Oliver Coppersmith and Jonah Russell as Eitan and Avi in The Mikvah Project. Photograph: Mark Douet
The stage is a swimming pool, or more precisely, a mikvah, a type of bath used in Judaism for ritual immersion. The leads are Eitan (Oliver Coppersmith) and Avi (Jonah Russell), two young Jewish men discovering what it means to find and hold on to love. This brave and sexually-charged play from writer Josh Azouz and director Jay Miller, now at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, is quite the spectacle.
Eitan is 17, navigating his way through hormone-ridden teenage years, and arriving at the conclusion that he’s fallen in love with Avi, a 35-year-old married man who’s trying for a baby. They meet at the mikvah to be spiritually cleansed, but it soon becomes clear they’re only there for each other.
Lighting makes effective use of the space in the theatre, the rippling water casting an eerie reflection on the corrugated iron ceiling. There’s a bravery in the staging and the physicality that transcends the small space, and brings the audience right into the mix.
Clever interplay between the two vastly different personalities makes for a highly enjoyable exchange of dialogue and the heavy weight of things unspoken. As Avi says, love is “all types of silence”. Wonderful casting really elevates this production from fringe theatre to a piece that could happily sit in the National Theatre.
Utterly immersive from the outset, the play dissects stereotypes and clichés – both of men and of Jewish culture. It meanders along a relationship between age, experience, longing, desire, admiration and duty, blending startling music with clever dialogue. It’s surprisingly frank and funny, focusing on young male anxieties. Eitan is eager and carefree, Avi has an obligation to his wife – there are very human exchanges of power and control as the two men try to find a place in which they’re happy.
Exploring the boundaries of desire, fantasy and sexuality, and informed by today’s Jewish culture at every turn, The Mikvah Project is a must-see production in the heart of Hackney Wick. Erotic, emotional, extraordinary.
The Mikvah Project is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2a Queen’s Yard, E9 5EN until 21 March theyardtheatre.co.uk
The image of the British Left suffered an unfortunate blow in 2008 when the Google Streetview camera van drove past the offices of The Morning Star – the world’s only English-language socialist daily newspaper – the day after they had been gutted by a catastrophic fire.
“I think it’s been updated now,” says Morning Star editor Richard Bagley. “But for a while if you went to the address on Streetview you had the door hanging off, loads of smoke damage, the windows smashed and the company secretary with his head in his hands on the curb!”
The offices are in better shape today. Down the road from the Stour Space gallery in Hackney Wick, two smart red five-pointed stars sit above the door of a squat brick building, bookending the legend: William Rust House. Inside is a life-size brass relief of the eponymous one-time editor, done in jagged Vorticist style.
The newsroom holds a dozen state-of-the-art iMacs, a Palestinian flag and a pinup front-page from the paper commemorating the late trade union leader Bob Crow: “LOVED by the workers, FEARED by the bosses”. According to a whiteboard, James is ‘Worker of the Week’. Journalists drift in as the morning proceeds, a little sun-damaged from spending the previous day covering a march through central London by the People’s Assembly, an umbrella group for left-wing activists sponsored by the union Unite.
The paper has survived worse than fire in its time. When the USSR collapsed in the early nineties, it nearly took the Morning Star with it: since 1974 the Soviets had been funding the paper through buying thousands of copies a week and shipping them to Moscow.
The cash dried up not long after the Wall came down, causing a financial coronary at the Morning Star. Their building on Farringdon Road had to be sold and staff went unpaid. Bagley’s father, who started at the paper in the days when it was called the Daily Worker, left at this time because he needed to support his family. “Personally for him it was a very difficult time as well, seeing it all be torn apart,” recalls Bagley. “There was a lot of division, in-fighting, factional splits and acrimony. It was a very difficult period”.
Strikes by journalists in 1998 and 2009 again brought the Morning Star to the brink of closure. Pay was notoriously bad, the then-editor John Haylett writing in 2009 that “Every Morning Star staff member is told bluntly at interview: ‘The wages are crap. We work at the paper because we are politically committed to its aims’.”
Things have changed since then. Starting salaries are just over £20,000, with plans to increase in coming years. The staff wouldn’t give much away about their levels of political commitment, joking when asked that “some of us are more socialist than others”.
Funding comes from selling papers (cover price £1, circulation 15-20,000) and from fundraising from supporters. This includes jumble sales and second-hand book auctions, and, in September, a group of readers from Merseyside doing a sponsored cycle-ride from London to Paris. The paper is owned by the People’s Press Society, a cooperative with shares owned by readers.
Bagley points out that this is one reason why the Star’s editorial policy is different to other national dailies. The People’s Assembly march is a case in point. Unite paid for a free giveaway of the Morning Star at the demonstration, for whom it was front-page news. According to the organisers, 50,000 people marched through London on 21 June, though it was barely covered elsewhere in the press. Why?
“I think it possibly reflects the make-up of people in the media and what their outlook is personally,” is Bagley’s answer. “It’s also kind of like: ‘We don’t want there to be an alternative projected; that’s last century, left and right don’t exist.’ There’s a buy-in to this idea that this is it now; we’ve got this model, this is it, and nothing else is valid.”
For the same reason, Labour politicians who advocate nationalisation will be “gone for” by the newspapers. Says Bagley: “I mean the press is owned by oligarchs and pornographers. And the ‘hooray for the Blackshirts’ peeps at the Daily Mail”.
Since Bagley’s brought up the Mail’s Blackshirts connection, it seems fair to ask him about the support the Morning Star gave to Soviet repression in the twentieth century. The Morning Star backed the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, which saw tanks on the streets of Budapest and thousands killed.
The Morning Star masthead, with its red star insignia, would be illegal across much of eastern Europe (Estonia, say), much as Swastikas are forbidden in Germany. But this doesn’t much bother Bagley, who believes in the power of branding: “It’s just our logo. It’s not a Soviet star. And we’re not in Estonia anyway. I mean we’ve had that logo since 1966 – it’s our logo.”
A related legacy is a certain trigger-happiness with the word “fascist”. Bagley makes out the 2010 Conservative election campaign was “fascistic” for including “big slogans”.
With such loaded terms in play, politics can become a moral activity, rather than an intellectual one. Editorially, this moral preoccupation comes out in a tendency to commentate-as-you-report, with phrases such as “disgusting work capability assessment privateer Atos” used unflinchingly in the main news section. Bagley contends that this is simply doing more overtly and honestly what other papers do covertly. “We’re not ashamed to show who we are,” he says; which is why the front cover bears an explicit statement of the paper’s aims: “for peace and socialism”.
The paper’s stance follows the policy document of the Communist Party of Britain, Britain’s Road to Socialism, and the decision to do so is endorsed every year by shareholders in the People’s Press Society. Is this preferable to having to answer to the Barclay brothers or Rupert Murdoch? “I don’t get a phone call saying ‘this is your command today’,” Bagley clarifies.
“The broad thrust is that there needs to be an anti-monopoly alliance involving small shopkeepers, labour communities and trades unions, encountering the weight of the corporations and global pressures. That’s a comfortable place to be for a newspaper.”
What is striking is that, despite everything, it’s possible to feel extremely comfortable reading The Morning Star. Bagley’s view that we have a political monoculture is a valid one, and it’s worth giving serious time to his proposition that “under the guise of austerity, a lot of the advances made in the last hundred years are just being rolled back, because they’re not seen as required”. The typos and flagrant bias make you less angry than the stories it is actually reporting on do.
WickED ways: Anna Freeman Bentley with her paintings at Hackney WickED 2014. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The first time I went to Hackney Wick was for a party in the autumn of 2009. It was late, it was dark and I was by myself. I felt anxious walking by the A12 among isolated warehouses to reach Fish Island. Back then the area was referred to as ‘the desolation on the edge of the East End’ for good reason.
But on reaching the party, I soon realised I had stepped into the life of a vibrant community of artists, who lived and worked in warehouses, and maximised their potential by creating, experimenting and collaborating with each other. Performances were raw and challenging.
This is a side of Hackney Wick many visitors at this month’s Hackney WickED festival might never have seen or heard about. The weather was glorious with uninterrupted sunshine and the vibe on the streets very relaxed. Parents showed up with their kids, people walked their well-behaved dogs while revellers tucked into offerings from innumerable street food vendors.
Of course, the festival is all about art, and visitors embraced this by visiting artists’ open studios. Heading for a beer at the Crate Brewery in The White Building, you might have come across Gretchen Andrew, wearing a light blue Google Glass. The contemporary painter was showcasing work she has been producing during her three months’ residency at Space Studios using Google Glass to “record the creative process and translate the physicality of it to my viewers”.
It was curious to see how many artists were influenced by their family trades. Jewellery maker Clarice Price Thomas’ father was a clockmaker. As a child, she looked on with wonder at clocks’ mechanisms and is now combining traditional clock making techniques and machinery in an innovative take on jewellery design.
Anna Freeman Bentley’s dad was a civil engineer. “I grew up looking at structures and building sites” she explains, which feeds into her paintings. She is currently looking at Hackney, how the area is changing and the impact of gentrification on the physical environment.
Over two days of exploring the festival, I was surprised to see that beyond official studios, few alternative work/live spaces opened their doors to the public. In almost a voyeuristic way, I missed stepping inside artists’ living rooms and bedrooms and being able to confront the honesty of their art within the intimate context of a home setting.
It meant that the festival lacked the thought-provoking, authentic experiences that I, for one, had come for. At the same time, people were willing to shell out £25 on the door of a warehouse to get into the Tuckshop Summer Carnival on Wallis Road.
As, privately, artists complained to me of having to leave their studios next year due to regeneration plans, I gained a sense of how sanitised the Wick could become.
Bridge Theatre company present Scan Artists at The Yard Theatre. Photograph: Richard Davenport
Sitting at the front awaiting the start of Scan Artists, it was hard not to wonder if I was about to behold a future household name.
This production of Evan Placey’s play, about a group of young cancer sufferers who form a pop choir in their group therapy sessions, is by the Bridge Theatre Company, formed of graduates from the Brit School of performing arts, whose famous alumni include Adele and Amy Winehouse.
A circular area in the centre of the stage is the ‘braided circle’, a place where the ten youngsters meet to discuss their experiences. It’s a serious subject treated atypically, with choreographed movement, music and loud colours everywhere. As the group members battle to come to terms with cancer, and amid adolescent anxieties and rebellions, a love story unfolds.
Amy Smurthwaite is Jenna, an 18-year-old recently diagnosed with lung cancer, who blurts out her amorous intentions to her soon-to-be boyfriend, box salesman Angus (Sean Byrne), before declaring: “ I’m not a slag, I just have cancer.” As their comically awkward exchange continues, the rest of the cast, outside the main circle of the stage, sing a rousing acoustic rendition of The Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen In Love’. Stylish stuff.
During the sessions Jenna meets Rox, a northern singer-songwriter played by Zoe West, who inspires her to let go of her inhibitions, dance and fall in love properly. And so the healing power of self-expression is weaved into the narrative.
The play wants at turns to tug at the heartstrings and subvert sentimentality. It doesn’t particularly achieve either, but the performances are all strong, and the cast’s grasp of the musical side of things particularly impressive.
Harmomised versions of Outcast’s ‘Hey Ya’ and ‘Survivor’ by Destiny’s Child are convincing, and the use of a loop station on stage shows how a basic grasp of music technology can really enhance a theatrical performance, such as when a snippet of voice repeats during a monologue, like the workings of a troubled mind.
