch of London?
Hackney is a personal project undertaken for no reason other than to remember what it was like to just wander the streets and photograph, to explore and think. I’d been travelling for years, working on quite serious subjects, and I had largely ignored my own country and my own neighbourhood.
I have lived in Hackney all my life. It’s where I went to school, learnt to ride a bike. It was always shabby, and in many ways represented a place to get away from. But it’s changing, and by taking the time to see it I kind of fell in love with the area. The images are a kind of meditation on the confusion of cultures, clash of identities and the beauty and ugliness that co-exist in the borough today.
Can you tell me a bit about how and why you first started photographing Hackney?
Hackney suddenly seemed very alive – crazy and absurd. It was always poor – one of the poorest boroughs in London – but suddenly it became trendy. One day I laughed out loud pedalling home on my bike. Passing someone sporting a crazy ‘look’. I thought, I must document this moment.
Berries by Zed Nelson
What story does A Portrait of Hackney tell?
To try and make ‘sense’ of the place seems futile. Hackney is a socially, ethnically diverse melée. It has violence, beauty, wildlife, concrete wastelands, poverty and affluence jumbled together, vying for space. It is tattered and fractured, but very alive. But I am watching with fascination as the area goes through a metamorphosis – and witnessing an extraordinary contemporary social situation develop in the borough, where fashionable young hipsters, yuppie developments and organic cafés co-exist awkwardly with Hackney’s most under-privileged.
The social landscape for an under-privileged teenager growing up in Hackney is a million light-years away from the new urban hipsters who frequent the cool bars and expensive cappuccino cafés springing up in the same streets. These worlds co-exist side-by-side but entirely separate, creating bizarre juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, aspiration and hopelessness. There is a story of gentrification going on here. And it raises difficult questions that are hard to answer – is it good, or bad? I think people have a way of ‘unseeing’ things – which allows us to ignore that which does not directly affect our own lives.
How do you feel about how Hackney is changing – the rampant pace of gentrification, for example?
I enjoy Hackney today more than I ever have. But I also watch with a growing concern for its identity. As the property developers move in and gated luxury apartments spring up on every street corner you have to wonder how will it end? There’s a reoccurring motif in my images of Hackney, of cracked pavements and walls, melting tarmac and weeds and roots bursting through concrete. It’s as if nature is trying to reclaim the land, and Hackney – under-funded, neglected and poorly maintained – is constantly being sucked back into the earth. It amuses me to see this, as I find other, wealthier areas where nature has been conquered depressing and disconcerting – covered over in tarmac, cemented and de-weeded. I hope the property developers don’t win.
Trappers by David Salle, 2013 (acrylic on canvas, 84 x 129 inches). Courtesy of Maureen Paley Gallery
Two solitary figures and a black cat cross a grey and windswept Missouri River in a re-painting of a scene by one of the most popular American painters of the mid-nineteenth century.
The painting, entitled Trappers, is by American postmodernist artist David Salle, and is central to his current exhibition at the Maureen Paley gallery. But while faithfully rendered, this painting is no copy. Overlayed on this carefully plotted, monochrome scene is a layer of brightly coloured body prints, made by literally dragging a model across the painting’s surface.
“I am interested in the combination of the two elements – the differences in scale, palette and modelling – the overlay of one on top of the other – and also how one group of ‘actors’ creates an image of movement from illusionistic devices such as perspective while the other group (in the studio) makes an image from a literal ‘action’,” the artist explains.
Like graffiti on a mural, Salle’s layering of a culturally specific image with the bodies of painted studio models is provocative, though it also brings to his work a new layer of abstraction and figuration.
Salle, 62, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work came to prominence in the early 1980s and he is regarded as a member of the elusively named ‘Pictures Generation’, a group of painters and photographers whose work appropriated images from mass culture.
Other images on display include collages and drawings from Salle’s studio archive incorporating vintage printed matter, as well as images yet to be seen by the public.
David Salle is at Maureen Paley, 21 Herald Street, E2 6JT until 1 June
Blending fiction and reality with a punch of politics and a twist of time travel, Chris Marker’s images, be they filmed, frozen, multiplied or computer-generated, are as rich and potent as they are disorientating.
A pioneer of the documentary essay and one of those rare visual artists revered as a poet, philosopher and filmmaker in equal measure, Marker was a figure synonymous with mystery and provocation. But even in the darkest, most obscure corner of his remarkable portfolio there lies clarity.
An extensive collection assembled from his kaleidoscopic body of work is currently on show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat offers a nourishing journey through the latter half of the twentieth century via the mind of a true multi-media visionary.
Before his death in 2012, aged 91, the wildly creative Jack-of-all-trades had turned his probing lens to a plethora of subjects, including war, revolution,travel, artefact and history. Here, all are laid bare and dissected with clinical precision behind Marker’s signature veil of ambiguity.
On entering through the gallery’s heavy double doors, the trail leads past a wall of introductory prints, down a thin corridor and into a dark room ablaze with a fizzing myriad of television screens – “memory boxes” as Marker once called them.
The surreal images vary from the mundane to the deeply unsettling, flickering below the noise of an intriguing interview in nightmarish fashion. It’s a captivating start.
Central to the exhibition is the selection of Marker’s classic films projected onto screens that hang from the ceilings, including: the beautiful Statues Also Die; a mesmerising sequence from San Soleil; Le Joli Mai; and, if you have the time, a stripped-back, 180-minute showing of the epic title feature, A Grin Without a Cat.
Of particular note is La Jetée, a spiralling sci-fi photo-roman addressing themes of time and memory,birth verses death, the mobile and immobile image,and the history of place and cinema. Just as complex as it sounds, it’s a quiet masterpiece that rocks to a gentle rhythm before descending gradually towards a turbulent finale.
That Terry Gilliam found inspiration for 12 Monkeys in the 27-minute gem, with Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder of no distant relation, speaks volumes of Marker’s sprawling influence.
Walking through the ground floor space, it’s hard to miss the overlapping quality of the work on show. It’s somehow appropriate that the sound of one installation momentarily eclipses that of another. The pieces feed off their neighbours, producing a shambolic harmony akin to Marker’s own fragmented style.
The deft arrangement evokes a loose line from one of his many seminal works of experimental cinema: “Don’t patch up a broken crystal,” someone – perhaps from the future – warns.
While the extended films are the highlight of the show, the clusters of still images that pepper the walls are of no small interest; they are complimented significantly by the words pasted beside them: “In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.”
Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat tears right through Marker’s time, driven by his will to locate and relocate the boundaries of artistic endeavour. The exhibition revolves around two ever-pressing questions: where have we come from and where are we going? It is, dare I say, a memorable experience.
Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is at the Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX until 22 June
Acclaimed artists from Hackney and beyond including Billy Childish are coming together for a group exhibition at BL-NK in Shoreditch later this month.
Over 20 artists, most with local links, will be exhibiting work at the New Voices in Hackney Art exhibition, which aims to raise funds and awareness for the Prince’s Trust, St Mungo’s and a pro-reconciliation charity from the city of Haifa.
The most famous artist taking part is William Hamper, better known as Billy Childish, who founded Stuckism, an art movement that valued figurative painting over conceptual art. A successful musician and poet also, Childish will bolster his reputation as a polymath by exhibiting his first ever bronze sculptures at BL-NK.
Skeletal figures with big pink mouths will be recognisable as the work of Hackney Wick stalwart Sweet Toof, while the mythological figures and amorphous hybrid creatures of Aly Helyer will also make an appearance.
The works on display by these ‘new Hackney voices’ promise to be varied in style and tone. A satirical painting of the Queen by Annie Zamero shows the British monarch enjoying a ‘day off’ by going wild on a garden swing. At the other end of the spectrum, Michelle O’Mahoney’s oblique paintings explore relationships in life and death through the use of repeated imagery.
The week-long exhibition will be launched with an evening of music on 29 May from gypsy and east European influenced Klezmer duo Balabustah, who will perform with the virtuoso violin and accordion of Don Levitski and Chris Taylor.
Speaker’s Corner: New Voices in Hackney Art is at BL-NK, 37 East Road, N1 6AH from 29 May – 6 June.
Karen Bartke and Umar Ahmed in My Name Is… Photograph: Helen Maybanks
When, in 2006, 12-year-old Gaby left her Glasgow home to live with her father in Pakistan, the media rushed to conclude that she had been kidnapped by her “fundamentalist” father to be a “child bride”, in a neat example of Islam vs the West. But the drama took a turn after Gaby declared she wished to remain with her father and be known as Ghazala, and the media then quickly turned on her Glaswegian mother as “unfit” and “mentally unstable”.
My Name Is… takes a sympathetic and nuanced look at the story behind these tiresome tropes. Writer Sudha Buchar recorded interviews with Gaby/Ghazala and her parents, basing the play on her transcripts and skillfully interweaving all three voices into this authentic and moving work.
The result is focused less on the drama that attracted the attention of the media, and more on the story of the relationship between Gaby/Ghazala’s parents, Suzy/Sajida and Farhan, from the trance of their young dreams in 1980s Glasgow to an angry separation years later, in which Gaby’s disappearance is the climax of an absorbing, if sad, tale.
The set is split into two locations throughout – Suzy alone in her flat and Farhan and Gaby/Ghazala in a Pakistani villa, a device which allows their individual narratives to interact with each other, and as they later divide, for the two or even three voices to quite literally compete to be heard.
My Name Is… has little to say about global, or even national politics. It is about complex and shifting identities and the ways in which the immediate realities of racial prejudice and the expectations of family and community put pressure on individual relationships. While the news headlines focused on Gaby/Ghazala’s story, the play’s title could easily refer to her mother, who changed her name and religion for the sake of her husband, later accusing him: “You took Suzy and you made Sajida and you controlled her strings…” In fact, at times it feels as if the play is more her story than her daughter’s.
The performances by all three actors are excellent, with Karen Bartke especially compelling as Suzy/Sajida. Despite the extraordinary features of the story, this play is essentially about the struggle to make family life work and the difficulties faced by children caught between two separated parents. My Name Is… looks beyond the melodramatic and sensationalist headlines and paints a sensitive portrait of everyday family breakdown.
My Name Is… is at the Arcola Theatre, 4 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 24 May
A comprehensive six-week introductory evening course in music journalism, which aims to have you commissioned by the end of the course and will give you the tools to be a great writer, with a focus on independent music writing.
This course with The Journalism Schoolis led by Jennifer Lucy Allan, online editor at The Wire, and will cover feature and reviews writing, pitching and blagging, interview techniques and essentials including subbing, contacts building, and law for music journalism, all with a focus on independent music journalism.
Guest speakers will include Derek Walmsley (Deputy Editor, The Wire), Luke Turner (Co-founder, The Quietus) and Phil Hebblethwaite (NME, ViceUK, The Quietus, former editor of The Stool Pigeon).
No previous experience of journalism is needed.
The course will cover various styles of writing: music news, features, profiles, plus a masterclass on reviews writing, and the all-important ‘dark art’ of the pitch.
We will cover basic journalism law, subbing, editing, research and interview skills (including how to find and approach people for interview, and building contacts).
All questions about how the industry works will be answered en route.
There will be constant feedback and appraisal of your writing throughout the course, and all work and activities are aimed to be as close to real scenarios as possible, with the opportunity for one to one feedback, guidance and contacts.
There is no final exam, as the last piece of homework set will be to write a successful pitch to a publication or website of your choice. Success will be a real life commission!
Full course outline:
Week 1:
Introduction to music journalism
We’ll give you some key dos and don’ts in music writing, cover the essentials of libel and copyright in music journalism, and have a look at specialist research skills – how to find anyone, how to use custom search skills, and how to use and access other resources.
Subbing
You’ll learn the crucial ability to sub-edit your own work and the work of others, how to write headlines and standfirsts, and we’ll also discuss basic style rules.
Week 2
News writing and collecting
You’ll learn how to spot news stories and how to build contacts from majors to bedroom label heads. You’ll use and ‘abuse’ press releases from the music industry, and learn the inverted triangle of news, with a brief introduction to Freedom Of Information requests and how you can use them as a music writer.
Guest speaker: Phil Hebblethwaite, a journalist and editor who founded and ran The Stool Pigeon music newspaper between 2005-2013. He now works as a freelance journalist for The Guardian, NME, Vice and The Quietus. Phil will talk about investigative journalism and music writing, bringing your news copy to life, and how to transcend the confines of a press release.
Week 3
Interview techniques
Get your dictaphones out for a practical lesson on different types of interviews, and how to make the best of geographical limitations with your interviewee! We’ll learn how to deal with difficult or awkward interviewees, and how to ask difficult questions, before looking at basic rules for editing transcripts and using quotes.
Week 4
Reviews masterclass
Writing album and live reviews for print. Common mistakes and misdirections to avoid, and how to write the perfect review.
Guest speaker: Derek Walmsley is Deputy Editor at The Wire, where he commissions and edits around 30,000 words of reviews per month. He has contributed to the magazine since 2004, and has also written for The Quietus and Resident Advisor.
Derek will give an editor’s perspective on how to write album and live music reviews for print. Learn the mistakes that most writers make and how to avoid them. Find out what makes for rock solid music journalism, authoritative criticism and a style that zings of the page. Also covers the fine detail of how to put a review together, strategies that will grab a reader’s attention, and how to make your writing stand out from the pack.
Week 5
Feature writing
We’ll cover the basics of feature writing, including news features, profile interviews and essays, with a 101 on basic structure, which you will learn to play around with. We’ll use an interview transcript from earlier in the course to draft a 500 word feature.
Online music journalism
Guest speaker: Luke Turner is co-founder and co-editor of The Quietus, the award-winning, respected UK online magazine devoted to music, film, literature and popular culture. He has also contributed to Q, The Guardian, BBC, NME, Stool Pigeon, Dazed & Confused, Monocle, Caught By River, among others. Luke will look at the different considerations for online and print journalism, from the nuts and bolts of writing to how to seed that writing, from the basics of search engine optimisation vs shareability, to leveraging social networks.
Week 6
Features recap
We’ll look at a feature you’ve written, write a headline and standfirst, and use your subbing skills learned earlier in the course to mould it into a finished piece of writing.
Pitching and blagging
The final class will cover (arguably) the two most important aspects of music journalism: pitching and blagging. You’ll be given a primer on the ‘dark art’ of the pitch, with focused discussion on what editors are looking for and how to contact them. We’ll discuss internships and how to get one, and by the end of the class you’ll have a pitch ready to write up and send off.
Six two-hour classes for only £180.
Monday evenings 7pm to 9pm at
Celia Fiennes House
8-20 Well Street
Hackney
E9 7PX
Nearest station: London Fields / Hackney Central / Bethnal Green
The course runs from Monday 9 June – 14 July 2014.
[contact-form-7 id=”673″ title=”Get in touch with The Journalism School”]
Mark Hix’s Cock’n’Bull Gallery – located in the basement of his Tramshed restaurant in the heart of Shoreditch – has partnered with Sharon Newton and will be home to Let’s Celebrate 365, an exhibition of work by photographer Jeremy Hunter.
Spanning 35 years of Hunter’s stunning reportage photography across 65 countries and five continents, the exhibition focuses on global festivals, ceremonies, rituals and celebrations – ranging from secular to political and religious – in order to explore the world’s diversity.
Newton has worked closely with Hunter to select images that present rituals, ceremonies and celebrations from around the world including India, Tibet, Ethiopia and Britain.
Hunter has unflinchingly chronicled the many faces of celebration throughout the world. The photographs simultaneously capture the violence, tenderness and, as Newton says, “the most beautiful, often most vulnerable aspects of humanity”.
His subjects range from the Aboakyer Deer Hunt in Ghana, the whipping of young women at the Ukuli Bula ceremony in Ethiopia, to the rarely witnessed hair-pulling of nuns at the Deeksha ceremony in Southern India.
The photographs are not only an invaluable legacy from an anthropological perspective, but from a photographic and artistic one too. Hunter’s photographs are cinematic in their form, colour and framing, no doubt formed by his early career, working alongside influential British directors such as Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell and John Schlesinger.
Hunter’s work depicts the vulnerability of not just humanity, but of the fragility of cultures. Hunter says: “As a result of increasingly rapid globalisation and the impact of mobile-phone technology, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, much of what I have documented will most probably vanish.”
It is interesting, then, to see Hunter’s record of these imperiled global traditions in the heart of an ever-changing East End backdrop. The venue, Newton adds, “is perfect” and is where “Hunter shot his very first photo-reportage in Shoreditch during the 1960s”.
These heartfelt photographs may represent the last time we see these cultures, which according to Newton are “on their way to extinction”. Let us hope not.
Jeremy Hunter – Let’s Celebrate 365
9 May – 12 May 2014 Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery
32 Rivington Street
EC2A 3LX
Whenever I walk past a wool shop, I stare in the window and a have a brief moment of longing. Perhaps it’s because I had a fling with knitting as a child, perhaps it’s because I’m simple and bright colours attract me, like a magpie.
Or perhaps it’s because, as Wild and Woolly owner Anna Feldman suggests, knitting and crafting offer a remedy to the mental and existential fatigue brought on by spending half your life prodding a computer screen.
Anna packed in her years working in web design, but has opened Hackney’s newest knit shop to indulge her passion for the craft. “It’s a departure from working online,” she says. “Being online all the time has its frustrations, there’s something very real about making things with your hands, that people can enjoy.”
True to that departure from the digital, every available space on Wild and Woolly’s walls is dedicated to the handicraft – no modern trickery can bypass the patience it takes to weave a ball of wool into ear muffs.
The most advanced contraption available inside is a wooden hand-cranked mechanism for balling up yarn. There are more variations of needle than I knew were necessary and more types of wool stuffed into the displays than I knew existed, from Aran through to Alpaca. Anna sources as much of it locally as she can.
The Alpacas aren’t even from the Andes, they’re lucky enough to live in the Lake District. Some of the goods are sourced as close as Leytonstone and Shacklewell Road.
The ambition is for Wild and Woolly to have a collaborative local role. “My idea is having a place where people come and knit, the cliché is it’s a close knit community” she laughs, conscious of the pun. “It’s a place where people can come and work it all out together”. Far from being a woolly pipe dream, Anna brings forward her experience working with victims of torture for the Helen Bamber foundation. There she found that having a craft to work on helped people open up and have an identity beyond their trauma. “There is something therapeutic that happens between the lines,” she says.
The shop will hold classes from beginner’s level to advanced, taking you through tea cosies all the way to woolly jumpers, whether it’s for your nephew’s first birthday of your a Christmas pub crawl. With the prospect of the week’s work ahead in front of a computer screen, I bought some needles and yarn of my own. Anna even taught me how to start my thread. A true testament to her patience, believe me.
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
