East End Review

Tag: Freddie Machin

From the Ground Up, Shoreditch Town Hall, review: ‘a lo-fi game show experience’

The cast of From the Ground Up. Photograph: Almeida

We are rather familiar with binary choices these days – leave or remain, independence or union, Clinton or Trump.

Our views on these issues unite and divide us, and depending on how you look at it, they can define us.

From the Ground Up is an immersive performance devised by the Almeida young company touching on the binary decisions that matter.

Written by the co-founder of the pioneering and provocative Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, it asks the hardest of questions directly to its audience.

Performed underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, the audience is led from the foyer to the street, and down into the recesses of the building.

On the way a fellow audience member suggested turning on her pedometer. Indeed the signs suggested it would be us, rather than the company, doing all the legwork.

The Almeida’s education department enjoys an excellent reputation, and is not afraid to challenge their young members with alternative and contemporary theatrical forms.

This show was no different – not quite a play, not quite live art, in fact it was more of a lo-fi game show experience where the only answers were yes and no and the only questions devilishly difficult moral dilemmas.

“Are you afraid of interactive theatre?” A stifled laugh. “Are you afraid that we might ask you to do something?” A terrified silence.

Once we were numbered and the preliminary assessments made, the real questioning began. Are benefit cheats unforgiveable? Does race matter?

Half of the group watched whilst the rest wrangled with their moral compass. Is monogamy idealistic? Would you fight for peace?

Absent of ‘actors’ in the traditional sense, the ‘stage’ became something else too – a means to view each other, and ourselves. With those who participated exercising their right to speak but at the high cost of being judged by everyone else.

And the company made it crystal clear that was what we were all doing: “Number 19 has never engaged in sexting” they would announce, exposing to the room any admission which had gone unnoticed.

Executing an unusual piece like this demands a huge amount of confidence and clarity from the performers, as well as the ability to put an audience immediately at ease.

The company had this in spades. The standard of work and the ability of the performers far outreaching their age and relative inexperience.

To create such intelligent, interrogative work and deliver it with such presence and panache, the fact that this cohort of 16-25 year olds is destined for great things is no longer in question.

August 11, 2016
Getting stuffed – self-storage lock-up stages play about belongings

Getting stuffed: Handle with Care is being performed in an Old Street self-storage facility this month

Rather than constructing detailed theatrical worlds in abandoned or ‘found’ spaces, Dante or Die makes theatre in already working spaces.

Having previously designed pieces for hotel rooms, and a ski-lift, the company’s latest show is set in the lonely corridors of a self-storage building.

Created in collaboration with acclaimed playwright Chloe Moss, Handle with Care follows the fictional Zoe on a 30-year journey, viewed through the prism of her belongings.

Two years ago, when she was storing some of her own stuff, co-artistic director Daphna Attias fell into conversation with the manager about exactly who uses self-storage.

“People come to these places at a crossroads in their lives, whether it’s death or separation, or a big move. It’s never a really calm moment of your life,” explains Attias.

“Lots of couples who break up go to these places to store their stuff, and then they never come back for it”, she says.

Priceless discoveries such as the entire oeuvre of US street photographer Vivian Maier are rare. “Almost always the value of people’s stuff that they keep isn’t what they paid for it,” she says.

But there is a huge emotional value harnessed in lock-ups like these, and people respond to different triggers in order to access their memories.

The show plays on this sensory experience to explore the power of memory as well as our modern relationship to the things we own.

“We don’t need tapes, or CDs, or records, and we don’t need photo albums because they’re all in a cloud,” says Attias. “But we buy a lot more now because of how easy it is to consume.”

She explains that in the modern world, the acquisition of property – housing and otherwise – can be seen as a measure of maturity, a milestone towards adulthood.

“Once you have stuff, like a flat and a sofa, it feels like you’re a person, that you’ve arrived, and it gives us some kind of comfort, but of course its not true.”

Part of the show’s development was conducted with professional hoarders, the V&A. One of the museum’s missions is to give young people a sense of responsibility over their own belongings, and to convince them to regard social media and other online spaces as their own personal archives.

And it is that space that will be the location for a forthcoming Dante or Die production. Site-specific in the intangible, hyper-public world that is the internet.

Handle with Care is at Urban Locker, Paterson Court, Peerless Street, EC1V 9EX until 25 June.
shoreditchtownhall.com

June 8, 2016
After Independence: staging the politics of Zimbabwe

Stefan Adegbola as Charles in After Independence at the Arcola. Photograph: Richard Davenport

A few years ago, playwright May Sumbwanyambe sat down to watch The Last King of Scotland with his father. The film tells the story of a white Scottish physician who finds himself embroiled in African politics after he treats the former Ugandan leader Idi Amin.

“How did we become comfortable with stories being told like that?” Sumbwanyambe recalls thinking. “No other black man in the film has any agency apart from Idi Amin.”

Sumbwanyambe’s new play After Independence opens at the Arcola Theatre this month. The play aims to shine a spotlight on the deeper complexities of power and politics in post-independence Zimbabwe.

As a playwright, it is details that interest Sumbwanyambe, what he calls “the tangled web you’re allowed to weave together in the theatre” that draw out nuance to encourage a more balanced conversation around African politics.

Sumbwanyambe’s father was himself the physician to the first president of Zambia, so stories of what it means to be black and free have always been part of the playwright’s consciousness.

And although childhood visits to family in Zimbabwe and Zambia have fuelled the material of the play, it wasn’t until the concept of independence touched his own life that Sumbwanyambe decided to write about post-colonial Africa.

Born in Scotland but raised in Yorkshire, Sumbwanyambe was not eligible to vote in the Scottish independence referendum but was nonetheless confronted with the question of identity.

“I have always ticked the box Black-British,” he says. “But now I might have to choose between Black-English or Scottish.”

It was this that led him to think about its parallel in his father’s country. Sumbwanyambe was in Zimbabwe when white farmers saw their land forcibly confiscated without compensation. This created an even more complex political scene in which corruption was rife, and generations of different classes and races sought justice.

“It’s so much more complicated than saying it’s just Mugabe,” he says of some journalism’s tendency to oversimplify.

Sumbwanyambe came to writing relatively late, having completed his undergraduate degree in law. But now he increasingly finds questions of jurisprudence creeping into his work.

“I want to look at these stories in a nuanced and balanced way,” he says. “I’m not in interested in buffoonish black dictators.”

After Independence is at Arcola Theatre, E8 3DL until 28 May

May 9, 2016
Crossing the divide – Spitalfields to see crowdfunded adaptation of Malorie Blackman classic

The cast of Noughts and Crosses in rehearsal. Photograph: Purple Moon Drama

In 2013 the author Malorie Blackman became the UK’s first black Children’s Laureate.

A prolific reader in childhood, she said that for all the books she consumed she rarely came across a black child reflected in the pages.

This month, East London youth theatre group Purple Moon Drama is staging an adaptation of Blackman’s biggest selling title, equally eager to redress the issue of black representation.

Artistic director Cheryl Walker said she hadn’t realised how popular Noughts and Crosses was until she began working on the project.

“The response we’ve had from it has been really overwhelming. I wasn’t aware what a classic childhood text it is,” she says.

Noughts and Crosses is the first book in a bestselling series which has seen Blackman become a National Curriculum recommended author, and she was even name-checked in a Tinie Tempah number one record.

What drew Walker to the text were the young, black characters in leading roles.

Coupled with contemporary themes of terrorism, oppression, and social exclusion, Walker said she felt she could make the story important for her young cast.

“It’s not art unless you’ve got something to say”, she says, asserting that her 16 young performers are more than just actors – they want to have an impact on the communities they live in.

As an actor, Walker found credible black roles hard to find. So she set up Purple Moon two years ago with the intention of handing the reins back to performers so that they might better represent their own society.

Purple Moon offers drama programmes for young people 14-25 years old irrespective of socio-economic status.

Although Walker admits that the acting profession is unfairly dominated by those lucky enough to have been afforded the education, she says this need not be a barrier.

“It’s about empowerment” she says, “giving young people confidence, and proposing the idea that there are many options available to them – as actors or otherwise.”

Because the production is being crowd-funded online, Walker feels an even stronger imperative to represent those who are supporting the endeavour.

The company rehearses at a community centre in Shadwell, sitting cheek by jowl with a housing association.

“Crowdfunding is democracy at its best,” Walker says, “appealing to the community for support we have a duty to represent them”.

Noughts and Crosses
30 April – 1 May
Brady Arts Centre, 192–196 Hanbury Street, E1 5HU

April 20, 2016
The Sissy’s Progress at Toynbee Studios: drama tackles prejudice head on

Nando Messias marches through East London. Photograph: Loredana Denicola

Last year, wearing a red dress and high heels, Nando Messias returned to the street in Whitechapel where he had been attacked 10 years previously.

He once again caught the attention of a group of young men, and they once again hurled homophobic and transphobic abuse at him. But this time he was not alone.

Clutching a bunch of balloons, and flanked by a marching band, he led a 70-strong audience to the site of the initial attack, and the premiere of his new show, The Sissy’s Progress.

Following his attack Messias wanted to know what it was about him that had attracted the negative attention of those young men on that particular night.

Drawing on his training as a classical ballet dancer he realised that without the accessories of make-up or jewellery, it was his walk that clearly marked him out as effeminate.

At first he attempted to iron the habit out, but it didn’t work.

“It felt like I was trying to impersonate a butch woman, not even a man – it just doesn’t fit my body”, he says.

Originally from Brazil, Messias instead began celebrating his uniqueness, leading to the creation of his carnival-esque new work.

Messias identifies as a “male-bodied, effeminate man” and says: “I want my ‘misalignment’ to remain intact.”

Acutely aware of gender norms from an early age, his mother refused to allow him to join a ballet class along with his elder sister. But being consigned to the sidelines only increased his desire to dance.

On turning 17 he paid for classes himself, choosing the female role rather than the male in a discipline with the gender binary at its very core.

“Ballet is very segregated. Girls go first then boys go second. I have always done female technique. I’m not interested in learning the codes of masculinity. I’m interested in enhancing my body, not correcting it.”

Messias came to London to study, going on to complete a PhD on the effeminate body in Western culture.

In Brazil he suffered verbal abuse on a daily basis but never the physical abuse he suffered in London. But it doesn’t taint his enthusiasm for the city. “It’s a very, very tolerant place,” he says. “It’s a place that welcomes difference and eccentricity.”

Messias says he was glad that the audience was able to experience the abuse he had suffered first hand during that first show.

“They saw what it’s like to be laughed at. This kind of thing still happens, and they saw that.”

The Sissy’s Progress is at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, E1 6AB from 17–18 March.
artsadmin.co.uk

March 15, 2016
Family connection to Mayflower pilgrims inspires play

Don’t Waste your Bullets on the Dead

Researching family history is big business, and it is easy to see why. Who wouldn’t, afterall, want to know if they were distantly related to a former president of France, or be tempted to see themselves afresh in the light of newly discovered relations?

Playwright Freddie Machin managed to trace his own ancestry back centuries to uncover a story that he has used as the basis for his new play, Don’t Waste Your Bullets on the Dead, which premieres at Vault Festival this month.

I might be related to someone who was on the Mayflower ship that went to America in 1620,” says Machin, a 30-year-old writer and actor based in Stoke Newington.

That someone is John Billington, who has the dubious honour of being the first English settler to be executed in the newly-colonised land.

Billington was aboard the Mayflower, the ship that transported the pilgrims from Plymouth, England, to the New World in 1620, a voyage that culminated in the signing of the Mayflower Compact, which established there a rudimentary form of democracy.

John and Elinor Billington decided to leave England to escape their debts, but 10 years after their arrival John was convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged.

Machin’s play is not a retelling of their story. Instead it uses their story as the backdrop for a “metatheatrical piece” about someone who is writing a play about maybe being related to someone who was on the Mayflower.

“It has an autobiographical starting point, but from there it ceases to have anything to do with me really,” says Machin.

“We spend some time in 1620s and then I pull the rug and it comes back to the modern day. So there is a relationship between the writer and her own material. And in actual fact she comes face-to-face with her own character in the rehearsal room at one point.”

Machin made his main protagonist female to distance himself from the narrative, but admits that Don’t Waste Your Bullets on the Dead could be seen as autobiographical in another way.

“The main character is trying to choose between her relationship and writing this play, because writing for her – and for me too – is an all consuming act,” he says.

“I’m writing something today about if you choose to be a creative or if you choose to take any path in life you will do so at the cost of other things.

“The play presents a person at a crossroads, who has chosen to be a writer and finds she is having to compromise whether she wants to have a child in the future.”

The character’s decision is whether to have a real life baby, or to give everything she has to the ‘baby’ that is the play.

“I certainly feel like that,” Machin confides. “I’ve got a play going on, which means I’ve got no money and time for anyone else as all my energy and focus is going into the play.”

Don’t Waste Your Bullets on the Dead is at The Vaults, Leake Street, SE1 7NN from 10–14 February.
freddiemachin.com

February 10, 2016
My Beautiful Black Dog – review: finding humour in depression

Brigitte Aphrodite in My Beautiful Black Dog. Photograph: Richard Davenport

Brigitte Aphrodite is a wonderful performer. Funny, watchable, and present, she has a sold out audience eating out of the palm of her hand before the show has even begun.

My Beautiful Black Dog, Aphrodite’s unabashed theatre-gig about one of society’s biggest taboos has been at Hackney Showroom this week, and before the show starts Aphrodite takes it upon herself personally to apply glitter to the beaming faces of almost everyone in the room.

The show is a personal reflection of Aphrodite’s own bouts of depression, which have kept her away from the stage and confined her to bed for up to three weeks at a time.
Using a mixture of spoken word and song, she is accompanied onstage by the leather-clad, guitar-wielding Quiet Boy, forming a musical duo that invokes shades of Bowie and the Bromley Contingent, where Aphrodite also hails from.

Easy targets though they are, it is the coke-fuelled rants of London’s media trendies that provide Aphrodite with some of her funniest lines. In ‘Pop This Party’, her satire of a Saturday night in Shoreditch, the popping of a champagne cork is one partygoer’s second favourite sound – after birdsong.

Quiet Boy also finds his niche on the track ‘Prickly’, which pitches him somewhere between the hard rock credentials of Dave Grohl and the tongue-in-cheek vocals of Jack White on ‘Danger! High Voltage’. Their partnership is mostly choreographed and amiable but occasionally, like life, it veers into hostility and anger.

The morning after the night before, and following a bitter exchange with her guitarist, Aphrodite retreats to her human-sized, glitter-lined, flight case for the next few minutes. Closing the lid to the world to better contemplate the dark.

In her absence we hear a series of voicemail recordings apparently left on her phone during her real-life depression. We hear what claim to be genuine recordings of Dad, Mum, Nan, boyfriend, and others attempting to coax Aphrodite from out of the box.

But like her onstage relationship with Quiet Boy, it is never entirely clear whether these are genuine. Are they the original recordings, retained during her actual depression or have they have been mocked up for the show? Are the musician and performer a couple in reality or is it purely onstage chemistry?

Even though the show is about honesty and the raw truth, it would benefit from greater artifice. Aphrodite’s unadorned reflections on how she felt at key moments are heartfelt but the lack of metaphor, and character, fails to transmit the message as powerfully as it might.

Nevertheless, this is a courageous performance and both of the performers are excellent, Aphrodite in particular has such a strong relationship with the audience that by the end the whole room was shimmying along with her.

She shares a powerful conclusion with us at the end of the show too – that this is not the end. This journey she is on, along with so many others that suffer with depression, will never be definitively over. It is a present and constant struggle. One that, for now, she is winning.

My Beautiful Black Dog is at Hackney Showroom, Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT until 20 November.
www.hackneyshowroom.com

November 20, 2015
Octagon – stage review: poetry that ‘shivers your timbers…and sizzles your spine’

Octagon (L-R Asan N’Jie, Solomon Israel, Harry Jardine) Photograph: Anna Söderblom

It didn’t take long for Nadia Latif, director of Homegrown, the controversially-cancelled play about young converts to radical Islam, to get back in the directing saddle.
At the Arcola this month Latif has directed Octagon, a new play by US spoken word artist Kristiana Rae Colón.

Referencing a huge range of contemporary issues from the nature of creativity, feminism and sexuality to personal legacy, Octagon depicts a group of would-be slam poets on the road to the national finals at the titular nightclub.

What resonates so strongly in the piece is the fact that it is written by an insider. The lyrics of a seasoned poet lend the text an authenticity that cannot be manufactured.

And the extremely strong cast of eight is up to the challenge. Each poem is delivered with such urgency and relish that it sounds as if the performers had penned the words themselves.

Estella Daniels as the host of the knockout rounds commands the room with an ethereal grace, striking fear into those who dare to cross her whilst gently teasing the audience into whoops and claps when a rhyme deserves it.

As she states at the top of the show, the judges are looking for poetry that “shivers your timbers, halogens your heart and sizzles your spine”, and we are not disappointed.

At its explosive best, Crystal Condie as Jericho delivers ‘Malala writes to Miley Cyrus’ with danger and urgency.

To the Taliban gunmen she says: “I spat I am Malala like acid back in his face” reminding Miley that her “right to gyrate didn’t come free”.

Latif’s direction is clean and specific, echoing the sharp clarity of the text. In one of the final moments, the poets reflect on whether they will go ahead with the national slam final given all that has happened.

What emerges is a scene, written in verse, which feels so fresh and present that it might be entirely improvised. Like great verse writers before her, Colón’s rhymes please the ears, but it is her complex and thoughtful provocations which follow you home.

Just beneath the surface, there are densely riddled arguments around sexuality, race and religion that go fathoms deep, the intricacy of their phrasing inviting you to mouth the words whilst you chew over the ideas a little longer.

For all its verbal dexterity however, the play does lack structural rigour. The narrative thread on which the poetry hangs is weak and the scenes a hotch-potch of different forms from monologue to drama to more abstract scenes.

But for the authenticity of the live experience, Octagon certainly hits the mark.

Octagon is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 17 October.

www.arcolatheatre.com

October 8, 2015
Radical play Brenda reflects on nature of being human

Photograph: Dan Pick

An intriguing new play opening at the Yard this month has at its core the central question of what would life would look like “free from the everyday challenges of being a person.”

Brenda, which transfers this month from the HighTide Festival in Suffolk, was inspired by playwright E.V. Crowe’s instinctive feeling about the nature of the self.
“This feeling was so strong, I had to write about it,” Crowe says. “Once I had written a character who could say out loud ‘I’m not a person’ it felt like such a denial of everything we consider natural and true.”

From this radical starting point, the play has been developed alongside acclaimed director Caitlin McLeod through a process of experimentation. The play was built as the rehearsal process unfolded, with everyone in the room contributing to what the production will be.

“It’s a terrifying way to work in some respects,” Crowe admits. “But we think it will make the play more alive and real than other ways of working.”

Crowe honed her playwriting as a member of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme Super Group. Her classmates at the time reading like a who’s who of today’s hot young playwrights: Nick Payne, Anya Reiss, Penelope Skinner.

And although she had completed a MA in playwriting prior to her involvement at the Royal Court, she says it was her experience there that really showed her the possibility of becoming a playwright.

Brenda is clearly at home amongst the challenging and unorthodox work which has come to characterise The Yard theatre, and which has won it such a loyal following across London.

Previously Crowe’s work has been about very distinct subject matter but when talking about Brenda she can’t help but describe it in the abstract. “The play is about the unknown, the unknowable leaking out and disrupting all that we consider real,” she says.

Ultimately Crowe wants the audience to experience the play on a “guttural, instinctive level. So even if there were no words, or you didn’t speak English, you’d ‘feel’ the play anyway.”

Crowe is a big fan of East London and an advocate for young people breaking into the arts. Before becoming a full-time writer she worked for a youth project in Tower Hamlets. “There is so much talent in East London it’s crazy,” she says. “All young people ever need is an opportunity and then the confidence and support to take it.

“I haven’t worked at The Yard before but I love their work and their approach, and that they’re willing to take big risks on artists and ideas.”

Brenda is at The Yard, Unit 2A, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, E9 5EN from 22 September – 17 October
theyardtheatre.co.uk

September 16, 2015
Bakkhai – stage review: Greek tragedy’s modern makeover

Cast of Bakkhai. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Each time Dionysos appears on stage in the Almeida Theatre’s new production of the Bakkhai there is a crackle of electricity. A dangerous flash and fizz of escaped current that threatens to shock the nearest heathen into adoration.

Ben Whishaw is the ethereal Dionysos, who states in his opening address “I intend to thrill you, Thebes.” Fresh off the boat, his mission is to convert Greece to his own brand of ecstatic worship just like he converted Asia before them.

The only man that stands in his way is Pentheus, Thebes’ intolerant ruler. Played by Bertie Carvel with conservative restraint, Pentheus displays all of the ignorance and disregard of contemporary politicians in wanting to put down “this Bakkhic nonsense” with the minimum of fuss.

But he doesn’t know what he is dealing with, and rapidly becomes the victim of his own gnawing curiosity.

In keeping with the tradition of 400 BCE, three actors alternate through the main character roles, whilst a ten-strong female chorus support, cajole and critique their decisions in song, chant and lamentation.

Anne Carson’s adaptation of Euripides’ classic text is clean, accessible and totally honest. Where there is no English translation for the original Greek, the character declares it.

Dionysos admits he is known by a different name in every land he has conquered thus far, his mercurial essence impossible to capture definitively within the confines of language.

In performance, the simplicity of Carson’s text has the power to both articulate huge emotions and sensations and equally be thrown away.

Both Whishaw and Carvel play on the sarcasm and informality that characterises so much of contemporary conversation, Whishaw using language to wield great authority and depict puckish giddiness, to torment and to tease.

Because the language is so plain, the audience tunes in on any glimmer of a double meaning. When Pentheus appeals to us – his courtiers – to support him in maintaining order in the land he governs, we giggle at his double entendres.

Just as Dionysus would have us do, we corrupt his words for our own pleasure and turn all to sex.

Pentheus condemns us for disobeying him, but as an audience of voyeurs we are already followers of Dionysos – vocal adherents of wine, ritual and song.

The quiet control of the performances, the constant rhythm and the coldness of the lighting are what lend this production its eerie atmosphere.

The Bakkhai themselves, instead of presenting their ecstasy and devotions through chaos, are uncannily still.

Instilled with a deep sense of peace and joy, they show us what the satisfaction of true worship might look like. They positively glow with the smugness of the brainwashed, gleaming with evangelical self-satisfaction.

As well as producing new productions of three major tragedies the theatre is presenting an extensive series of discussions, debates and readings interrogating the influence of Greeks on contemporary life.

The Greek season at the Almeida promises to be impressively comprehensive. And Bakkhai is its magnificently sinister and supernatural centrepiece.

Bakkhai is at the Almeida until 19 September.

almeida.co.uk

August 21, 2015