East End Review

Tag: Rachel Muller-Heyndyk

The Childhood of a Leader – 10-year old Hackney actor talks “scary films” and more

The Cast of The Childhood of a Leader. Photograph: Tom Munro

Last month’s East End Film Festival premiered Brady Corbet’s chilling directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader.

There is certainly a lot at play in this film, which is part political thriller, part psychoanalytic drama about how a fascist leader is created.

Set in 1918 in a quietly beautiful but bleak French village, the film imagines the life of the son of diplomat and aid to President Woodrow Wilson as his father negotiates the Treaty of Versailles.

While the characters’ interior lives remain mysterious, the tyrannical patriarch’s son Prescott has his lonely, cruel childhood laid bare.

The film stars the much-adored Twilight idol Robert Pattison, but critics have been left mesmerised by the brilliantly unsettling performance of ten-year-old Hackney-based actor Tom Sweet as the film’s leader in the making.

One might assume that Sweet had starred in a number of plays from a young age. As it happens, Childhood of a Leader is his first performance.

Even more surprisingly, the opportunity came about by chance. “I started acting when I was nine, it all happened really quickly – I was walking home from school with my parents one day, and I was just stopped and asked if I’d liked to audition for the film,” he explained.

Sweet’s role certainly isn’t an easy one. The film progresses through a number of increasingly disturbing ‘tantrums’ by the politician’s son, as he boils over under an austere, rigid home life.

Prescott doesn’t seem to gain any enjoyment out of antagonising the adults around him. He reacts with indifference to the recipients of his outbursts and his lack of emotional intensity appears far more believable than the usual ‘creepy child’ stock character rolled out in Hollywood.

Sweet and I were in agreement that Scott Walker’s shrill, orchestral score makes Childhood of A Leader truly fearsome. “I hadn’t watched any scary films before and I don’t like them that much but I’ve watched Childhood of a Leader four times and didn’t find it too bad! I suppose it definitely helps that I know it so well and understand the character. I remember being really frightened of the score when I watched it in Venice though – the music is amazing but so shocking”, he said.

It is clear that Prescott’s uncaring parents are to blame for his rebellion. Sweet admits that a number of scenes were difficult to film. The first scene he shot involved an especially violent altercation between himself and his onscreen father, but for Sweet, that’s all part of the fun. “Yeah, he’s definitely very mischievous! I think what I love most about acting is that I can be two totally different people, it’s the chance to step away from ordinary life for a bit and become someone else.”

While much of the critical attention to this film may be on Corbet’s debut as the director, the articulate, gifted Tom Sweet also provides much cause for excitement.

August 2, 2016
Another World, National Theatre, review: ‘reminder how powerful a tool verbatim theatre can be’

(L-R) Zara Azam (student), Farshid Rokey (student), Nabil Elouahbi (Mohamed Akunjee). Photograph: Tristram Kenton

In February last year, without a word of warning to their parents, three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green left their homes for Syria. They are just some of the estimated 800 Britons said to have joined so-called Islamic State since its conception. As fear over terrorism continues to dominate headlines, it’s a topic that’s attracted panic, frustration, and blame on all sides. What remains unclear though, is why exactly so many young Muslims are risking their lives to join the organisation.

Another World: Losing Our Children to the Islamic State does not provide a solution to this overwhelmingly complicated issue, nor does it try to. Instead, what you get is a calm, serious discussion that rises above the commotion. Encompassing a whole range of views, the documentary theatre play by Gillian Slovo and Nicholas Kent uses material taken from interviews with researchers, politicians, young people, and families of the young men and women who left to fight. Word for word, the cast retells their conversations with astounding detail and focus.

There’s nothing particularly fancy about Another World in the way of stagecraft, but that doesn’t make it any less engrossing. The Syrian conflict, radicalisation, and the government’s prevent strategy all get a look in without jargon or pretence. The way in which the performance avoids any whiff of preachiness is equally impressive.

The testimonies from the mothers of those gone to Syria are as heart breaking as you might expect; their guilt and grief run deep. While their children’s backgrounds and characters all vary, their lives are all united by a deep-rooted feeling of displacement in society – the phrase “just something missing” keeps cropping up.

But perhaps the most insightful moments of the play are the discussions with Muslim teenagers from East London, who chat freely about their bafflement over the rise of IS and their fears of prejudice in after the Paris attacks. Theirs are voices that are not heard enough over the fierce political rhetoric both here and abroad, and it’s a reminder of how powerful a tool verbatim theatre can be. Another World is an entirely sophisticated, sensitive and important work.

Another World: Losing Our Children to the Islamic State is at the National Theatre, Upper Ground, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 7 May.

May 6, 2016
Playing a blinder – All That Fall preview

All That Fall, as staged by Out of Joint

It would be fair to wonder what is to be gained from staging a radio play without any visuals at all. The audience watching Samuel Beckett’s one act 1956 piece, All That Fall at the legendary Wilton’s Music Hall sit blindfolded for the duration of the performance. But without pesky sight to distract from the pithy dialogue, Out of Joint’s production successfully strips the play down to its bare, nihilistic bones with brilliant effect.

The cast wind through the space, allowing for voices to rise unexpectedly out of the darkness, while pre-recorded broken excerpts of Schubert and the screeches of incoming trains make the gloomy soundscape even more ominous.

Set in rural Ireland, the play follows the journey of the elderly Mrs Rooney to meet her blind husband as he arrives on the 12.30 train. Consistently maudlin and self-centred, Mrs Rooney’s outlook towards the world is so morbid that you’re left feeling desperate to escape her company – if only her cynicism wasn’t quite so funny. Laughter echoed around the room as she sighed and complained through the first half of the performance. However self-indulgent Mrs Rooney’s rambling though, her pain is nonetheless real. “Love, that is all I asked… daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular,” she croakily laments.

The simplicity of the plot does not mean that All That Fall is an easy play to grasp. The individual backgrounds of the characters are never fully known, the context of their conversations is never understood, and questions are left unanswered. Beckett’s usual themes of death and decay are everywhere, and the naturalistic script does not make it any less surreal than some of his other works.

Despite the occasionally shaky Irish accent, the greatest strength of the production lies in the cast’s ability to deliver the script with warmth and conviction, allowing for the play’s heavier aspects to seep through without sounding forced. In the 60 minutes during which nothing very much happens, we’re left with a lot to ponder. It seems that sometimes being kept in the dark can be a good thing after all.

All That Fall
Until 9 April
Wilton’s Music Hall
1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB
wiltons.org.uk

April 1, 2016
Mary Seacole brought to the stage at the Rosemary Branch

Cleo Sylvestre as Mary Seacole. Photograph: Cleo Sylvestre

Walking into the Rosemary Branch Theatre, I feel instantly welcome. At 5pm the bar is bustling with customers young and old, with artistic director Cleo Sylvestre flashing a fuchsia-lipped smile as she greets each one.

“My friend Cecilia and I have been running the Rosie for 20 years now,” Sylvestre says. “My husband had just died, and Cecil was teaching ballet upstairs. It was really a baptism of fire, neither of us knew what we were doing.”

It seems Sylvestre’s life has been marked by a series of colourful career moves, having worked in music, film and on the West End. She points at a black and white photograph in a corner. It’s her with some “faces you might recognise” – The Rolling Stones, with whom she recorded ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ in 1969. “I had a great time.

The Stones were releasing music that no one had ever heard before, but I thought that rather than just going to loads of gigs, I wanted to be the gig”.

But despite her musical credentials, theatre is her first love, she says. “I love being able to go to the theatre and forget about the outside world for an hour. I think it’s all about being able to bring something to life.”

To mark the Rosie’s 20th anniversary, Sylvestre’s acclaimed one-woman show, The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole is returning to the stage for a short run this month.

Based on the autobiography of the same name, it recounts Jamaican-born Seacole’s experiences of the Crimean War during which she set up a hospital using abandoned metal and driftwood to aid sick and wounded troops.

Whereas Florence Nightingale’s legacy has long been part of the school curriculum, Seacole’s contribution to British history has been largely overlooked.

Sylvestre admits she knew little about her until the 1980s. “I read her autobiography while my children were still very young and thought she was an amazing woman. Initially I wrote it for children. I wanted them to hear her story and get across that anything is possible if you put your mind to it.”

Sylvestre is also an ambassador for The Mary Seacole Statue Appeal, whose efforts have finally paid off, with a monument set to be unveiled this spring. It will be the first statue of a named black woman in Britain.

Portraying Seacole’s personality as well as her achievements was vital for Sylvestre. “I think she was quite a complex character; she was tough, she was intrepid. I think she had a very warm heart, but she had a lot of steel to have gone through what she did.

I also think – how can I phrase this without putting her down – that while she mixed with people from all walks of life, she didn’t suffer fools gladly. She could hold her own.”

The play promises to be an opportunity to hear the story of one remarkable woman, told by another.

The Marvellous Adventures of Mary Seacole is at Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Road, N1 3DT from 9-11 March.
www.rosemarybranch.co.uk

March 8, 2016