Exeunt – Page 6 – Catherine Love

Schönheitsabend, Northern Ballet

Posted on May 17, 2016October 25, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Schönheitsabend roughly translates as “a beautiful evening”. A subtitle might be “make of that what you will”.

Beauty is just one of the ideas that is challenged and subverted and thoroughly pummelled by choreographer-performers Florentina Holzinger and Vincent Riebeek over the course of this show. The pair’s performances have a certain infamy in continental Europe, and it’s easy to see why. The warning note tacked to the door at Northern Ballet is already a catalogue of provocation, promising audiences nudity and scenes of a sexually explicit nature.

And the framing of the piece itself continues this arch dialogue with impropriety and expectation. At the start, Live Art Bistro’s Adam Young steps on stage, clipboard gripped between his hands. He is, he tells us, responsible for the venue this evening, a statement met with a flurry of nervous laughs. Just before walking in, a fellow audience member has joked that he expects the evening to end in some sort of orgy (cue more nervous laughter). This is exactly the kind of anticipation that Holzinger and Riebeek playfully stoke, wrapping their performance in both brash sensationalism and institutional concern. “You are about to see something outrageous,” they implicitly say.

The clipboard-clutching Young introduces each of Schönheitsabend’s three parts, carefully establishing expectations and acknowledging conventions. We are asked, for instance, to respect the artists, and told that what we are about to witness in one segment is an unrepeatable live experiment. The language is distinctly that of live art, the tone firmly tongue-in-cheek. In riffing on art-world discourses of seriousness, Holzinger and Riebeek never take themselves too seriously.

Each of the three parts, labelled as dances of vice, horror and ecstasy, leaps off from avant-garde dance tradition and injects this with some of the recognisable tropes of performance art. In part one, the 1910 ballet Shéhérazade gets added pole-dancing and strap-ons. In part two, hubristic myths of artistic inspiration meet an aesthetic of failure and embarrassment. And in part three, Holzinger and Riebeek fully embrace absurdity and fantasy, completing the performance’s gleeful descent into dreamlike incomprehensibility (complete with antlers, strobe lights and bondage).

The experience as a whole is disorientating and hallucinatory, a collection of images as vivid and strange and disturbing as half-remembered snatches of dreams. Looking back on it from the vantage point of a few days later, it feels like a dream itself. Did I really see that? Surely that didn’t happen on stage?

Reflecting on it now, I wonder how much Holzinger and Riebeek are toying with our fetishizing preconceptions of “European theatre”. I remember my first trip to Berlin, and the friend who nervously asked me if the theatre I was dragging him to was going to be all nudity and animal heads (I’d told him about Three Kingdoms). Schönheitsabend might as well be a caricature of everything that particular friend dreaded – with even more sex and silliness and spectacle.

Expectations, of whatever kind, are definitely important here. I’m no ballet expert, but the first part of the show is definitely the closest to what most people probably think of when they hear the word ‘dance’. Without knowing Shéhérazade, I could guess that Holzinger and Riebeek were to some extent imitating it. I was waiting, then, for these balletic moves to fall away and for something more contemporary and more bonkers to take its place. Knowing this, Holzinger and Riebeek stretch out that tense expectancy, constantly teasing us. This says something, at the same time, about what we expect from art of whatever kind.

The role of expectation is even more prominent in the second part of the evening, which unravels anticipation into an entire act. Primed by Young’s slightly ominous introduction, and by the outrageousness of what we’ve already witnessed, the breath of the audience is collectively held while Riebeek takes up his position on a chair centre stage. What is he going to do? The answer is, well, not a lot. Instead, we’re once again teased, while Holzinger and Riebeek also play around hilariously with their prickly dynamic as a pair – a sharp contrast to the choreographed eroticism of the previous scenes. By the unrestrainedly bizarre third part, then, the frame has shifted.

A further frame for the piece is the festival in which it appears. Transform this year is a teaser or, as it has styled itself, a trailblazer. The work it is showing is intended to offer a flavour of what the festival will be once it has fully expanded into a city-wide, international event next year. And as statements of intent go, Schönheitsabend is pretty fucking audacious.

The impact of that statement, however, is another question. If anyone had asked me, as I stumbled out of Northern Ballet, whether I liked what I had just seen, I’m not sure I could have answered them. As it turned out, everyone else was in their own personal daze, whether of disgust or awe or a bit of both. The show still leaves me in a bit of a daze when I try to think about it now. Giving a simple thumbs up or thumbs down seems both impossible and somehow inappropriate.

A beautiful evening? Perhaps not in any conventional way, but then that’s emphatically not the point.

I am Thomas, Wilton’s Music Hall

Posted on May 10, 2016June 13, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

When is the right time to speak up? That’s one of the questions lurking amidst the chaos and clutter of Told by an Idiot’s latest show, which tells the story of one person – Thomas Aikenhead – who spoke up at precisely the wrong time. Or at least that’s one way of looking at it. Was this obscure, unlikely hero a champion of free speech, or just a kid who didn’t know when to shut his mouth?

Hearing the name Thomas Aikenhead, audiences might well ask – in the words of one of the show’s many songs – “who the fuck is he?” A footnote in British history, Aikenhead was the last person to be executed for blasphemy in this country in 1697. Just 20 when he died, he was a curious and opinionated student who fell foul of higher powers and paranoias – in particular, those of James Stewart, Lord Advocate of Scotland, who made an example of the hapless Aikenhead.

Of course, this is Told by an Idiot, so it’s no straightforward telling. The company bring their characteristic dark humour and lovable silliness to Aikenhead’s tale, as well as a collection of tunes penned by Iain Johnstone and Simon Armitage. The result is Brecht/Weill musical theatre meets the broad, belly-laughing comedy of the music hall (rather appropriately for the gorgeous surroundings of Wilton’s). There’s also an attempt to highlight the present day resonance of Aikenhead’s fate, putting the game eight-strong company in a dressing-up-box hodge-podge of period and modern costume and framing the central story with a group of Edinburgh officials squabbling over who to commemorate with a new statue in the city.

The narrative, meanwhile, is shot through with glimpses of others who were at odds with or ahead of their time: a Bowie T-shirt, a Sex Pistols record, an Einstein dream sequence. Whether Told by an Idiot are lobbying for a place for Aikenhead in the same line-up, however, is unclear. When he sings with passion and lyricism about the importance of the truth, he becomes a beacon of rationalism and progress. But then elsewhere it’s his ordinariness that’s underlined. Like any inquisitive and gobby student, he’s just trying to make his mark in whatever way he can.

Told by an Idiot seem, at times, to be having their cake and eating it. Take the title, emblazoned across pieces of clothing worn by various members of the cast. The role of Thomas is thus passed around, never resting for too long on any one person’s shoulders. The message is twofold. On the one hand, any of us could be Thomas, an ordinary young man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s nothing special. On the other hand, though, “I Am Thomas” is just one step away from “Je suis Charlie” (and barely half a step away at one pointed moment in the show), turning this unlucky, outspoken student into a tragic symbol of free speech.

The show’s aesthetic is no less busy and contradictory. At some moments, it’s a political thriller, with the church’s spies lurking in dark corners clad in trench coats and shades. At others, it becomes a game, commentated on by two Match of the Day pundits (“nice move there from Stewart”; “that’s definitely a yellow card offence”). Pop cultural references are everywhere, from comic-book backdrops to snippets of dialogue from Jaws and The Life of Brian. There is, in other words, a lot going on. Too much, I begin to think. However brilliantly performed by the cast, whose energy doesn’t let up for a moment, the sheer quantity of different skits can become distracting, garnishing rather than actually telling Aikenhead’s tale.

Perhaps, though, it’s right that Told by an Idiot don’t close down this story; that they don’t make it definitively either a celebration of free speech or a simple tale of misfortune. Like the potential statue bickered over by the Edinburgh councillors, figures such as Aikenhead mean different things to different people. He’s available as a symbol of the pursuit of truth and equally as an example of foolishness, just as Stewart can be seen as a great reformer or a bullying authoritarian. Who the fuck is Thomas Aikenhead? Whoever you want him to be.

Photo: Manuel Harlan.

Folk, Birmingham Rep

Posted on May 10, 2016June 13, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Music gives lives meaning. It gathers communities; marks the rituals of births, marriages and deaths; soundtracks moments of happiness and heartache. A song can be a solace or a spur, a souvenir or a scar.

For the trio of characters in Folk, it’s the music of the title that lends significance to these individuals’ ordinary existences. Tom Wells’s play is, in many ways, a classic story of unlikely friendships. At its centre is Winnie, a gleefully singing, swearing and smoking nun, whose enthusiastic knowledge of the saints is only matched by her love for a good jig. On Friday nights, she’s joined for a sing-song and a pint of Guinness by her quiet best friend Stephen, a man who never quite got the hang of life. Where Winnie is all vivacity, Stephen is all reserve.

Lobbed into their lives like the brick she sends smashing through Winnie’s window, teenager Kayleigh is the improbable third member of their makeshift folk group. Unfolding over a series of their Friday evening jam sessions, the play slowly envelops us in these people’s lives. Bit by bit, Kayleigh opens up about her problems and worries, while Winnie and Stephen strive to conceal theirs. The supposed goal is an Easter Folk Night at the local church, thrust by Winnie upon a reluctant Stephen and Kayleigh, but really it’s the friendships between the three characters that are gradually built up through their playing and singing.

And that’s it. Folk is a slight little thing, its ambitions as modest as those of its characters, yet it’s sort of exquisite in its own tender, unassuming way. It gives the same measured, compassionate attention to unremarkable people and unremarkable lives as Barney Norris’s gentle, muted Eventide or the plays of Robert Holman. Like the writers of folk songs, Wells has an ear for the everyday rhythms of small joys and sadnesses. These things deserve to be sung about too, he seems to be saying.

In terms of plot, it’s easy enough to see where everything is headed, but at heart this is a piece that’s more about character than it is about story. The attention of Tessa Walker’s unshowy production is likewise firmly fixed on the people at its centre. Bob Bailey’s bare frame of a set, filled with the cosy religious paraphernalia of Winnie’s life, is a scaffold for these lives to hang on, while Walker’s direction creates vital breathing space in which the characters can discover one another. Silence and song say as much as words.

As the irrepressible Winnie, Connie Walker vibrates with constant energy. Even when sat down talking, her legs jitter to an inner beat, and when the music starts up she’s instantly transformed, leaping into jigs that are exhausting just to watch. It’s no wonder weary exasperation seems to radiate in waves from Patrick Bridgman’s Stephen. But there’s warmth and care, too, in her uncompromising, non-stop approach to life. Those sentiments are infectious, thawing gruffly protective Stephen’s initially frosty attitude towards Kayleigh and visibly softening the brittle, seemingly self-sufficient exterior of Chloe Harris’s confused teenager. As they play music together, the distance between these three very different people simply slides away.

Folk music is, as Kayleigh puts it, “centuries of troubles and struggles and not-to-worrys”; it’s tunes that lodge in the head like “little ribbons, half-remembered”. In Wells’s play, those songs become tools for living, at the same time as sounding an empathetic ode to lives half-lived and the stories that are so often left untold.

Photo: Graeme Braidwood.

X, Royal Court

Posted on April 25, 2016May 20, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Everything in X is slightly off-kilter. Literally. Merle Hensel’s great grey box of a set is permanently tilted at an angle. The sort of angle that’s just enough to shift your perspective on your surroundings. The sort of angle that’s just enough to start you questioning things.

The same goes for the psychic world inhabited by the characters in Alistair McDowall’s new play. It’s a physical and mental landscape that is out of joint. It’s also out of time. The collection of crew members occupying this bland, functional capsule are billions of miles away from home and the rest of humanity, clinging on at the far reaches of the solar system. The sun is barely a faint flicker this far out; it is, as one character puts it, “one long night”. No days, no markers, nothing to hold onto except technology. And technology can go wrong.

That’s just what has happened as the play opens. Or, at least, something has gone wrong. After an eighteen-month stay, the first scientists to colonise Pluto are due to be picked up and returned to Earth. Except Earth isn’t answering the phone. There’s been no contact for three weeks and the crew at the research base are starting to get restless. “We’re all a bit … fraught,” says second-in-command Gilda (a nervily hair chewing, cereal chomping Jessica Raine), with delicious understatement.

At first, X is essentially a workplace drama – if one with heightened stakes and shrunken surroundings. Imagine being trapped in the same featureless space with your workmates for months on end and you begin to get the picture. The situation is desperate, but also banal. Colleagues bicker over contracts and kill the time with games of Guess Who. There are arguments about who hasn’t done the cleaning. Nerves are frayed.

But then McDowall’s play mutates. Just as it threatens to drag, its pulse – and ours – quickens. Ray (Darrell D’Silva), the captain of the crew and the astronaut who shipped them all out to Pluto, starts seeing things in the empty gloom of the not-quite-planet. Cole (Rhudi Dharmalingam) notices that the clocks have been going back by themselves. There’s a glitch in the system, a ghost in the machine. No one knows how long they’ve been stranded here, and no one is coming to pick them up. Suddenly we’re in the realm of psychological thriller, the confined research base (packed with provisions that will outlast them all) becoming a pressure cooker for the crew’s fears and tensions.

And then things get stranger. And stranger. And stranger. As the display on the digital clock scrambles, so too does time and memory and identity. Ray’s not the only one who’s seeing things. Or is he? There’s a crew member who’s maybe a crew member, or maybe a ghost, or maybe an echo of a memory, or maybe their rescuer. Maybe. False memories multiply and compete. Months or years or decades slip by. Nothing can be trusted. Eventually, even language breaks down, fracturing into single syllables and then just a vomited stream of ‘X’s. All that holds it together at the centre is Gilda, who’s sent spiralling further and further into herself.

It’s baffling and bewildering, but then it’s meant to be. The whole point of X lies in the same ambiguity that characterises its title. X can mean many things. A kiss. An error. The elusive answer to an equation. X marks the spot. In McDowall’s play it is all of these and more. And it’s distinctly, thrillingly theatrical. Sat in our seats at the Royal Court, watching these bodies on stage in front of us, we’re more aware of time passing than we would be behind a screen, where the pause function is always just a tap away. We feel time, which is crucial to this play about time dissolving.

Vicky Featherstone’s production, meanwhile, makes equally canny use of the space of the theatre to tell this fractured narrative. Prolonged blackouts dare us to see our own fears in the enveloping darkness. In between, Lee Curran’s lighting casts a queasy, subtly shifting synthetic glow, under which the characters sweat and squirm. Nick Powell’s sound design, with its nods to sci-fi, gestures towards the cinematic while working with the performances to slowly turn up the tension in a way that only a live art form can. And when things fall apart, Tal Rosner’s video designs transform the dull walls of this enclosed space capsule, twisting the strange world of the stage that bit further out of alignment.

What’s most haunting about X, though, is not the exhilarating theatrical effects or the familiar hint of space horror: the little girl at the window, the spectre of something scary in the deep, deep darkness of outer space. The production is having fun with these elements – and temporarily spooking the hell out of its audience in the process – but what lingers afterwards is the exposed fragility of time and memory. That out-of-joint-ness that doesn’t quite go away after walking out of the theatre and allowing the world to right itself.

Because we might not be on Pluto, but our senses of self are no more robust, really, than Gilda’s. Strip away clocks and relationships and familiar places and things and what are you left with? As McDowall himself has pointed out, in some ways it’s not really all that significant that the play takes place on Pluto; it’s the extreme distance of this place from home and all things known that really matters. And time is both as artificially constructed and as inexorable in its passage for us as it is for this imagined crew. The implicit questions raised – about what we remember, and what we don’t remember, and how we hold onto an idea of who we are – resonate far beyond any sci-fi setting (and the best sci-fi does, after all, have a habit of playing on our deepest fears and preoccupations).

The other thing that haunts is the pervasive atmosphere of loss. X isn’t just a play about being far from home. The home these characters yearn for is one that has already been lost – ravaged for profit and rapidly consuming itself. The snippets of information we gradually glean about this future Earth are horrifically bleak: birds have fallen from the sky, whole continents have been swallowed by the sea, trees have disappeared. It’s ecological crisis writ large. The skill of McDowall’s writing, though, is to imbue these horrors with a chilling normality. This is just the way things are. (And, I sense with a shiver, it is just the way things will be if we continue down our current track of blithe environmental destruction.)

Then again, that’s just one way of seeing it. Tilt your head at another angle and other interpretations reveal themselves. That’s the beauty and the occasional frustration of McDowall’s play, which refuses to narrow possibilities. Like that huge, off-centre grey box, it’s a container for meanings and fears and memories. X, after all, can mean many things.

Photo: Tristram Kenton.

Comeback Special, Shoreditch Town Hall

Posted on April 25, 2016May 10, 2016 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

1968, Burbank, California. Six years after his last number one single, Elvis Presley records an intimate television concert surrounded on all sides by screaming fans.

2016, Shoreditch Town Hall, London. Greg Wohead re-enacts the television broadcast, now known as the 1968 Comeback Special. Well, sort of re-enacts it.

In The Ted Bundy Project, Wohead dissected our morbid fascination with violent figures and his own disturbing attraction to serial killer Ted Bundy’s confession tapes.Comeback Specialonce again unravels the fabric of fascination, though this time it’s the famous rather than the infamous under the microscope. What makes an icon, a King? And what might happen if we try, briefly, to bring him back?

Wohead arranges the audience on four sides of a raised square stage in Shoreditch Town Hall, mirroring the layout of the Burbank studio. Chairs and a microphone stand are placed just so. It’s a perfect reconstruction in some ways, deliberately imperfect in others. Drained of the bright, synthetic colour of 1960s fashion, Wohead’s version is a shadow or skeleton of the original event. Recreated in monochrome, this is a black-and-white negative of the 1968 Comeback Special. An echo. A ghost.

The whole event is, supposedly, about authenticity. “I want you to see who I really am,” says Wohead/Elvis in a seductive drawl. That was the whole point of the television broadcast: to offer fans a glimpse of Elvis the man as well as Elvis the star. The King and his musicians jam together, while Elvis talks to the audience between songs. Yet at the same time, as Wohead tells us, this was all carefully constructed: the television show was pre-recorded and released in multiple different versions. How is it even possible to recreate something that exists under myriad guises?

Wohead builds his re-enactment slowly, in careful layers. At first, the dynamism of the gig is rendered oddly static. Everything is told, not shown: Elvis’s appearance, the layout of the television studio, the position of the cameras, the clothes worn by the fans. Wohead talks us through every last detail of the recording, the meticulous description juxtaposed with a complete refusal to imitate. “You can see that my hair is black, obviously,” says Wohead, looking at us through his mousy mop. Even the lyrics are spoken, deadpan, rather than sung.

And then gradually, bit by bit, Wohead takes on aspects of Elvis’s physicality. A curling lip. A thrusting hip. Then, later, that distinctive voice. That unmistakeable “uh-huh”. Wohead’s is a fragmented impersonation, isolating individual elements of Elvis’s performance. He works like a forensic scientist, as if in search of some elusive essence. Is it in the voice? The recognisable quiff of hair? Those hips?

But meaning resides as much with the audience – the audience then, in the television studio, and the audience now, in Shoreditch Town Hall – as it does with either Elvis or Wohead. Attention is drawn to the ways in which individual spectators cherish moments of eye contact or precious souvenirs: a sweat-soaked handkerchief or a piece of lint plucked from Elvis’s cheek. A good chunk of the show is dedicated to recreating one small moment of interaction between Elvis, the audience and one of his band members, Wohead building the encounter piece by tiny piece with the help of the audience.

The choice of re-enactment also feels crucial. The 1968 Comeback Special is the scene of Elvis’s career resuscitation. But it is also, perhaps, the moment everyone realised for the first time that he was human and fragile and as vulnerable to time and age as the rest of us mere mortals. This is not Elvis as he was in the years before his death – fat, drug-addled, washed-up – but he is no longer quite the untouchable young man he once was. He is, as Wohead puts it, “caught between”.

Scrolling through YouTube the day after watching the show, there’s something hypnotic about the videos of the 1968 Comeback Special. It’s the way the whole event flirts with failure: Elvis interrupts his own songs, jokes about forgetting the lyrics, laughs in a way that is at once exposed and in control. This is not Elvis at the height of his powers. And the footage of the television show itself, when it finally appears in Wohead’s performance, seems flimsy and thin, projected onto translucent cloths hanging behind the four sides of the stage. The King is little more than a flickering image, fleeting and insubstantial.

Photo: Manuel Vason.