East End Review

Tag: Shoreditch Town Hall

Sleepless, Shoreditch Town Hall, preview: exploring Fatal Familial Insomnia

Jake Ferretti in the play Sleepless, at Shoreditch Town Hall until 14 September

Margaret Thatcher famously ran the country on five hours a night, but for many a fitful night’s sleep can destroy any hope of functioning like a reasoned human being.

Insomnia, however, comes in degrees of severity, and at Shoreditch Town Hall this month a new play explores the most rare and horrifying strain of them all.

Sleepless is inspired by the true story of a family and the disease that cursed them for generations, playwright Hannah Barker tells me.

“The inspiration comes from a book called The Family Who Couldn’t Sleep, a true life account written by a science journalist about a Italian family that has this very rare condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI)),” the playwright says.

“It’s this frightening thing that belongs in a horror movie really because it’s this condition where your pupils become like pinpricks, you sweat profusely and you just really struggle sleeping.

“What that progresses to is complete inability to sleep and a slow and quite painful death over the course of nine to 18 months.”

Balvinder Sopal and Andrea Quirbach in Sleepless

The play takes the form of a detective story in which a woman whose mother has died in mysterious circumstances goes on a journey to find out what really happened.

In the process she learns about this peculiar genetic disease that robs you of sleep and progressively shuts down the mind and body.

Barker, a Londoner and former Dalston resident, says her theatre company Analogue, which has a reputation for combining powerful storytelling with rigorous scientific research, wanted to delve into the real life implications of having the disease.

“We wanted to show what it would really mean for a human being. There’s the fact it’s a rare human condition so there’s not a lot funding for research into it. So it really puts into question the value of a human life and how many people need to be affected for it to be worth it.

“On top of that there’s the question of living under the shadow this genetic disease. If you do have the disease there’s a 50 per cent chance you’ll pass it on to your children, so if you decide to have children you could be effectively handing down a death sentence.”

This may sound somewhat morbid, but Barker and the cast counter a potentially gloomy subject matter with moments of lightness and an exploration of the subconscious realm between being asleep and awake.

“What’s interesting about this show is what you can do within that zone of sleep and wake, you’ve got real creative licence to explore what’s in your subconscious,” Barker says.

As the daughter pieces together the jigsaw with the help of a doctor, becoming more of an unreliable narrator in the process, the play reaches an unexpected denouement.

Although reluctant to reveal more, Barker is confident the play will keep audiences wide-awake.

Sleepless
Until 14 September
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT
shoreditchtownhall.com

September 5, 2016
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
1972: The Future of Sex begins Shoreditch Town Hall run

Generation sex – The Wardrobe Company on stage. Photograph: Jack Offord

Sex began in 1963, said Philip Larkin. But in a play at Shoreditch Town Hall it’s the seventies providing fertile ground for sexual awakening.

In 1972: The Future of Sex by The Wardrobe Ensemble three couples embark on having sex for the first time during one evening.

This is the year when Ziggy Stardust first appeared on Top of the Pops, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finally published unabridged, and when the notorious pornographic film Deepthroat was released.

“Our research led us to that moment because it seemed quite significant time in British public consciousness in terms of the changing of attitudes about gender and sexuality,” says the play’s director Tom Brennan.

“We were looking to make a show about sex and sexual anxiety and our discussions led us to that moment in time between the AIDS epidemic and the sexual revolution.”

In this era of glam rock and space-hoppers, Christine is steeling herself for the loss of her virginity with the nerdy lead singer of a local band, whilst other storylines involve a student who is inspired by her university professor in more ways than one, and Brian in his bedroom, exploring his sexual identity by himself.

“The storylines are kind of woven together – we’ve structured it so we have a lot of narration in the show which allows us to jump between the storylines and kind of explore them simultaneously in some cases,” Brennan explains.

The show features original music from Bristol-based songwriter Tom Crosley-Thorne, a school friend of Brennan.

“I was in a band with him and when I was first talking to him about doing this show, the next day he sent me these amazing tracks, which are perfect homages to Bowie and The Who and Chaka Khan.”

After a preview last year at Shoreditch Town Hall, Brennan and fellow members of The Wardrobe Ensemble took the play up to Edinburgh where it earned rave reviews.

Now back in Shoreditch for a longer run, the play will be aiming to humorously highlight the challenges and pitfalls of growing up as a member of the class of ’72.

“You had the first gay pride march in London and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was around,” Brennan says. “But then you had Mary Whitehouse and the National Festival of Light trying to ‘restore Christian morals’. So it was quite an interesting time.”

1972: The Future of Sex
12–23 April
Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT
shoreditchtownhall.com

April 11, 2016
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. 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

April 8, 2015
Grimm Tales for Young and Old – review

Annabel Betts is Little Red Riding Hood in Grimm Tales. Photograph: Tom Medwell

Immersive theatre comes to Shoreditch Town Hall this month with a stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old.

Audience members are guided through the stunning fairytale world assembled in the basement catacombs of Shoreditch Town Hall. This unique space, a web of dark subterranean rooms, has been transformed into a forkloric neverland, with faded white dresses hanging from the stairwell and scraps of poetry and old photographs lining the walls.

Five fairytales have been plucked from Philip Pullman’s 2012 book. Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel will be known to everyone, but are told here in full macabre detail. Simon Wegrzyn is a wonderfully wicked wolf, fleet of foot and devilishly sly, the perfect foil for Red Riding Hood, played with wide-eyed naivete by Annabel Betts.

The staging and set design is exemplary. Granny’s bed is vertical, so the audience, assembled on two sides of a long room, see the gory denoument from above, and in Rapunzel the tower prison is layed across the stage floor. This production has clearly not been done on the cheap, though some of the best details are simple ones. A chest in the centre of the room in The Three Snake Leaves, a tale of misplaced love and treachery, becomes a tomb, a boat and an instrument of war, while in The Juniper Tree a murdered boy seeks revenge on his stepmother by becoming a bird, represented on stage by an umbrella. Director Philip Wilson’s adaptation of Pullman’s text is swiftly-paced and clever; characters narrate the tales as well as being part of them, a nod to the oral tradition from which Grimm Tales originated.

The humour is dark and edgy and there is a well-developed sense of the bizarre in stories such as Hans-My-Hedgehog, a tale of a half-man, half-hedgehog creature who rides a cockerel and herds pigs while sitting in a tree playing the bagpipes. The Brothers Grimm may well have approved.

Grimm Tales for Young and Old is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT until 24 April.

April 11, 2014