East End Review

Tag: Arcola Theatre

  • Ghost from a Perfect Place – review: ‘Just the right level of dystopian horror’

    in Philip Ridley's Ghost from a Perfect Place
    Scarlett Brookes, Florence Hall and Rachel Redford star in Philip Ridley’s Ghost from a Perfect Place

    Ghost from a Perfect Place is a play that transcends the era in which it was written, swirling images from the past with forewarnings for the future.

    Controversial when first staged in 1994 (the Guardian’s Michael Billington famously slated it as “pornographic”), the Arcola’s gutsy twentieth anniversary production is by no means a walk in the park.

    Playwright Philip Ridley draws us instantly into the East End’s insalubrious past, when former gangster Travis Flood arrives on the doorstep of grandmother Torchie Sparkes. “Don’t you know who I am?” he cries, his silk suit and white lily at odds with the flaking flat.

    Over tea and biscuits, Torchie, played daintily by Benidorm’s Sheila Reid, entertains Travis with stories of her tumultuous past, lacing them with nostalgic snippets from back in her heyday. The entrance of her bombshell granddaughter Rio cranks up the pace as we are thrown into the inner workings of her girl gang, The Disciples.

    Somewhere between The Bangles and Macbeth’s Witches, the gold-lamé clad trio make for fascinating viewing. Rachel Redford plays one of Rio’s loyal followers, Miss Kerosene, like a woman possessed, searing with energy and anger.

    Much of the second half hinges on the power struggle between Travis and the girls, who fashion a world devoid of men in order to survive. Michael Feast is every bit the suave old-school mobster in his rendering of Flood, with an uncanny likeness to Michael Caine.

    Out of his depth he may be, but Travis is guarding a secret toxic enough to topple Rio from her lofty throne. Layered between Ridley’s lyrical, effervescent prose, it is the bearing of this fact gives the play its enduring significance.

    Director Russell Bolam injects Ghost from a Perfect Place with just the right level of dystopian horror and fashions the most violent scenes to leave a formidable visual imprint on the mind of the audience. However it is Ridley’s script that deserves the most applause.

    The master storyteller uses each character to conjure fantastical images of lives lived and dreams dreamt, as if the stage were filled with far more than just five characters.

    Ghost from a Perfect Place is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin St, E8 3DL until 11 October

  • Dalston’s Grimeborn festival is underway

    Grimeborn 2014 -620
    Grime is of the essence at alternative opera festival

    A fraudulent psychic, persecution in Mussolini’s Italy and a shepherd’s marriage to a semi-divine nymph are some of the subjects set to feature at this month’s festival of alternative opera Grimeborn, at the Arcola Theatre.

    Ten productions, including new operas and small-scale re-workings of established favourites by Monteverdi, Massenet and Handel, are to be staged throughout the month in the Arcola’s two main studios.

    Eye-catching operas include Women Box, a triple bill of musical theatre and opera about women’s boxing and the rise of the female conductor; a new translation of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea; and The Medium, an invitation to a séance with dark voices, magic tricks and flying spirits.

    Now in its eighth year, Grimeborn aims to turn the stuffiness of the English summer opera season on its head, with its name a playful reference to the Glyndebourne opera festival.

    The Arcola’s Artistic Director, Mehmet Ergen, calls Grimeborn “a breeding ground for original voices and some of the stars of tomorrow”.

    The festival prepares vocalists for future roles by giving them the chance to perform in a more intimate setting and aims to attract new audiences to opera by adopting a bold, risk taking approach and by selling tickets at affordable prices.

    Grimeborn 2014 is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 7 September

  • The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes – review

    Selva Rasalingam and Nabil Elouahabi in The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes. Photograph: Judy Goldhill
    Selva Rasalingam and Nabil Elouahabi in The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes. Photograph: Judy Goldhill

    Seeking asylum in Britain is no laughing matter, but journalist and screenwriter Rashid Razaq’s new black comedy is perhaps an exception, using well-observed wit to take aim at the cultural superiority and political insensitivity of the West during the Iraq war.

    Perhaps inspired by Fuentes himself – famous for his rotating narrators – Nicolas Kent’s direction sees the play, based on a short story by Iraqi author Hassan Blasim, jump giddily forwards and backwards in time between 2006 and 2011. Projected politicians appear on the walls but their confusing speeches, presumably intentionally, provide little context.

    Saleem Husain, played movingly by former EastEnders actor Nabil Elouahabi, is a street sweeper, used to cleaning the carnage left by car bombs on the streets of Baghdad with his colleague Khaled (Selva Rasalingham). Hiding in a van full of frozen peas he makes his way over the border to England – a reassuringly “godless” place. Saleem turns over a new leaf and adopts the name of famous Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes after seeing a handsome picture in a magazine.

    While the videos of Bush’s and Blair’s garbled justifications of invasion draw grim smirks of derision, Carlos’ new persona provides Fawlty Towers-style gags. We meet him reeling off the eight wives of Henry VIII he has learnt for his citizenship test while on a dirty weekend with posh totty Lydia (Caroline Langrishe).

    The amenable Carlos tries to convince UKBA he is an atheist, fleeing persecution from God, only to be told: “God is not on our recognised list of dictators, Mr Husain” by a dour Scottish case worker, played by the talented Sara Bahadori.

    But Carlos’ fresh new start soon begins to lose its shine. No matter how much inane trivia Carlos ingests, the memories of his homeland are as hard to erase as his stubborn Arabic accent. Carlos’ composite identity – a suave Mexican with the demeanour of an English gent – gradually erodes, leaving a Sunni Iraqi tormented by his nightmares.

    Rashid Razaq’s play shows us not only the psychological damage suffered by those forced to seek asylum, but reminds us that the complexities of sectarian conflict are not reducible to tick boxes on an immigration form.

    The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 16 August.

  • The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes – preview

    Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes 620

    Black comedy The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes is based on an award-winning short story by Hassan Blasim, who recently became the first Arabic writer to win the International Foreign Fiction Prize.

    Exploring issues of immigration and identity, it tells the story of an Iraqi refugee arriving in London after fleeing religious persecution.

    Looking to change his fortunes he marries a wealthy older woman who helps him as he fervently studies for his citizenship tests. In doing so, he discovers the complexity of what makes somebody intrinsically British.

    In the process, he arrives at the crushing realisation that knowing the history of England inside out does not constitute such an identity.

    The performance will be directed by Nicolas Kent; the former artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre and son of a Jewish-German refugee who arrived in Britain in 1936.

    “In a way I’m trying to look after my father’s heritage,” Kent says. “We live in a very tolerant society for the most part and it’s very important that we look after people who come here who have been persecuted in their own country, and that those that come to this country recognise that they have a responsibility to their host society.”

    Having been involved in a number of political productions throughout his career Kent is no stranger to sensitive subject matter, and admits immigration is a topic that has “been hugely moved up the political agenda with the recent events in the European elections”.

    “I always think theatre is most powerful when it makes people think and when it makes them question and provokes them,” he says.

    Sex and comedy gives the play certain entertainment value, though the ominous threat of the Carlos’s past proves inescapable. Kent hopes it is this combination that will intrigue the audience.

    “It’s short, it’s very funny, and it’s also very hard hitting at the same time. It really looks at the issues as to what happens in Iraq, and looks at the issues of political asylum, and also the issues of what it is to be British. All these issues are very pertinent at the moment.”

    The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 23 July – 16 August.

  • Between Us – review: a bold confrontation of class inequality

    Callum Dixon as Dave in Between Us at the Arcola Theatre
    Callum Dixon as Dave in Between Us at the Arcola Theatre. Photograph: Jeremy Abrahams

    Julia is a therapist, moonlighting as a stand-up comedian, who has recently made contact with the daughter she gave up for adoption many years ago. Dave, her client, has come to see her since the birth of his daughter triggered a depression. Teresa, another client, is a wealthy woman struggling to cope with caring for the two children with behavioural difficulties she recently adopted.
     
    For her latest work, Sarah Daniels is confronting the audience. Her play opens with Julia, played by Charlotte Cornwell, in the role of stand-up, addressing us, the ‘Guardian-reading’ theatregoers, here in Hackney E8. We are all included in this evening’s critique, which is: ‘What price does society pay to allow the middle classes to feel good about themselves?’ 
     
    The suggestion is that Teresa (Georgina Rich) and Dave (Callum Dixon) are using therapy to feel good about themselves despite the ethically dubious choices they have made. But while the question may be a valid one, this play this feels like an over simplification of the issue. While it promises to ask ‘how have we come to this?’ this question is not really answered, and both Teresa and Dave have something of a plausibility problem. The motivations for Teresa’s behaviour and her relationship with her husband are not properly examined, and her story feels unreal. It also asks too much of the imagination to believe that Dave, a cockney builder, was ever a public school ‘posh boy’, and his behaviour when bumping into his therapist in a bar feels unlikely. 
     
    The scenes involving Julia and her daughter Kath are the most moving. Having boldly declared to begin with that inequality is a thing of the past, the many inequalities in Julia’s relationship with her daughter are painful to witness – she craves a relationship with her, but her feelings are not returned in equal measure, and she tries to use her wealth to buy time with her. Her heartache in these scenes is palpable.
     
    Between Us includes many brilliantly observed details. On learning that her daughter is a hairdresser Julia asks “and you want to be…?”  – “A hairdresser,” Kath replies. But some of the references to societal inequalities seem artificial and inserted, and the snobbery of Julia and Teresa at times too open to be convincingly English.
     
    Between Us is funny, well-acted and always compelling. Some may find its message challenging and important, others may find it unsubtle and didactic. But it is certainly engaging.

    Between Us is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL, until 21 June

  • Waiting for Godot review – ‘not total tomfoolery’

    Totally Tom duo
    Comedy duo Totally Tom star as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot

    “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” wrote Samuel Beckett in his play, Endgame. It is apt, then, that in the Arcola Theatre’s bold new production of his famous masterpiece Waiting for Godot, the vagrants are played by stand-up comedy duo Totally Tom.

    The Samuel Beckett estate is notoriously strict on the direction of his plays. Ex-Eton master and director Simon Dormandy’s casting of his former pupils, who swap bowler hats for baseball caps in the lead roles of Vladimir and Estragon, has created a few ripples of surprise.

    The youth of Totally Tom might irk the purists –  but they give new life to a play perhaps otherwise fated to a future as the unyielding subject of undergraduate dissertations. Playing Vladimir, Tom Palmer channels a Soho video editor with his bike satchel and scuffed Nikes while his gangly companion Estragon (Tom Stourton) has the air of a morose Irish barman – the kind you might find working in a Dalston dive.

    Their clothes might be updated but Didi and Gogo’s predicament remains unchanged. They turn up to their barren spot, a background of rubble and puddles artfully designed by Patrick Kinmouth, every day to wait for their appointment with Mr Godot. The waiting is still agony, as Didi says: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”

    Their wretched impasse is punctuated by the arrival of Pozzo (Jonathan Oliver) – a whip-wielding egocentric who has an elderly man, Lucky (Michael Roberts) tied to a rope. Oliver’s Pozzo is an East End geezer with a leather pork-pie hat, rings and tattoos but he is rather out-shined by the dexterity of his slave. Commanded to ‘think!’ on demand, Roberts produces a torrent of gibberish both disturbing and entertaining, when commanded to ‘dance!’ he performs a shuffling and strangely affecting flamenco routine.

    Totally Tom shift the emphasis of Beckett’s literary anti-heroes, giving them a sense of optimism that only makes the disappointment of Godot’s absence more intense. The jokes are not total tomfoolery but palliatives, desperate attempts to conceal the horror of waking up to a life without meaning.

    Perhaps it is the agonisingly slow passage of time that means Didi and Gogo have been seen traditionally as middle-aged rather than young men. Dormandy’s Godot suggests that today it is the tracksuits not the suits that wait in limbo. Get a ticket, what are you waiting for?

    Waiting for Godot is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 14 June.

  • My Name Is… review: From the trance of young dreams to an angry separation

    Karen Bartke and Umar Ahmed in My Name Is... Photograph: Helen Maybanks
    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

  • Banksy: The Room in the Elephant – review

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

    Banksy: The Room in the Elephant, now showing at the Arcola, is a double-bill that compares the man with the myth and asks questions about what art is and how we value it. But the central character is not Banksy.

    For seven years Tachowa Covington made his home in an abandoned water-tank outside Los Angeles. He lived, literally and figuratively, on the fringe, furnishing the tank with found objects and transforming it into a ‘palace in the sky.’ In 2011 Banksy, in town for the Oscars, spotted the tank and stencilled ‘this looks a bit like an elephant’ on its outside. Suddenly the tank had huge financial value and Tachowa was evicted from his home.

    The Room in the Elephant is a one-man, 55 minute play starring Gary Beadle of Eastenders fame, based on Tachowa’s story but making no claim to be factual. ‘Don’t no-one want the truth – they want the story,’ explains the imagined Tachowa. Bristol-based playwright, Tom Wainwright, says he “followed his nose into a giant can of worms where truth and fiction lead each other on a merry little dance,” and the play is a self-conscious attempt to ask, ‘who is entitled to tell whose story?’

    The play is followed by the short film Something from Nothing made by the Dallas filmmaker and friend of Tachowa, Hal Samples, comprising material gathered over seven years. It presents Tachowa at home in the tank, through being evicted, then documents his response as he becomes internationally famous through Wainwright’s play.

    There is an irony in the idea of artwork by Banksy, who has made his name as an anti-establishment graffiti artist, being used to displace this true maverick from his home. Something From Nothing reveals that this is not in fact what happened – in reality Tachowa had already been given notice to leave the tank before Banksy’s visit. But this information doesn’t detract from the play’s essential point: that art can be a form of social colonialism.

    It is also a satire on the contemporary circus around Banksy’s pieces. Over seven years Tachowa had invested in a truly original creation, lovingly upcycling a disused water tank into a quirky but comfortable living space. Before the graffiti appeared, it was viewed as a ‘piece of junk’ by the authorities, but it is now being preserved in storage and is the subject of a law suit, simply because the (somewhat inane) observation ‘this looks a bit like an elephant’ has been spray-painted on it. This looks a bit like the emperor is wearing no clothes.

    The Room in the Elephant was a sell-out in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2013. Certainly the script is clever and Beadle gives a strong performance as the charismatic fictional Tachowa. It is Beadle’s talent which carries the show, as there’s little in the way of action.

    The film Something From Nothing is illuminating but at times incoherent and disjointed.

    The Room in the Elephant raises important questions for anyone interested in art and its politics. Otherwise it feels, like Banksy’s art – a little over-hyped.

    The Room in the Elephant is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 26 April.