Brand New Ancients, Battersea Arts Centre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

“We are still mythical,” Kate Tempest persuasively tells us, looking around with wide eyes at the crowded space of the Council Chamber at Battersea Arts Centre – historically the most un-mythical of places. Her new show, taking as its basis the ancient use of mythology as humankind’s way of explaining itself, attempts to convince us that the gods are really everywhere; on park benches smoking fags, at the bar pulling pints, in the room around us. All of us have the ability to be mythic heroes.

This clash of the old and the new, of the exalted language of the gods and the lyrical banalities of the modern high street, feels perfectly at home among the gently crumbling architecture and faded charm of BAC. An unexceptional figure in jeans, T-shirt and plimsolls, Tempest commands this space, striking a startling stance between declamatory power and guileless warmth as she paces the stage with her microphone while the air around her crackles.

Part electric spoken word performance and part gentle storytelling, Tempest intricately weaves together the tale of two families, ordinary and alike in their everyday miseries. For her contemporary Oedipuses and Medeas there are marriages and affairs, betrayals and violence, all equally related with a compassionate lack of condemnation. The bond of friendship between two young men demonstrates the capacity for love even when surrounded by abuse and rage, while another boy escapes the dull reality of his life by sketching comic book epics, vivid sagas of those modern day gods known as superheroes. Tempest’s characters struggle and love and hate and regret, all to the evocatively pulsing soundtrack of Nell Catchpole and Kwake Bass’ live score.

Tempest’s style of delivery marries poetry, song, hip-hop, oratory and – ironically appropriate amidst all this talk of gods – something of the preacher. Fittingly both heavenly and earthy at once, she slides from close-eyed, lilting lyricism to bare, stripped down direct address, stepping out of her performative self to offer artless confidences. At odd moments, usually in the wake of a particularly crude observation, she shrugs, as if by way of charming apology for what she has created.

There are undisguised slip-ups in the performance; Tempest mixes up the names of two of her characters, correcting herself with a laughed explanation, before later tripping on one of the wires snaking across the stage. The lack of polish, far from distracting, makes for something much more vital and – crucially for Tempest’s purposes – much more human. We’re all flawed, she seems to be saying without apology, and that’s OK. While in one sense taking up the mantle of tradition and, like many poets before her, adopting the role of chronicling heroes, there are no pretences of poetic perfection here.

For all this easy charm, underneath the fizzing performance and beaming wit there is something urgently furious at the heart of Tempest’s plea for the value of humanity. Between the houses and parks and pubs, Tempest’s vivid brushstrokes capture a world in which “everything’s weighed on the scales of profit” and we fall on our knees before the false idols of fame, Saturday night entertainment and Simon Cowell, that modern day serpent in the grass. In this fame-seduced world, the television recurs as a symbol of loneliness, a poor but addictive substitute for the company of others.

In pleading her case for the gods and heroes all around us, Tempest is arguing for an appreciation of others that does not hinge on money or fame, but a recognition of the capability for love – as much as the vulnerability to hate – that exists in all of us. We might be flawed, but we are still mythical. And these stories that Tempest is telling us, with raw and captivating power, are the new parables.

Brand New Ancients runs at BAC until 22nd September.

Fractured Narratives

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

As theatre implicitly recognises, our experiences in life are typically defined by the stories we tell after the event. The heightened experience of the Edinburgh Fringe is no different, from the startling encounter in the street to the performance that stole a little bit of your heart, or even just the slurred poetry of intense discussions in the early hours. We package our experiences in small, select slices, reassembled into a mangled but recognisable version of reality.

Perhaps this is why, as we pack away our deflated enthusiasm and file that inevitable late copy between jolting sips of lukewarm East Coast Trains tea, it becomes obligatory to overlay the mad anti-narrative of the fringe with some grand, overarching tale of political or artistic significance. The annual Edinburgh round-ups are scrawled over with trends and a theme inexplicably emerges from the shapeless nebula. Even coffee-fuelled discussions with fellow theatregoers and makers gradually, almost subconsciously slip into comparisons of what the work we have seen is “about” and how it interconnects.

Of course, no piece of theatre exists in a vacuum. Threads can be traced and there is a wider context in which all work sits, comfortably or otherwise. Context is particularly significant to a festival which has itself played host to smaller festivals, miniature curated or partially curated seasons that have carved out shapes within the amorphous whole: Northern Stage at St Stephen’s, Escalator East to Edinburgh, Old Vic New Voices and, arguably, the impressive, internationally-flavoured programme at Summerhall. Each of these programmes has had a distinct identity that has coloured its work – a narrative of sorts.

Yet the kinds of narratives we find ourselves imposing on our festival experiences are unavoidably subjective and essentially arbitrary. As an exercise, one might pluck a theme out of the air, sit down with the now dog-eared fringe guide and quickly circle a generous clutch of shows fitting the bill. Political protest, sexual politics, athletic prowess, urban decay, environmental disaster, eating disorders, the riots, childhood, adulthood, life, death, zombie apocalypse. Take your pick and build your story.

So I could insist on the triumphant glow cast by the Olympics on theatrical stories of sporting achievement, or point to numerous damning indictments of modern politics. I could even make an irritatingly ironic point by dreaming up a ridiculously idiosyncratic theme and using it to battle a pathway through the dense jungle of the fringe. But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll surrender to subjectivity in another way by falling back on one particular show at this year’s fringe which neatly illustrates my point. What I Heard About the World, a collaboration between Third Angel, mala voadora and Chris Thorpe, is all about stories, employing these as a way to understand the world around us. Gathered from the far corners of the globe, their odd little fragments of narrative are both amusing and revealing, but what the show is always aware of is its incompleteness. Any story it constructs from its many splinters of smaller stories must be limited and selective. A similar point was made by Thorpe’s serving up of exotic tales at Hunt and Darton cafe; you place your order and you taste the dish of your choosing.

If the Edinburgh Fringe could be distilled into any written structure, it would be a sprawling, web-like poem, replete with spiralling references and veering tangents; probably written by T.S. Eliot, with annotations by Roald Dahl. It has stories, sure – it’s overflowing with them. But the beauty of the experience lies in its messy, democratic multiplicity, its stubborn resistance against the narratives that we insist on vainly saddling it with. There is no overarching story, but we still have the stories that each of us tell.

The Ugly Sisters, St Stephen’s

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

RashDash’s rock-infused cabaret restyling of Cinderella really shouldn’t be as good as it is. Reimaginings of fairytales are hardly original; almost every maligned fictional villain has now had the story retold from their misunderstood perspective. Likewise, there is nothing particularly earth-shattering about RashDash’s scruffy-punk aesthetic or the music of accompanying band Not Now Bernard. So the gloriously anarchic product, transcending its angsty teenage premise, is fairly remarkable testament to the charisma and chemistry of this accomplished performing duo.

The narrative twist that is executed by RashDash throws the Cinderella story into the midst of rabid, fame-obsessed contemporary culture and the distorted world of “reality” television. Dragged up in a world of burned out cars and used needles, twins Emerald and Pearl undergo their own rags to riches transformation when their fortunes are changed by their mother’s marriage to a wealthy single father, but this is no fairytale. As they find themselves increasingly overshadowed by seemingly perfect Arabella – dubbed “Cindy-rella” by Emerald – the girls decide to copy their stepsister by entering You Shall Go to the Ball, a nauseatingly plausible television contest to win the affection of a prince.

But it’s not the gruesome dissection of reality TV that really slices to the bone – we already know that The X Factor is an amplified freak show, the grim voyeurism of the eighteenth-century asylum made-over by the worst excesses of Saturday night entertainment. Instead it is RashDash’s cuttingly perceptive indictment of the roles that women are straitjacketed into by this media-obsessed society that remains most firmly embedded in the mind. In an attempt to match the appeal of materialist, manicured Arabella (ironically represented by a male band member wearing a tiara), the two sisters wriggle into boob tubes and totter on platform heels, pouting with hands on hips in a pose that exemplifies the anxiously conformist vanity of the Facebook profile picture – hilarious but grotesque.

There is also something fairly potent in RashDash’s approach about the nature of narrative and the power held by the storytellers. With the media under a particularly scorching spotlight at present, their turning of the tables is yet another instance of how our perceptions are determined by those clutching the pen – the implication being, of course, that it has always been this way. While such distortions now lie in the hands of profit-conscious TV producers and tabloid editors, the continued currency of fairytales illustrates that there has always been a tendency to paint heroes and villains.

Such musings, however, arose mostly after the event. The show itself carries its audience along on a momentum of charismatic, impressively physical performances and fierce vocals; a sharp and irresistible adrenalin rush of playful, cabaret-style narrative riffing that races past at a furious gallop. The intensely performative confessional of the cabaret show is an appropriate vehicle for telling Emerald and Pearl’s side of the story, but this genre is spliced with other elements. The use of foot pedal looping to create a layered musical narrative, for example, offers one of the performance’s stand-out moments of inventiveness, suggesting the noise of the various voices surrounding this story. RashDash also throw in some cheeky chunks of meta, making knowing nods to the theatrical conventions they are working within and teasing us with the prospect of intimidating audience interaction that often accompanies such performances, without ever fully committing to this strand.

Ultimately, it is perplexingly hard to articulate just why this works. There may not be a great degree of originality or distinctiveness to RashDash’s approach, but in execution it is unfailingly enjoyable. Like the fairytale it takes as its basis, it may be familiar and not all that exciting on paper, but it translates into an undeniably engaging night of entertainment.

A Thousand Shards of Glass, St Stephen’s

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Much like the inevitable solo film trilogy, a piece that advertises itself as a one woman action adventure thriller is the sort of theatrical experience usually best avoided at the fringe. It sounds suspiciously as though it might involve a diluted Lara Croft figure and misguided martial arts. Jane Packman Company and consummate storyteller Lucy Ellinson, however, demonstrate that genre can be a tool for reinvention as well as a chain to confine.

The show’s staging, like its premise, is deliciously deceptive. Seats arranged around a circle enclosing nothing more than a ring of lights linked by fat, snaking wires, this would appear to be the height of theatrical minimalism. In a sense it is. As the piece progresses, however, the conceptual care behind each simple creative choice becomes ever more apparent. Nothing here happens by accident.

In the absence of any concession to naturalistic scenery, the tale that Ellinson spins takes place in the vast landscape of our imaginations. Seated in our circle of chairs, gazing across at one another, the audience configuration is reminiscent of the campfire – a forum for fantastical stories since stories began. As spectators, we are also fragmented, separated, identified as individuals rather than as part of an amorphous whole and thus forced to fully engage with the performance. Creeping around this circle, Ellinson conjures a flat, projected world, a Matrix-like illusion in which the human race are trapped and from which she alone can save them.

In this magical realist, two-dimensional space, there is an apt element of the graphic novel to the text’s vivid yet artificial frescos. One of the most vibrant scenes is that in which Ellinson’s character circles around Egypt in a taxi, ticking off colourful scenes of the surrounding market that summon a bustling mental picture, but one which snags uncomfortably on the corners of the mind; like the protagonist, we too can see the edges. Repeated images whirl past in aTruman Show carousel of fakery, seeming real but not quite real enough.

That my references are all to films is no mistake. It is from this art form that Jane Packman Company takes its stylistic cues, borrowing from Hollywood tropes and flitting schizophrenically from scene to scene in the manner of the scissor-happy action movie aesthetic. Lewis Gibson’s evocative soundscape, the piece’s one aid to the imagination other than the loop of flickering lights, is a nod to the surround-sound conventions of modern cinema, as noises emit from speakers dotted throughout the space and two sound boxes are passed between members of the audience.

The influence of film, among the most elaborately artificial and widely reproduced artistic mediums, also seems fitting for an imagined world constituted of signs. This flat world, this “desert of the real”, to borrow – as The Matrix does – a phrase from Jean Baudrillard, becomes an unsettling metaphor for a society which has accepted the flat, airbrushed reality of capitalism. In contrast to this steady stream of simulacra, the tricks of the production are all visible and unmasked, from the protruding wires of the lights to the sound boxes that travel from hand to hand – a method of staging that seems appealingly mutinous in itself. This may only be a story of resistance, but its rebellious sentiment is one that outlives the narrative.

At a festival where epic ambition is often traded in for intimate bite, Jane Packman Company has found a gorgeously simple way to happily marry the two. The literal space occupied by the piece is bare and compact, paced by Ellinson alone. But the cavernous realm of the imagination, unrestrained by practical limitations has far greater epic sweep than even the most immense of stages.

Born to Run, Traverse Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Fresh out of the patriotism-drenched self-congratulation of the Olympics, it’s not as if we are in need of further excuses to hear Vangelis’ iconic, now numbingly ubiquitous theme to Chariots of Fire. Gary McNair’s play, however, casts a new and markedly less heroic gloss on the activity of running. Born from the idea that even the most exercise-shy of us are running either away from or towards something, this piece projects running as both symptom and cure, a way to escape and a way to get to where you want to be.

For McNair’s protagonist Jane, running is her salvation. Diagnosed with epilepsy and struggling to cope, she discovers that going for a jog can stall her seizures, leading her to plant trainers around her house, in the office, tucked away in her handbag – at any moment, she can run away. Framed within the context of a mammoth 110 mile ultra-marathon across the North American desert, the piece opens a window into Jane’s mind as she steadily eats up the miles while desperately reaching for a decision that eludes her.

In an impressive display of stamina, Shauna Macdonald performs the entire show on a treadmill, pounding the act of running further into her identity with every step. Running is not just something Jane enjoys, it is a part of who she is – “it’s what I do” – replacing her crippling condition as a vital fragment of her identity.

What McNair has created is essentially a psychological study of his protagonist, drawing both on the scientifically and anecdotally proven power of running to clear the mind and on ideas of mental refuge and escape. As Jane repeats, “it’s amazing what you can do if you don’t put your mind to it”, a throwaway assessment of human thought processes which could be given further examination.

Giving rein to Jane’s thoughts and memories, McNair’s staging is fittingly simple, leaving the space around Macdonald empty save the treadmill she is running on. The only intrusions into this space are slickly executed projections which fire out questions and scroll through internet pages, visualising the ultra-connected anxiety that plagues the modern consciousness in a world in which every illness can purportedly be diagnosed through Google. Alone with her thoughts, Jane’s sole interaction is with her running app, a poisonously smug electronic voice that counts down the miles.

While Macdonald is an engaging and fiery performer, the piece as a whole is oddly unsatisfying, limping off with aching muscles and minimal lasting impact. As a personal story it is absorbing while it lasts, but in a way that is not far removed from the inspirational profiles that make convenient news programme fillers; impressive and often poignant, but easily switched off at their close. Its main power is derived from its near-universal resonance, the ability it allows for every spectator to identify with Jane’s struggle. After all, “everyone runs, don’t they?”