Curious relationship… Alison O’Donnell and Jack Tarlton in Brenda. Photograph: Nobby Clark
In E.V. Crowe’s new play, coming to The Yard following its debut at HighTide festival, security guard Robert drags his reluctant girlfriend Brenda (Alison O’ Donnell) to their local Community Action Group. He hopes that sharing their story might persuade their neighbours to help the down-on-their-luck couple out.
But while Robert, played by an ashen-faced Jack Tarlton, might be fretting over flats and the future, this isn’t what worries Brenda. She stares at the audience with a hunted look, her feet have left tar-like black prints across the floor and she can’t seem to say her own name. An explanation, of sorts, comes when she tells Robert matter-of-factly she is actually “not a person”.
Sparse dialogue and slow dramatic action mean the roles are challenging but with Caitlin Mcleod’s direction Tarlton and O’Donnell give a convincing portrayal of this curious relationship. Robert is in turn cajoling and gentle as he persuades Brenda into taking the mic – he sings Bowie’s ‘Starman’ to encourage her to loosen up, electrocutes himself repositioning fans to cool her down but then calls her “selfish” when she won’t do as he asks.
Later (the community group has still not arrived) there are fun moments tinged with pathos when Robert humours Brenda by “pretending to be upwardly mobile”. They mime getting a dog, calling it Colin, having friends over and burning the dinner. Brenda goes to put Colin outside and Robert catches eyes with the audience, as he slowly mimes washing up – will she return or is the game over? She does come back, but not for long.
Like Mersault, the existentialist hero of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, Brenda seems detached from the commonplace. But the audience doesn’t see her reach any kind of affirmation under the glare of the community hall spotlight.
On paper the play says it explores what life would look like ‘free from the challenges of being a person’ – but rather than being liberated, for most of the play Brenda is just a non-person shackled to the banality of everyday human existence. And then she is through the fire exit and gone.
Perhaps Brenda finds her freedom, but we can’t know how that pans out, and a lack of context or backstory means we’re left as indifferent as she is to what becomes of her.
Brenda is at the The Yard, Unit 2a Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN until 17 October
It often seems as if no stone has been left unturned in documenting the history of Hackney’s famous Woodberry Down Estate.
But just when you thought all the stories had been told, a self-proclaimed “diaspora of punks” who once squatted on the estate are adding their voices to the choir with an upcoming exhibition on its regeneration, entitled “They’ve Taken our Ghettos: A Punk History of the Woodberry Down Estate.”
This mixed-media show will comprise of etchings, comics, photographs and graphics and will be exhibited in the gallery space of Craving Coffee, an independent coffee shop in Tottenham recently partnered with social enterprise scheme the Mill Co. Project.
Woodberry Down’s colossal overhaul, which has seen one of the borough’s poorest housing estates transform into a mixed-tenure development with flats for sale at over £1million, prompted former squatter Rebecca Binns to coordinate an artistic response to the changing landscape.
Contributors include graphic designer Kieran Plunkett, etcher Joe Ryan, whose submission examines the relationship between institutions and control and Mik Insect, comic artist, tattooist and guitarist in punk-squat band Coitus. All three squatted on Woodberry Down in the late eighties and early nineties.
A collage entitled Reality Gap, which depicts Rebecca Binns in her first squat in a Haringey tower block aged 17 has also been submitted by web designer Millie Guest.
Mobocracy by Kieron Plunkett
Binns, who is a PhD candidate at University of the Arts London, researching the work of anarcho-punk band member and artist Gee Vaucher, told the East End Review she wanted to commemorate the estate’s alternative history “before it changes beyond recognition”.
The title “they’ve taken our ghettos” is drawn from the title of one of Joe Ryan’s etchings. “I think it is meant to be a bit ironic,” explains Binns. “It was hard then. We stayed in houses unfit to live in and were moved on a lot. I guess Joe is reflecting on the fact that while they were far from ideal homes they provided something very important – a sense of community and freedom.”
Like many asked to pass judgement on the redevelopment of Woodberry Down, Binns is ambivalent. She raises familiar concerns such as the management of the estate’s deterioration, residents’ unhappiness at the lack of social cohesion in the estate’s new ‘two-tier’ social structure and anger that leaseholders were not reimbursed at market rate for their properties.
Conquest, Colonisation and Social Cleansing by Joe Ryan
But Binns concedes that the council has “made an effort for it not to be a wholesale sell-off” and says it has tried to provide a decent component of social housing.
Following the Manor House Development Trust’s ‘memory bank’ exhibition and extensive media coverage on the council’s flagship scheme, Binns hopes the show will give voice to the estate’s radical past.
“I thought it would be a good idea to commemorate the alternative history of the estate. Ours is a different narrative,” she says.
“They’ve Taken our Ghettos: A Punk History of the Woodberry Down Estate” is at Craving Coffee, The Mill Co. Project, Gaunson House, N15 4QQ until 26 July
The front of one of the Omega Works warehouses on Hermitage Road, Harringay. Photograph: Ossi Piispanen
“Artists and African churches always move in at the same time,” says Ellis Gardiner, as he describes how he arrived in what is known variously as the Manor House or Harringay Warehouse district in 2000 with plans to set up a recording studio.
Fifteen years on, we are sitting in the ground floor of an old Courtney Pope building on Eade Road – part of a sprawling industrial site consisting of around 322 units across 42 sites. Once the area’s major employers in the shop fitting business, Gardiner and others have transformed the building into the New River Studios, comprising a recording studio, affordable office space and a café. Rising above the other side of Seven Sisters Road is a glinting totem of plate glass that is Hackney Council’s flagship development Woodberry Down.
The cross-subsidising model of Berkeley Homes’ mammoth project – where luxury penthouse flats are sold to fund the building of new council homes – is an increasingly popular one among cash-strapped councils.
Walking around the warehouse cluster the Berkeley tower pokes up above every chimney turret and single storey factory, a constant reminder of top-down regeneration and the steady spread of capital inching up from Shoreditch via Dalston and Stoke Newington.
Shulem Askler began buying up property on Eade Road in the nineties, when the ‘rag trade’ fell into decline and Harringay’s smaller textile factories accommodating Greek and Turkish dressmakers, sewers, packers and button makers began to close. His company Provewell Ltd now manages around 70 per cent of the warehouses in the area on behalf of its owners (mainly offshore investors).
Beginning with blank slates (“They had no bedrooms or doors,” laughs Askler) these industrious new tenants designed their own homes and workplaces. Other than a few rogue ‘architectural nightmares’, many are spaces that could grace the pages of interior design magazines; vast communal spaces decorated with projector screens, pool tables and wild plants, daring staircases and the obligatory space-saving mezzanines.
Gardiner – something of a warehouse everyman – is also a leaseholder on a former Fed-Ex warehouse appropriately named Ex-Fed, home to around 25 people. “It’s like a vacuum, creative people just flood in,” says Gardiner.
Now more than 1000 people live here. Hundreds of self-employed artists, makers, musicians and entrepreneurs have set up shop inside the live/work units. An internal Facebook group, fiercely guarded by its administrators, is a good place to view the micro-economy in action. Services and jobs are advertised, alongside parties and odds and ends for sale. Organisations like Haringey Arts work to connect artists with each other and provide a legal framework for those looking to apply for arts funding, while events such as May’s InHouse Festival offer a jam-packed programme of film, music, theatre and art held over six warehouses venues.
Row of former furniture factories now warehouses on Hermitage Road. Photograph: Ossi Piispanen
Unauthorised living
All this was bubbling away nicely until a Haringey Council officer visited one of the units on Hermitage Road in summer 2013 following a fire and was shocked to discover bedroom after illegal bedroom tucked away in an industrial unit. Despite the fact tenants had been paying council tax for over 10 years, the authorities were apparently unaware of the scale of the residential use. Initially Haringey Council went in guns blazing and requested £660,000 to tackle “unauthorised living in industrial areas”. One councillor described the warehouses as “cramped, cold, unsanitary and dangerous”.
Opposition to the evictions was quickly mounted by Warehouses of Harringay Association of Tenants (W.H.A.T.), and after an enforcement notice seeking to reverse the unauthorised residential use in Ex-Fed was quashed in a legal case, the council was pressured into performing a tentative yet significant U-turn. In the Haringey Local Plan released in February 2015, policymakers describe their ‘Vision for the Area’ as: “The creation of a collection of thriving creative quarters, providing jobs for the local economy, cultural output that can be enjoyed by local residents, and places for local artists to live and work.”
So begins the momentous task of legislating an alternative way of living – coming up with what might sound like a contradiction in terms, a “warehouse blueprint”. Normalising an alternative lifestyle whilst retaining its authenticity is a tricky balancing act. W.H.A.T. member Tom Peters says: “Blueprinting is about trying to ring-fence off areas in a way that limits the rampage of gentrification across the city. The state is supposed to be hedging against these big development models. Otherwise the city will become unaffordable dead space.”
This might be what beckons for Hackney Wick, just a few miles down the River Lea, where the artist community has never tried to officially change its use from light industrial to residential or live/work.
Imposing: front of a warehouse by night. Photograph: Ossi Piispanen
As developers put in gigantic planning applications, artists are working out their notice period in leaky studios with nothing but vague Section 106 promises of “affordable workspace”. Going for legitimacy might mean the council makes you put banisters on the staircases, but it also offers protection.
When I get Askler on the phone, known as simply Shulem to his tenants, he tells me he “deserves a reward” for how he has developed the warehouses. “It’s a vibrant and fantastic community. We’re trying so hard to keep it like this. Of course! We could have gone for planning permission and built a Berkeley Homes out of it, but it’s crazy, these people do so much for the community. We have over 1000 tenants, not one single one of them takes housing benefit.”
While the council’s decision to draft a warehouse policy is generally thought of as “pretty progressive, for Haringey”, many of the residents – especially those familiar with the implementation of City Hall’s London Plan – express concerns about the council’s strategic policies to bring back the employment function of the area. This means big change. Local historian and founder of online forum Harringay Online Hugh Flouch says the boom and bust story of the British Industrial Revolution can be read in the history of this sprawling site.
Heavy industry arrived around 1914 in the shape of the redbrick Maynard’s sweet factory, Courtney Pope Holdings and a collection of piano manufacturers. Industry has been trickling out of Harringay since World War II, and many question exactly which types the council thinks it could tempt back. John Gregory, son of Jim Gregory who opened J. Reid Pianos in 1952, has worked in the piano refurbishment shop on St Anne’s Road since he was 12 years old. He says:“The factories have gone and have been converted. What was industrial is now residential.”
Except it is not just residential. The site is already home to the kind of burgeoning creative industry that the council says it wishes to create. The judge in the enforcement case at Ex-Fed recognised Provewell’s point that under the current occupation the building was generating a higher level of employment than when it had been used for its lawful purpose.
Gardens at the back of Omega Works. Photograph: Ossi Piispanen
Popularity problem
With Haringey Council tentatively on board, the other threat is the district’s ‘popularity problem’ or gentrification. The clumsy waves of big money are already appearing, one frozen yoghurt shop at a time. A shop called Simply Organique is the latest addition to Manor House Station – its healthy wares incongruous against the dusty fug of kebab grills, knackered bakeries and greasy spoons. Nathan Coen, 24, moved to Overbury Road from Dublin in 2010 and now lives in Omega Works. “When I moved it was just before the Tottenham riots, no one wanted to be here. Now you can see the changes creeping.”
But while it is easy to point the finger at the wider market for the rent rises, the internal organs of the warehouse district are not immune from profit-motives. Within the tangled power structure some ‘bad apple’ leaseholders are taking a less than positive artistic licence and making big bucks by squeezing bedrooms into former communal space. Gardiner, who is a leaseholder himself, says: “It’s a problem, and it’s not sustainable.” W.H.A.T. hopes to tackle the problem by starting a housing cooperative together with Provewell and taking on units themselves.
Using Haringey Arts as a vehicle to connect with its tenants, Provewell has invested £50,000 in the area’s external appearance. A huge hand-made light-up sign shaped like a cotton reel reading ‘Artists’ Village’ hangs over Overbury Road. There is also a heat-reactive mural depicting both the dystopian and utopian elements of warehouse life which turns opaque when you place your hands on it, and a QR code bookshelf encouraging passers-by to download a warehouse-recommended read.
Tom Peters from W.H.A.T. sees the ‘Artists’ Village sign’ and the landlord’s artistic patronage as a commodification of the area’s hitherto organic creativity. “It is branding. There’s a tension between wanting to celebrate what we are doing and preserving it.” But Co-Director of Haringey Arts James West disagrees: “Artists complain about having no funding, and that they can’t get Arts Council funding because of the cuts, but there’s money on the doorstep. So yes it is loosely gentrified, but at least you are being involved.”
When compared to the whopping towers of Woodberry Down or the gradual erosion of artistic areas like Hackney Wick, it is tempting to see the growth of the Harringay warehouse district as a genuinely bottom-up or grassroots process of regeneration. Peters resists such a simple narrative. “It’s not as linear,” he says. “The city is created and recreated all the time and it is a more complex process than looking at it top-down or bottom up. It’s about different interests clashing.”
Home grown: Residents decorate warehouse front with plants. Photograph: Ossi Piispanen
Patti Smith at Field Day. Photograph: Carolina Faruolo
Tights were joyfully stripped from sun-starved legs, sleeves rolled up and dungarees donned as a week-long smudgy cloud hanging over East London made way for glorious blue sky to welcome Field Day to Victoria Park.
Acoustic treats greeted punters as they flowed into the festival to the pacey parp of trumpets and trombones from local lads Hackney Colliery Band, kicking things off on the main stage. They were later followed by father and son duo Toumani and Sidiki Diabaté from Mali, playing the kora – a traditional West African instrument.
Glamorous hordes swanned by as a couple lay face down on the grass near the stage, their cheeks pressed against a cling-wrapped copy of Saturday’s Guardian, the sound of the world’s best harp players the perfect lullaby for a quick power-nap.
So far, so sedate. But as the sun began to set as dancing feet tossed dust into the air. Some reckless rapping from teenage hip-hop trio RatKing, who have been touring with Run the Jewels higher up on the Field day bill, got bodies shifting on the i-D Mix stage.
Ratking (not to be confused with Rat Boy, another Field Day act). Photograph: Ella Jessel
Sneaking under the awnings of the Shacklewell Arms tent came the bewitching vocals of Tei Shi, moniker of New York-based but Bogota-begot singer/songwriter Valerie Teicher. Her atmospheric electronic R&B left the crowd shouting for more.
But as with previous years, bigger acts seemed to struggle with sound. In the Crack tent, Chet Faker could hardly be heard, though the crowd seemed more than happy to sing blithely along to ‘No Diggedy’ all the same.
Punters crammed the main outdoor stage eager to hear Caribou – the perfect choice for the headline slot. But the sound on the Eat Your Own Ears stage was also weak. “I feel like I’m watching this on TV”, one chap said to his friend, staring glumly up at the video screens beaming images of crowd-surfers and girls hoisted on shoulders.
Sunday
If Saturday night was all right for partying, then Field Day Sunday put music firmly back in focus. A more seasoned festival crowd gathered to see the likes of Patti Smith, Ride and Mac Demarco on the main stage, with the weather gods once again looking kindly on proceedings.
Feeling disorientated in your local park by the array of tents, stalls and stages is a strange sensation at first, though wandering between them all to discover new acts whilst grazing on some of the stellar street food offerings is no bad thing.
Gulf were an early find, a psychedelic guitar-pop group from Liverpool playing to a modest crowd in the Moth Club tent. For a new band, festivals are like a shop window, a place to find new fans, and Gulf’s lilting, melancholic melodies and full-throttle guitars are sure to have won them friends.
Walking between stages it was surprisingly easy to be distracted by the sight of adults sack-racing, or in the words of the bawdy announcer, showing “athletic prowess in the sack”. Silly but actually rather fun, the ‘Village Mentality’ area is an enduring feature of Field Day that makes it stand out from its festival brethren.
Napping: A couple snooze while revellers flit between the bands. Photograph: Ella Jessel
Packing out the Verity tent were Leopold and His Fiction, who wowed the afternoon crowd with a high tempo set of vintage rock, complete with singing drummer. “This song is about Detroit,” declared frontman Daniel James, the crowd roaring their approval. “Has anyone ever been to Detroit?” he followed up, to a more muted response – though enthusiasm for this all-American blend of Detroit rock and soul was well placed.
In an early evening slot, Patti Smith and band played Horses in full, with punk poet Smith showing she’s lost none of her energy or stage presence in the 40 years since the album was released. From the snarled opening line of “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” it was clear Smith meant business.
Smith railed against governments and corporations and implored everyone to be free, to whoops and cheers. By the end, audience members were calling out the names of lost loved ones during an emotional rendition of ‘Elegie’, dedicated to all those people “who we have loved and are no longer with us”.
Those who left after Patti Smith must have felt there was no room for improvement, but the remaining faithful were rewarded with a serene set from headliners Ride. Playing songs from across their four albums and various EPs, the reformed cult act and original ‘shoegazers’ have lost none of their intensity, their guitar ‘wall of sound’ thankfully still intact.
With cruel punctuality the curfew was reached. Happy, sunburnt and a little worse for wear the crowd filed out, leaving only glimpses of grass under a carpet of plastic cups, broken sunglasses and crushed cans of Red Stripe.
Could the sound have been better? Probably. But Field Day has all the elements for a great party and emerged with its reputation for devising an eclectic line-up unscathed, though a few decibels short of fever pitch.
Janet Etuk as Grace and Sean O’Callaghan as Phil in Beyond Caring. Photograph: Mark Douet
During the pre-election ‘air battle’, zero-hour contracts were a hot topic. It is timely then that Beyond Caring, a play that peels back political rhetoric to reveal the realities of cleaners working in a meat factory with no fixed hours, has transferred from The Yard in Hackney Wick for a brief run at the National Theatre.
Designed to encourage a flexible labour market, zero-hour contracts force workers to bend over backwards to meet the whims of an employer. If you are young and lucky enough not to fall ill or on hard times – you might survive. But those in Alexander Zeldin’s play are the vulnerable, the poor and the sick.
The action follows three women taken on for a two-week job at a meat factory. They are bolshy Liverpudlian Becky (Victoria Moseley), timid Susan (Kristin Hutchinson) and Grace (Janet Etuk) who has had her disability benefit cut and has been passed fit for work despite having rheumatoid arthritis.
They join Phil (Sean O’Callaghan) a gentle giant type who buries his head in detective fiction and is on a treasured permanent contract, and manager Ian (Luke Clarke).
All the acting is strong but Clarke gives an especially good performance as Ian, the type of manager who thinks an extra 27p an hour and a university degree gives him the right to laud it over his subordinates with fascistic zeal.
He calls team meetings after punishingly long shifts (“I’m not happy guys”), prevents Grace from taking medication and watches porn on his phone all the while spouting an infuriating jumble of self-help clichés and managerial jargon.
Nothing happens, the days pass in a pattern of work and biscuit breaks. This lack of plot is consonant with the sense that there can be little progress for those forced to live in the immediate.
We learn little of the characters’ backstories beyond hints at private tragedy but again this is a reflection on the nature of their work, for how can human connections be forged on such inconstant foundations?
Tension builds as physical exhaustion and pent-up rage pushes the cleaners towards the edge. Grace’s muscles, pushed beyond their capability finally give in and she collapses over the huge concertina-shaped machine. Paste-grey water is sloshed frantically over stainless steel machines, but the stubborn smears of congealed sausage meat will not budge.
The cleaners are presented as ‘invisibles’ (Ian says the staff party will give them a chance to mix with the ‘normal staff’) but 2.3 per cent of the UK’s workforce are on zero-hour contracts. The barman at your local gastropub is probably on one, as is the Sports Direct cashier who sells you a bundle of socks.
What really shocks in this brutal piece of theatre is that legislation that values a business owner’s profit-motive over basic human rights has become so commonplace in modern Britain. Beyond Caring leaves the audience smarting – not just from the pungent smell of sanitiser but from the injustice of it all.
Beyond Caring is at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 23 May nationaltheatre.org.uk
Wendy (Nadége René) in Politrix. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
In the Big House Theatre’s latest play Politrix, the embers of the London riots are still glowing.
This punchy piece of theatre, directed by Maggie Norris, explores the widening gulf between the halls of parliament and a swathe of inner-city youth once branded a “feral underclass” by its members.
With the exception of Ben Lambert who plays Conservative politician CJ, all the cast members are part of Big House Theatre’s 12-week drama programme aimed at getting care leavers from the ages of 18-23 involved in theatre.
The plot follows a Tory MP dragging a group of six young people on a whistlestop Westminster tour. Verbatim recordings of the cast’s own trip to the House of Commons are woven into Ben Musgrave’s script, making their voices audible above the legislators that claim to speak for them.
Determined to use the occasion to her advantage, Monroe (Camilla Ferdinand) asks CJ for help in getting her brother out of prison where he was sent for being present at the scene of a gang murder – a joint enterprise conviction.
He dithers before declining. “You saw me come in here with my bag of dog-eared papers and you thought: fuck”, she accuses him scornfully.
For Monroe’s friends, the environment of pomp and privilege is oppressive, and the halls of power morph into a dystopian house of horrors.
An ashen-faced Margaret Thatcher (another turn for Lambert, now in drag) rises from the dead and attacks Leo (Shane Cameron) and Wendy (Nadège René) for being a product of the ‘something for nothing’ culture of the welfare state.
Soldiers march past and security guards perform the rituals of stop and search. Authority is everywhere they turn. Respite is found in the chapel where kindred spirits lurk, suffragettes and revolutionaries, whose tales help to soothe the young friends’ jangled nerves.
With its concrete floors and high ceiling, the all-new Hackney Showroom is an ambitious space and the acoustics are tricky to control – ironic in a play about the struggles of being heard.
But the cast rises to the challenge and it would be hard to pick out a standout performance from the wealth of fresh young talent on display. From the entertaining Fizz (Auzelina Pinto) to the angry K (Moses Gomes-Santos), each character has formidable presence.
After the play I ask 22-year-old Kieran Roach, who gives an affecting performance as the quiet Rico, about the anger that runs throughout the piece. “It’s not anger, it’s frustration,” he gently corrects me, “frustration that we are not being listened to”.
Politrix gives a voice to those who were the collateral of the 2011 chaos. For politicians puzzling over how to build bridges with Britain’s youth it should be compulsory viewing.
Politrix is at Hackney Showroom, Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT until 11 April.
Jasper Britton as King Henry IV and Alex Hassell as Hal in Henry IV Part II. Photograph: Kwame Lestrade
Shakespeare’s meditation on the universal themes of honour, duty, loyalty, and affection is packed with both dramatic action and raucous comedy.
No contemporary political parallels are intimated through costume or set – this is straight-down-the-line classic English theatre.
Antony Sher shines as Falstaff, in turns manipulative, deceitful, endearing and very human. But though Sher is by far the stand-out performance, Alex Hassell also plays a fine Prince Hal.
Part I centres on the strong attachment between the two men and its gradual unravelling as Hal responds to his higher calling as a warrior and defender of his father’s throne.
There is a clear spark between Sher and Hassell, who together elicit a wide range of emotional reaction.
Trevor White’s Hotspur is also well-judged, his bristling energy an apt counterpoint to Hal’s graceful self-assurance.
Part II picks up where Part I leaves off, but with a notable shift in emphasis as wild Hal’s sense of responsibility and filial duty becomes a heavier weight on his young shoulders.
On hearing news of a second rebellion, merry Falstaff is called away from London’s underbelly, his coquetry with potty-mouthed wench Doll Tearsheet (Nia Gwynne) and Mistress Quickly (Paula Dionisotti) put on hold.
He travels to Gloucestershire, recruiting a raggle-taggle band of old soaks and rustic bumpkins from country villages, all the while believing himself still in favour at the Westminster Court.
In the shires he meets former acquaintance Justice Shallow (Oliver Ford Davies), who provides light relief as he nostalgically, and erroneously, recalls his gallivanting youth.
But as the sick King weakens, so does the bond between Hal and his roly-poly companion – their separation is also physical as they meet only twice in the whole play.
The deathbed scene in which Hal mistakenly usurps his sleeping father by taking the crown is one of Part II’s strongest moments.
Grief for his dying father and the looming burden of the throne he must inherit combine to force the reluctant prince into maturity. Hassell is affecting, as his cocky smile slips into mask of desperation, his swagger turns to diffidence.
Once the new king is crowned, Falstaff has become an unsightly remnant of Hal’s old hedonistic life, a vestige of an ill-spent youth that he would rather put behind him. “I know thee not, old man,” he says, wrapped in pomp and finery.
Part II dwells on the extinguishing of life’s “brief candle” whereas Part I shows it burnt at both ends – it is something of a hangover – full of regrets and reminiscence.
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.
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.
