East End Review

Tag: Vault Festival

  • Family connection to Mayflower pilgrims inspires play

    Don
    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

  • Vanity Bites Back: the quick witted clown cookery show about anorexia

    Jill ta
    Jill takes on a cheesecake in Vanity Bites Back. Photograph: Impressive PR

    Some subjects are more irresistibly comic than others (whoopee cushions, hairpieces …) though the best comedy is always found in unexpected places. For her one woman show Vanity Bites Back, Helen Duff chose a subject that few talk, let alone make comedy about: anorexia.

    Duff, a trained actor, comedian and clown, plays Jill, a genteel 1950s-style Stepford wife who wants nothing more than to host her own television cookery show. Her big moment arrives and the audience joins her for the pilot episode. “It’s going to be the best bloody cookery show you’ve ever seen,” she confides in deadly seriousness.

    As well it might be, though not in the way she intends. Instead Jill, an eccentric described as a cross between Alan Partridge and Margaret Thatcher, makes a comically epic mess. As her dream unravels the mask slips; her practically perfect persona gives way and a person suffering with anorexia is revealed.

    “Stories keep cropping up that are not really part of the cookery show,” explains Stoke Newington resident Duff. “It’s not about eating so much as little moments of vulnerability and fears, and feelings that you haven’t lived up to expectations. They keep coming out no matter how hard she tries to keep this perfect persona up.”

    Vanity Bites Back premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where it was warmly received, and this month the show returns to London for Vault festival in Waterloo. It’s the 27-year-old’s debut show, and stems from her own experience with anorexia as a teenager.

    “One of the reasons that I made the show is that when you have anorexia people don’t ever talk about it. Even family members and friends. They don’t want to say the wrong thing or isolate anybody so people don’t talk about anything. So coming out and saying that I’m suffering with anorexia is a really intimidating thing to do.”
    The title of the show was inspired by a conversation Duff had with a friend who didn’t yet know about her anorexia.

    “I realised they knew other people who’d suffered and they essentially said to me that everyone says it’s this or that but really I know it’s just attention seeking, she’s always been vain and she just cares about what she looks like.

    “I felt so deeply that that was wrong and wanted to be able to correct that view and wanted to be able to explore that view and why I disagreed with it. But I couldn’t because at the time I was so vulnerable.”

    Duff started a blog and called it Vanity Bites Back, about the idea of whether anorexia really was attention seeking. If so, says Duff, it is rooted in something other than vanity, which is a sense of pride in what you look like.

    “Anorexia is just the opposite, it’s about a complete lack of self-worth as opposed to a sense of everyone look at me.”

    The blog was well received, and writing about the illness gave Duff confidence. She was also gaining confidence as a theatre maker following a spell studying clown at the École Philippe Gaulier in Paris. The two things converged and the character of Jill was born.

    Learning clown, such an intensely physical art form, might not be the obvious choice for someone who has experienced an illness linked to body image. However, Duff refutes this, saying that anorexia is less about body image than it is a physical manifestation of needing control and feelings of inadequacy. Clowning, she explains, provided a freedom that was the perfect tonic.

    “Clown is about accepting yourself and your audience in the space in the moment. It’s about happy accidents and really allowing yourself to be open to what happens. So it’s the opposite of anorexia which very much about controlling, about not allowing yourself to be spontaneous or to divert from the plan.”

    Improvisation is a big part of the show, and there’s also plenty of direct contact with the audience. For that reason Duff is keen to build in new jokes and frivolity to keep the show fresh. “I have to be sharp to what’s happening in the room,” she explains.

    Jill can suddenly shift from profound silliness, singing about Hobnobs or covering herself with butter, to moments of genuine pathos. Some audiences apparently laugh all the way through; at a recent performance in Bristol some people were still laughing whilst others were crying by the end.

    “Generally I use comedy to puncture moments and to make them almost more moving because that’s a better way of approaching a difficult subject matter. I think people receive information and open their minds more when they feel comfortable and are having a good time, rather than receiving a sort of lecture.”

    Duff tells me that one of the most enjoyable processes was using her own fears as someone who has had anorexia to construct the form of the play. I ask if she was ever afraid that the play would be perceived as insensitive.

    “I’m always in the character who’s obviously suffered with the illness,” she replies. “I’m never making jokes about not eating. It’s never that explicit or that cheap.”

    Duff plans to take Vanity Bites Back to Australia to comedy festivals in Melbourne and Adelaide this year, as well as develop something new for next year’s Edinburgh Free Fringe. Her days of striving for perfection are over, but the best is yet to come.

    Vanity Bites Back is at London Vault Festival from 28 January –1 February at The Pit, Leake Street, SE1 7NN