Birds by Stephen Staunton, who became an artist after sustaining a traumatic brain injury.
In 1991 Stephen Staunton – an artist originally from Galway in Ireland and now living in north London – sustained a traumatic brain injury in a road traffic accident. As a result, Staunton is deaf and uses very little language or formal signing, instead “communicating through gesture, isolated words, vocalisations, and the physical resources of his surroundings,” according to Headway East London, a Haggerston-based charity that supports people affected by brain injury.
Staunton began attending Headway in 2007, where he started painting. Nine years on, and an exhibition of his work – described by Headway as “patchwork dramas of colour” – is on display this month at the Gallery Café in Bethnal Green, sponsored by the Whitechapel Gallery and curated by Steph Hirst.
“I think Stephen’s paintings are partly expressions of an unusual way of seeing,” reflects Bryn Davies, co-ordinator at Headway. “He paints as if he’s at home with the social lives of colours. Stephen’s works usually begin from a source image, but they quickly take on a life of their own. He works with a mixture of careful planning and off-the-cuff gusto.”
Chinese Ladies by Stephen Staunton.
Staunton developed his practice in Headway’s art department, known as Submit to Love Studios. Davies explains that the studios are a central part of Headway’s work. “Art gives an opportunity for our members to express themselves and their relation to the world in an atmosphere of collaboration and mutual support,” he says. “Such projects also open up conversations which will hopefully lead to a deeper understanding of the difficulties and talents of brain injury survivors.”
Staunton himself gave a talk on his paintings on 5 May at the Gallery Café, followed by a musical performance by other Headway members.
Steven Staunton Paintings Until 31 May, Gallery Café, 21 Old Ford Road, E2 9PL whoareyounow.org
In February last year, without a word of warning to their parents, three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green left their homes for Syria. They are just some of the estimated 800 Britons said to have joined so-called Islamic State since its conception. As fear over terrorism continues to dominate headlines, it’s a topic that’s attracted panic, frustration, and blame on all sides. What remains unclear though, is why exactly so many young Muslims are risking their lives to join the organisation.
Another World: Losing Our Children to the Islamic State does not provide a solution to this overwhelmingly complicated issue, nor does it try to. Instead, what you get is a calm, serious discussion that rises above the commotion. Encompassing a whole range of views, the documentary theatre play by Gillian Slovo and Nicholas Kent uses material taken from interviews with researchers, politicians, young people, and families of the young men and women who left to fight. Word for word, the cast retells their conversations with astounding detail and focus.
There’s nothing particularly fancy about Another World in the way of stagecraft, but that doesn’t make it any less engrossing. The Syrian conflict, radicalisation, and the government’s prevent strategy all get a look in without jargon or pretence. The way in which the performance avoids any whiff of preachiness is equally impressive.
The testimonies from the mothers of those gone to Syria are as heart breaking as you might expect; their guilt and grief run deep. While their children’s backgrounds and characters all vary, their lives are all united by a deep-rooted feeling of displacement in society – the phrase “just something missing” keeps cropping up.
But perhaps the most insightful moments of the play are the discussions with Muslim teenagers from East London, who chat freely about their bafflement over the rise of IS and their fears of prejudice in after the Paris attacks. Theirs are voices that are not heard enough over the fierce political rhetoric both here and abroad, and it’s a reminder of how powerful a tool verbatim theatre can be. Another World is an entirely sophisticated, sensitive and important work.
Another World: Losing Our Children to the Islamic State is at the National Theatre, Upper Ground, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 7 May.
My partner and I recently found ourselves at a popular veggie café, sharing a pallid tofu scramble with squidgy fake sausages, discussing why so much vegetarian fare is inscrutably joyless. Whilst mainstream restaurants in East London’s exploding food scene make a point of showcasing the ever-changing palette of colour and tastes wrought by seasonal produce (but with meat), all too often vegetarian places serve pallid and underseasoned food. Yet there’s no dearth of vegetarian food on menus, which made me wonder if the outdated image of the vegetarian lifestyle was the culprit.
This might at least explain why the Hive, located at the top of Vyner Street, doesn’t mention its own vegetarian credentials too loudly. Instead, its website describes “a dining experience designed to enhance your lifestyle…our cold pressed juice detoxifies, our food nourishes, our coffee ignites the senses and our natural wines warm the soul.” If a bit vague, it at least sounds like a good overall outcome for anyone who has been to the pub too many times in the week.
The owners take their sourcing seriously. Mainly a breakfast and lunch destination, the Hive serves up coffee from the excellent roastery Square Mile, sourdough from e5 Bakehouse, all natural wines, and biodynamic and organic produce inspired by the Slow Food movement. The foods on offer are enticing and break out of the all too common staid fake meat and dahl framework found elsewhere. Breakfast here could be cashew ricotta cheese, made in-house, and marinated mushrooms on toast, and lunch courgette and squash noodles with coriander pesto. There is limited dairy on offer too.
When we sat down on a rainy midweek evening, we turned ourselves over to the chef for food recommendations. These presented themselves as tapas – first a wood board with carefully assembled amuse-bouches, such as a raw mini pizza made with macadamias, and a tempeh and aubergine square. Following that, a stack of grilled vegetables, served to us on a mini barbecue crafted out of a brick and smoking coals. I liked the playfulness of this gesture, full of spontaneity and creativity. For puddings, we were served an all vegan trio of caramel ‘cheese’ cake, lemon tart, and brownie, which were all good verging on great, possibly a bit chewy in the case of the brownie. Finally, there are many cocktails and natural wines on offer.
The Hive may rely a little heavily on soya products in its menu currently for my tastes, but it is certainly a place that I would return to, regardless of my diet. My only fear is that its location on the top of Vyner Street may not capture the right kind of passing foot traffic for it to retain a steady evening service. For the full experience, I would stop by for a daytime meal.
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
Rich Mix is facing an uncertain future should it be forced to repay £850,000 to Tower Hamlets Council in one lump sum. The Shoreditch arts centre has decided to go public with the details of a legal dispute with the council dating back to 2011.
The council is demanding repayment of £850,000 given to the arts organisation in 2002 to enable the organisation to complete the refurbishment of its premises at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road.
Rich Mix claims it was never settled whether this money was a one-off grant or a loan that would have to be paid back. But in 2011, the council served legal papers demanding immediate repayment of the entire sum.
It is not clear why the council has demanded all the money at once, but Rich Mix says it does not have sufficient financial reserves to pay the money and that the centre would find it difficult to continue to operate if it did.
Rich Mix CEO, Jane Earl said that the arts centre disputes that the money needs to be paid back, though has offered to do so in instalments, adding: “What we mustn’t do is pay it in a way that will make us go bust.”
She also claims that the council is withholding £1.6 million owed to Rich Mix as part of the planning agreement for a nearby development. Under this agreement, the developer, Telford Homes, paid over £2 million towards cultural development in the immediate area. The council’s Strategic Development Committee decided in 2010 that this money would go to Rich Mix.
A formal contract was drawn up for the money to be transferred but contained no specific targets that Rich Mix would need to meet in order for the funds to be handed over. The contract was recently judged “unenforceable” by a court because of the lack of firm targets.
Earl blames the contract’s poor drafting on the council, who rejected the idea of targets. She said: “In 2011 the council said it would be premature for us to set targets when we didn’t know what our level of Arts Council support would be.”
Following the court judgement, Rich Mix has proposed a deal whereby the council would hand over the £1.6 million of development money and in return Rich Mix would pay the council the outstanding £850,000.
Asked whether the council is using its power over funding to shut down Rich Mix, Earl declined to comment. She is, however, concerned that some councillors hold a negative view of its activities, including the “idea that it’s some kind of licentious drinking den”.
A spokesperson for Tower Hamlets Council said: “The council considers that it would be inappropriate to comment on either ongoing litigation or associated settlement discussions. Irrespective of the litigation between the parties the council remains open to constructive discussions with Rich Mix over possible partnership funding.
“During these difficult times for local government funding and taking into account the council’s statutory obligations, the council must ensure that any further funding is appropriate, affordable and delivers value for the borough.”
A painting by one of the participants in the Arch 76 project in Bethnal Green. Photograph by Eleonore de Bonneval
Down a back road in Bethnal Green, tucked under the smog-stained railway bridge, a grey dingy arch has come to life with colour. Artwork explodes on the walls; knitted blankets, golden prophecy paintings, and jewellery made from old car tyres are crammed into every corner. Inside, 12 women, old and young, talk over each other to show off their art and tell their stories.
“When I first came here I was so dirty, you could stick me to the walls,” says Tracy, 41. “It saved my life this place. It gave me hope, it gave me love and it gave me friendship. I’d never done anything like this before.” Arch 76 is a charity-based art project that was set up two years ago by Wendy Rolt. The idea was to create a safe space for vulnerable women to gather; away from men; sheltered from the streets where many of them have lived, and far from the drugs and abuse that had made them lose hope.
In the whitewashed brick room, through a combination of artwork and group chats, many of the women who are battling addiction or mental illness, have found a new focus in painting. Tracy has become deeply entrenched in the religious aspect of the group. Though women from all faiths are welcome, she draws on the short bible passages they read each time they meet, depicting, with massive swirls of gold paint what she’s understood. She points at one of her pictures hung on the wall. “In this story, this person was murdered by his half-brother. A lot of those stories, you see, we can relate to.”
The art project has become a community staple in Bethnal Green. Although the location is kept quiet for the security of the women, local cafés and cinemas have provided breakfasts and organised film outings. A gallery in Brick Lane helped them put on an exhibition of their work, with the money from sales going straight into their pockets. “It was the first time some of them had made any money themselves,” says Rolt. “ – at least legally.”
Most of the women who attend come regularly, and they see the group as family – for some it’s the only one they’ve ever had. And for others, it’s the only time they’ve had the chance to have their voice heard, either through group chats or by using the myriad of supplies that burst out of drawers and cabinets. “I don’t think that art is the answer,” says Rolt, who volunteered at a rehab centre before starting the charity. “But it’s a way of being creative, and it really encourages them. Some are more shy, and the group meetings bring out more in them.”
She adds: “We once read a story about fasting. And it brought out a lot of the women saying they fast – but not out of choice. Until then they’d been too scared to tell people they had run out of food money.” After that, many of the group members brought in extra food to share when they met twice a week.
“I know we can’t do everything, and that can be hard,” says Rolt. “We have to be really honest. We can’t do their housing, we can’t do their benefits, but we can be there for each other through all of that. It’s what friends are for. We have a lot of birthday parties here. Some of the women have never even had a cake.”
