East End Review

Tag: Annalies Winny

  • The Planner- review

    Tom Campbell. Photograph © Nick Cunard
    Tom Campbell. Photograph © Nick Cunard

    Even if you don’t remember Tom Campbell’s first book, you might remember him as that dark horse of City Hall who boasted about shoplifting.

    In 2011 Campbell promptly resigned from his post at the London Mayor’s Office after explaining to the Evening Standard that he had a personal code of conduct for using chain stores: never buy, only steal.

    The boast may have been a sloppily-made political statement (why not just actively buy from independents?), but nonetheless a refreshing bit of risky honesty.

    Not surprising then, that Campbell counts among his influences the American novelist Jonathan Franzen, who won headlines by allegedly being rude on Oprah.

    In The Corrections, Franzen’s white, angsty middle-class protagonist goes into a posh grocery store and stuffs some salmon fillets into his pocket, only for their juices to drip down his leg while he queues at the checkout. It’s a bizarre act of entitlement combining expensive tastes with wealth resentment. Annoying, but intriguing.

    In Campbell’s new novel, The Planner, everyone is similarly annoying. And that makes The Planner a little bit addictive, because it’s fun to resent characters in books.

    The title character James is, by all conventional definitions, boring. He works a thankless job as a town planner in Southwark Council. He spends his days poring over the finer details of a city he can barely afford to live in, surrounded by friends he finds insufferable as their vacuous success (bankers, lawyers) has come to define their personalities. They lack complexity, thoughtless amoebas blobbing their way through life.

    Surely then James, martyr to his city, is more than meets the eye? Not so.

    Unable to conjure any more noble motivations, James allows himself to become the mentee of high-flying ad man Felix, who introduces him to a glamorous, decadent lifestyle as a method of revving up his bland, night bus-using existence.

    It’s the book’s central irony that this planner can’t plan his own life, which may be a bit overplayed – the professional/personal divide is nothing special. Fashion designers often dress badly. There are dentists with bad teeth. Lawyers who commit crimes.

    Elevated to the role of protagonist, James’ task is to surprise and intrigue.

    But he never does, forcing an altogether more cynical take away – there’s no enlightenment in having very little. Just more striving.

    The Planner is published by Bloomsbury Circus. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781408818268

  • The Frida Kahlo of Penge West – review

    Cecily Nash and star both star as Frida Kahlo in The Frida Kahlo of Penge West
    Raising eyebrows: Cecily Nash and Laura Kirman star in The Frida Kahlo of Penge West

    If you like your revolutionary history brief, and brash and sexual, this is one for you.

    This mega-consolidated satirical history of the life of Frida Kahlo, weak in ‘back, legs and womb’ is a filthy bit of GCSE history – in the best way possible.

    But despite all this high politics and high sex, this play-within-a-play has altogether more banal groundings.

    A terribly meek Zoe (Laura Kirman) has her Penge West sofa colonised by a loud-mouthed, embittered uni mate, out-of-work actress Ruth (Cecily Nash). A motley crew of revolutionaries are filtered through the minds of these two equally, but differently, hapless friends putting on a play to appease Ruth’s ill-conceived feminist streak, and boredom.

    The muralist Diego Rivera graces the stage as a pot-bellied Manc. There’s Leon Trotsky, with a bad Russian accent. Kahlo herself is a blonde ‘Mehican.’ Like Kahlo’s works, this two woman show is surreal and overtly sexual in a grotesque kind of way. In not much more than an hour it packs in an impressive amount, drawing innuendo from every little piece of political theory. And on top of being a two-woman show about two women making a two-woman show is, this is a revenge tale in disguise.

    Following its run at the Rosemary Branch Theatre on Shepperton Road, the show skips town this week. A fresh set of dates are set to be announced later in the week.

  • East London Painting Prize winner announced

    'Nico's Cafe' by Nathan Eastwood
    Winning painting: ‘Nico’s Cafe’ by Nathan Eastwood

    We all know how a prize works. Someone has to give it. Someone has to win. And then someone says thank you, and several more say thanks anyway. And the whole thing self-perpetuates thus.

    They’re fun for the judges and the winners alike –  quality is defined and rewarded, and for the weaker-willed among us, a gold standard is set. 

    But beyond that, who cares? One look at the East London Painting Prize exhibition catalogue left you wanting more of everything –  yet we’re left with just one winner.

    The shortlisted works – more than half of which come from Hackney painters –  were not, as the name suggests, a testament to East London as a place, but to a remarkable range of artists who happen to be based here.

    Among the finalists were images of a burqa-clad mother pushing a stroller in green-gloved hands, a woman with the face of a monkey clutching a tree, masterful plush country landscapes and several geometric abstractions. Cathy Lomax, director of Transition gallery, submitted a watercolour of a woman gazing hesitantly back through a half closed door, while Ben Jamie’s shortlisted work is an evening sun-lit landscape, complete with violet foliage and deep metallic blues. 

    The prize is awarded in the spirit of the East End-born painter and champion of emerging artists Jack Goldhill and in this, its inaugural year, the prize went to a documentation of the oft-unnoticed minutiae of a changing neighbourhood – its humanity defined and celebrated by the unremarkable incidents of everyday life.

    It began like this: 41 year-old painter Nathan Eastwood, who works from a studio on Cambridge Heath Road, stopped by his local greasy spoon for a “good solid lunch” of steak pie and mash, and snapped a covert photograph of an elderly man having a quiet meal alone, which was to become the winning painting, Nico’s Cafe – one of Eastwood’s many representations of “incidents of everyday life in East London,” he says. 

    The grey-and-white work is an homage to the café scenes of great American realist, Edward Hopper, but with malt vinegar and ketchup bottles instead of jaunty hats and coffee cups. And without the colour. Since finishing his MA, Eastwood has turned his back on pigment in favour of shades of black, white and grey. 

    As if describing a person, Eastwood describes his winning work as “very antagonistic. It was a real fight to get it the way I wanted it.”

    Eastwood’s scene of moody mundanity is charming, but the draughtsmanship in some of the other paintings was astonishing.

    For his efforts Eastwood will receive a £10,000 cash prize and a solo show at the Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road. With part of his bounty, Eastwood plans to expand his studio and travel to Holland to see Van Gogh’s early works in their natural habitat.

    The selection implied that the judges prefer the right atmosphere to technical accomplishments, which answers my question about whether the East London Painting Prize is about celebrating East London or celebrating its best painters. This year, it seemed to be the former.

    But that’s neither here nor there.

    For those of us watching from the sidelines, the value in this exercise lies in the ensemble. To the Jack Goldhill Charitable Trust – thank you very much for that.

    Nathan Eastwood’s solo show will take place at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow Road, E3 2SJ in October.