East End Review

Tag: Freddie Machin

  • Crossing Jerusalem: stage review – ‘We’re all the same stinking family!’

    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre
    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre. Photograph: Habie Schwarz

    “We’re all the same stinking family!” exclaims Sergei, attempting to diffuse an argument between an Arab and a Jew at a birthday party. In Julia Pascal’s 2002 play Crossing Jerusalem everybody is connected. Arabs, Jews and Christians hailing from countless corners of the world live cheek by jowl in one of the oldest cities in the world.

    Playing at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park until the end of August, Crossing Jerusalem is set in the Israeli capital during the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, when buses and cafés were the frequent target of bombings. So the Kaufmann family is justifiably on edge.

    Head of the household is Varda, a headstrong, workaholic, Jewish mother, who deals in real estate. Trudy Weiss as the matriarch is almost manic with paranoia, absently flitting from thought to thought, briefly breaking her stream of consciousness to criticise her daughter’s dress sense and her own lack of a grandchild.

    Only when she is crossed do we feel the full intensity of her feeling. “This is our country. If it goes to hell then we’ll go with it,” she declares. All of the characters at some point make reference to how dire the situation is.

    Everybody seems to have a claim to the disputed territory, and nobody a solution. So trauma is passed down through the generations with no suggestion of peace in sight. The state of Israel being as young as it is, the provenance of the homes Varda sells is inevitably called into question. An Arab family lived in their home before them – a neat metaphor for the wider political context.

    The design by Claire Lyth and Ben Cowens is simple and effective, summoning the remorseless heat and intense sunlight on blinding, white stone. The play takes place over the course of 24 hours, highlighting a sense of the ephemeral. The citizens of Jerusalem are forced to live in the moment because tomorrow may never come.

    Although Pascal says she had to omit some of the ‘Jewish-isms’ in the play for fear they would not be understood, there is still much laughter of recognition in the audience and a handful of great punchlines too. In an inversion of the famous quote, Varda remarks that Israel’s problem is that it suffers from: “Too much history. Not enough geography”.

    There is strong support from the younger members of the cast too. Adi Lerer is full-blooded and live throughout, and Alistair Toovey is particularly impressive as the vengeful and naïve Sharif. Varda’s husband Sergei battles persistently to diffuse the tensions rife within his family. And if his jollity and bad jokes grate to begin with, they find their mark eventually, with Chris Spyrides showing us the tenderness behind the character’s apparently offhand remarks.

    Crossing Jerusalem is at the Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, N4 3JP until 29 August

  • Crossing Jerusalem – a conflict of interest

    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre
    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre

    Jerusalem is a city on the edge. One of the oldest urban civilisations in the world, and a holy site for three major religions, it has in recent times become characterised by conflict.

    Control of the city is one of the central issues in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which remains not just a dispute over territory, but one of identity.

    Set against this backdrop is Julia Pascal’s 2003 play, Crossing Jerusalem, which is being remounted this month at the Park Theatre.

    Directed by the writer herself, the play takes place over a 24-hour period, capitalising on the ephemeral atmosphere in the city.

    “There is a sort of low-level anxiety in Israel constantly,” she says. “Love, sex and death are raw and present there all the time.”

    Pascal is an atheist, attending a non-religious state school in Manchester and ‘marrying out’ of Jewish society. But she still considers herself Jewish in a cultural sense.

    She wrote the Crossing Jerusalem following the Second Intifada, the Palestinian revolt against Israel that lasted from 2000 to 2005.

    Her research saw Pascal masking her Jewish identity and venturing into the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, speaking French as a decoy to find out the truth of what life was like there.

    “Being a writer is like being a spy,” says Pascal. “As a ‘French person’ I was told things I never would have heard a as Jew.”

    This is where she discovered details of the relationships depicted in the piece.

    These include a Jewish woman’s love for her Arab servant, acts of horrific violence perpetrated by both sides, and unusual culture clashes such as the Christian Arab who will host anyone at his restaurant as long as they can afford to eat.

    It is these apparent inconsistencies and contradictions that Pascal always seeks to draw attention to in her writing. She tells me that the only Jewish plays in London are anti-Zionist and that the nature of the conflict in the Middle East is over-simplified, supporting an “easy political dogma”.

    Her considerable body of work declares a fearless appetite to challenge these received opinions and an eagerness to expose the complex and uncomfortable truth.

    And this play is no different. It is an insight into a strained and complex world of family ties, prejudice, religious obligation and above all humanity.

    As Pascal says: “The more we know about each other, the safer the world is.”

    Crossing Jerusalem
    4–29 August
    Park Theatre
    Clifton Terrace
    N4 3JP
    parktheatre.co.uk

  • Playwright questions her Jewish roots in This Is Not The End

    Playwright Rose Lewenstein
    Playwright Rose Lewenstein

    Last year, for the first time in her life, Rose Lewenstein threw a Passover party. Fuelled by her own curiosity and frustrated at people constantly asking her if she was Jewish, she wanted to know what she was missing out on.

    Together with a friend, the 29-year-old read some Hebrew prayers found on the internet, broke Matzah and ate chopped liver and chicken soup made with ingredients from the Kosher section at Waitrose.

    Born in Mile End Hospital and brought up on Chatsworth Road, the playwright says the real answer to where she came from is in fact “all over”.

    Her new play Now This Is Not The End, which opens at the Arcola this month, explores some of those feelings of disorientation from one’s roots, family and homeland.

    Three of Rose’s grandparents were born outside of the UK and although her parents have Jewish ancestry, they are not religious, nor do they practice Jewish customs.

    Her name does indeed suggest a Jewish connection but for Lewenstein, heritage manifests itself more like “a niggling feeling that I don’t really know where my home is”.

    Her play, starring Brigit Forsyth, concerns three generations of women from the same family who are separated by geography and their relationship to their own heritage.

    Lewenstein asserts that the play is not autobiographical but rather, like herself “the characters are searching for something they weren’t brought up with”.

    Having begun her professional career on stage as an actor, singer, and dancer, Lewenstein trained at the Brit School and the prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

    But it was getting her play read at the Royal Court Theatre which was the turning point. After that she found herself abandoning auditions, instead choosing to stay at home and work on her own plays and occasionally as a journalist.

    A recent piece of hers for Vice magazine detailed the shocking statistics around women professionals in the theatre.

    A poll taken on a random evening in the West End found only 5 per cent of shows were written by women. In real terms this amounted to just one play and one writer – Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap.

    Discouraged by the statistics, her response was ‘What’s the point?’ but gradually that feeling of despair galvanised itself into productivity.
    “I really wanted to write a play that puts women centre stage,” she says. “Where they are not wives or daughters, but at the centre of the drama.”

    Now This is Not the End is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 27 June.
    arcolatheatre.co.uk

  • Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage – stage review: between a ruck and a hard place

    The cast of Crouch, Touch, Pause Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman
    Tackling discrimination: Crouch, Touch, Pause Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman

    In 2007 the Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas published the first of his two autobiographies. In the introduction he writes “As soon as I was made captain of Wales, I pledged to be honest to myself and honest with everyone around me.”

    Two years later he came out as gay and has since called the book “one big lie from beginning to end”.

    Thomas’s journey is re-told in Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage, a new play by Robin Soans created by Out of Joint Theatre Company and the National Theatre of Wales. Using text from real-life interviews, the play sees six actors play Thomas, who is known by his childhood nickname ‘Alfie’, with each taking their turn to sport the Welsh jersey and catch the rugby ball, which indicates a change of actor.

    Thomas says he wasn’t scared that people would reject him because of his sexuality, but because “suddenly you turn around and tell them you’ve been lying to them for twenty years”.

    As is so often the case, his best friend Compo had known all along. But his wife and parents hadn’t – and nor had his fans.

    But it’s not just a play about Thomas. As he suffers the taunts and jeers of the crowd, and his secret gradually becomes public knowledge, we also hear the testimony of a young girl whose own taunts and jeers drove her to edge of the void.

    Darcy, played with tenderness and humour by Lauren Roberts, is a character created from interviews with two suicide attempt survivors from Bridgend, South Wales.

    Both parties live to fight another day and even meet to share their experiences, Alfie confessing: “There’s so much of me I see in you.”

    The show comes to a close with a demonstration of the scrum – the inspiration for the title – the forwards huddling together before crouching to engage their opponents.

    The pressure and excitement of various big match encounters punctuate the story as it unfolds and we are frequently presented with a huge gladiator of a man – strong and brave, and totally unequipped for the labours that face him.

    Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 20 June.
    arcolatheatre.co.uk

  • Why life as an outsider isn’t what it seems

    Robert Kelsey
    Outsider theorist: Robert Kelsey

    Feeling cheated by an education system “too linear and too rigid” to accommodate those who didn’t conform, Robert Kelsey left school with only one O-Level.

    But instead of allowing feelings of inadequacy and ignorance to paralyse him, he has gone on to become the owner and CEO of a successful PR agency and a best-selling author too.

    Kelsey’s latest book The Outside Edge, sets out to help fellow ‘outsiders’ succeed despite their disadvantages.

    The Hackney-based author suggests London is the outsider capital of the world, with Hackney having the city’s highest concentration.

    In the book Kelsey argues that spotting an outsider is not a matter of race or gender, but a combination of up to twelve characteristics including sensitivity and cynicism.

    However, unlike other social observers, Kelsey denies that being alternative is a prerequisite to success.

    “Despite the myth peddled by [Malcolm] Gladwell (and others), the attributes of genuine outsiders are usually highly disabling – with most successful outsiders no more than insiders with an attitude,” he writes.

    The book is a manual towards identifying one’s own outsider status and reframing disadvantage or suffering towards success.
    Kelsey sees Hackney as a destination for outsiders and argues that “it has managed to stay relevant through all of the changes, from something almost anarchistic to entrepreneurial”.

    In particular, he sees the transformation of Shoreditch into a hive of entrepreneurship as a logical mutation of the radicalism that characterised Hackney through the 1970s and 80s.

    In his opinion, Hackney has an attitude of ‘anti-collectivism’ – a refusal to conform, and instead maintains a population of fierce individualists.

    Frequent references to contemporary culture and popular philosophers make the book’s theory more accessible and engaging.

    Above all, Kelsey’s mission is a human one, as he states that an original perspective on the world more often leads to suicide than to conquering the world, “a depressing conclusion that every word in this book is aimed at preventing”.

    The Outside Edge is published by Capstone ISBN: 9780857085757 RRP: £9.99

    Outside Edge 372

  • Rugby drama tells the story of a pioneer for sexual equality

    Crouch, Touch, Pause Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman
    Tackling discrimination: cast members of Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage. Photograph: Robert Workman

    Following a tip off, I arrive to meet the playwright Robin Soans, holding a packet of Jaffa Cakes. In Soans’ new play Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage, opening at the Arcola this month, the main character’s mother says she always knows her son’s mood based on his eating habits – when things got bad, she says, he stopped eating Jaffa Cakes: “He can usually eat them by the packet.”

    The son in question is Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, who in 2009 came out, bringing a lifetime of denial to an end and beginning the long journey towards acceptance among his fellow professionals.

    Accepting a Jaffa Cake and dunking it into a cup of lemon tea, Soans tells me it is domestic detail like this that is so essential in a documentary play: “If you want people to believe the big stuff and go on the big journeys, you’ve got to woo them with the detail,” he says.

    The play is about a pioneer. “It’s about someone who did something that had never been done before,” says Soans. During research for the play Thomas admitted that whilst it was a groundbreaking act, it also came with the knowledge that “you have to be prepared to take the shit for it”.

    And Thomas did, being ritually insulted on rugby fields around the country in his late career. Six years on, it is his resilience and self-awareness through those dark times that have made him a hero to more than just sport fans, Soans says.

    Thomas is very keen for his story to be told – hence persistent rumours of a forthcoming Mickey Rourke film portrayal – but when Soans initially approached him, he was sceptical.

    “I think he distrusted the theatre as being exploitative and pretentious, but the first time he saw a run-through in the theatre he was gasping, he was sitting up, it was this absolute recognition.”

    On stage Thomas’ personal story is interwoven with that of his hometown of Bridgend, which, around the same time, saw 25 teenage suicides in just two years.

    “The two things I never, never try to be are either worthy or grim,” says Soans, “even if it’s a very serious subject.” Instead, with humour and humanity his express intention is, he says, to “reveal a piece of human nature that hasn’t been revealed in that way before.”

    Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 20 May – 20 June
    arcolatheatre.com

  • Hannah Moss: silent play is ‘my way of saying goodbye’ after Dad’s death

    Hannah Moss in So it Goes at Iron Belly, Underbelly Edinburgh. Phpotograph: Richard Davenport
    Hannah Moss in So it Goes at Iron Belly, Underbelly Edinburgh. Photograph: Richard Davenport

    The journey towards Hannah Moss creating her critically-acclaimed debut theatre show started the day her dad died. For many years she was unable to verbalise or even acknowledge the grief she had suffered, aged 17, when her father passed away.

    At university she had tried to write a play about the experience, but couldn’t quite find her voice. She wanted to go into the theatre professionally but wasn’t quite sure about how to approach that either.

    Through her collaboration with fellow theatre maker David Ralfe and a chance encounter with a production at the Edinburgh Fringe she finally found the language to express herself.

    Almost entirely without the spoken word, So It Goes tells the story of Hannah coming to terms with her father’s death. Revelling in his eccentricities and recounting fond memories, the narrative unravels through mime, movement and a mini whiteboard hanging around Hannah’s neck. “I’ve become very good at writing upside down,” she says.

    The play’s title is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In the novel, death is always followed by the phrase ‘so it goes’, acknowledging it as a natural part of the cycle of life, with the same reassuring tone we might recognise in ‘c’est la vie’.

    The first time Hannah spoke properly with her mother and family about her dad was after the show’s first performance. Referring to scenes in the play they found they could finally ask one another how it felt when certain moments occurred. “It was like there was this third thing to talk about,” Hannah says.

    Through the prism of the play, Hannah began to communicate with her family, coming to terms with her own grief and now able to celebrate her father’s life.

    Glowing reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe have prompted a national tour for So It Goes, which this month comes to Shoreditch Town Hall. It’s a tour which kicked off on Merseyside – where Hannah’s dad grew up.

    Hannah has described the show as “my way of saying goodbye”, adding that: “It was fitting that Merseyside was the first show we did.”

    So It Goes is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT from 8–18 April

     

  • Antigone – stage review: new script makes for slanging mismatch

    Frieda Thiel and Savannah Gordon-Liburd in Roy Williams' Antigone. Photograph: Robert Day
    Frieda Thiel and Savannah Gordon-Liburd in Roy Williams’ Antigone. Photograph: Robert Day

    In Roy Williams’ modern day Thebes, women are only ever referred to in the basest of terms. They are bitches, skets, yats and skanks. Antigone, powerfully played by Hackney actress Savannah Gordon-Liburd, is herself frequently described as ‘the inbred’, thanks to her Oedipal parentage.

    She works in a grubby nightclub owned by her sharp-suited uncle, the self-styled king of the underworld Creo, played ferociously by former Eastenders actor Mark Monero.

    Although we never discover exactly what her position of employment entails, it is understood that both ‘Tig’ and her sister Esme (Frieda Thiel), a cleaner at the venue, should be grateful for the work.

    This is the landscape of the play. A culture deeply opposed to women that is ripe for an overhaul. In the original Greek text, what follows is a challenge to that dominance by the most unlikely of heroes. A person who, with incredible determination and courage pierces the very heart of the prevailing system of power, prejudice and inequality.   

    But what Williams’ adaptation gives us is merely the continuation of that system. Facing constant derision on the grounds of her gender, and with her protestations falling on deaf ears, Antigone has no agency with which to challenge her uncle’s will.

    Making Creo such an out-and-out bad guy (he wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond movie) proves a disservice to the complex characterisation of Sophocles’ play. Once Creo condemns Tig and sentences her to death, he proceeds to sadistically keep her alive, apparently for days, whilst he endlessly insults her and repeatedly reiterates her fate.

    Though the idiomatic script is raw and pacey, it is a shame that this seminal dramatic work needs translating into street slang to make it relevant to a contemporary audience.

    Likewise, that it was thought that the best way to appeal to the East London public was through the prism of violence and gang culture, is problematic in the least.

    Antigone, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, E15 1BN until 14 March.
    stratfordeast.com

  • Kay Adshead: ‘I never thought I would be seeing women shot in the street for wanting an education’

    Kay Adshead
    Playwright Kay Adshead. Photograph: Mama Quilla Theatre Company

    “Women are not free anywhere in this world until all women in the world are free.” This is the mission statement of Mama Quilla Theatre Company that presents its new show, The Singing Stones at the Arcola this month.

    Inspired by the now deleted blog posts of women protesting in Tahrir Square, and on the frontlines of Tunisia and Kurdistan, this triad of new plays is written and directed by political playwright Kay Adshead.

    “Although they were briefly celebrated, these women’s voices have been ignored, denied and forgotten since the revolution” Adshead says.

    On a micro level the production is an effort to sustain the voices of women who, despite popular uprising, still suffer persecution and oppression around the world.

    A third of the protesters in Tahrir square in 2011 were women, many of whom were subjected to so-called ‘virginity tests’ in the street. Some were raped and killed and almost all were censored.

    The challenge for Adshead as the writer behind the piece was how to interpret such harrowing material for a theatre audience.

    “How do I make art out of this?” she asks. “How do I even make sense of it? When I had my daughter I never thought I would be seeing women shot in the street for wanting an education.”

    Despite the hard-hitting content the writer-director and her multiethnic, all female cast are at pains to insist that this is not agitprop – it is not a sermon, nor an agitation.

    “You won’t feel bombarded by horror or propaganda, it’s about the individual stories of these women” says Tina Gray, a member of the ensemble.

    Adshead made her name as an actor in television sitcoms such as One Foot in the Grave and alongside Victoria Wood in Dinnerladies. And her latest show undoubtedly benefits from that experience, infused with humour and her own natural vitality.

    The plays have come about partly as a result of collaborations with a host of global artists. World music star Najma Akhta has composed the music and will be performing live in performances until 7 February.

    Interspersed with the live performance will be films made by the Syrian theatre group Masasit Mati, whose satirical portrayals of Assad and his government intend to dispel the fear so present in Syria today.

    Their medium is finger puppets, which unlike the pamphlets or spray cans of traditional dissenters can be smuggled through military checkpoints with ease.

    As those who gathered in Tahrir Square were engaging in politics, so Adshead sees the act of witnessing theatre as a political act. The theatre, she says, is both a collective and an individual experience where people meet face-to-face and ask the question: “How do we live in this world together?”

    Mama Quilla has a distinguished history of asking difficult and challenging questions and The Singing Stones looks set to be an urgent response to a continuing global lack of equality

    The Singing Stones is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 28 February

    www.arcolatheatre.com

  • The Singing Stones – stage review: ‘reflecting a familiar feeling of impotence’

    The Singing Stones
    Looking back at the Arab Spring: the cast of The Singing Stones

    The Singing Stones is a jigsaw puzzle of perspectives on what the play’s creators see as potentially “the greatest missed opportunity of the 21st century”. In 2010, the Arab Spring swept through North Africa and the Middle East where despite countries such as Egypt booming financially the voice of the people was entirely absent.

    Freedom of expression is a vivid theme in Kay Adshead’s latest piece of political theatre. Graphic images of lips being fused shut by fire and singing voices silenced by brutality recur. The play opens with an argument that making art, or reflecting creatively on war contributes nothing of any value, and it closes with the response – but what else can we do?

    The reaction of the woman sat next to me at the theatre seemed to epitomise how many of us have responded to the barbarous acts carried out by the various regimes before, during and indeed after the revolution.

    When the actors spoke of so-called ‘virginity tests’ performed on the roadside she tutted. It wasn’t long before, head in hands, she let out an exasperated and audible sigh at the story of a young woman’s body being mutilated. She gasped in disgust when more bodies were burned, and by the curtain she was crying silently, desperately to herself.

    This journey from quiet disapproval, through vocal objection to helplessness seems to reflect a common feeling about the atrocities occurring in Iraq and Syria today. The Singing Stones’ press night even coincided with a debate in the House of Commons as to whether the British government is doing enough to help.

    Although Adshead’s play occasionally feels like grandstanding, and some of its points are trite, it does reflect a familiar feeling of impotence. The piece falls down in places thanks to a lack of structure, but its message is a good one. It is an invitation to listen, to witness, and to speak up.

    The Singing Stones is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL.
    www.arcolatheatre.com