Lorne Campbell

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Lorne-Campbell-cr-Topher-McGrillis-3

Originally written for Exeunt.

As I talk to Lorne Campbell about Northern Stage and this year’s programme at the Edinburgh Fringe, one word keeps stubbornly recurring: “conversation”. The theatre’s new artistic director, still only five weeks into the job, shows a profound understanding of the role of organisations such as Northern Stage in the many current dialogues around theatremaking – dialogues about funding, about politics, about artistic practice. As a key regional producing theatre, Campbell believes that Northern Stage has a responsibility to engage in, respond to and act as a catalyst for those conversations.

“The theatre is a regional theatre,” he says, “and for me that’s about connecting to all of that region. The theatre’s identity is a conversation with all of those multi-faceted communities and identities, rather than a clear thing that you can point a finger at.” When I ask about the importance of a theatre like Northern Stage reflecting its locality, Campbell pauses. “I think that’s quite a complicated question,” he eventually answers. “I think if a theatre like this isn’t local in profound and complicated ways then it’s completely irrelevant, so we have to find a way that our work is of the city and is of the region.”

At the point at which Campbell is taking the reins at Northern Stage, this conversation and these understandings of regional identity are particularly urgent. As he explains, “everything’s on slightly shifting sands”; the organisation is currently coping with cutbacks from the city council and Arts Council England, at the same time as bracing itself for further slashes to its funding. “In the face of all of that, it’s about trying to find the most dynamic and optimistic model you can, but it’s quite difficult to plan into the medium term,” Campbell admits.

While the necessity of protecting the theatre in the short term makes longer term visions difficult at this stage, Campbell makes it clear that Northern Stage’s community of artists is a key priority. “I’ve arrived at a very interesting moment where there is a hugely exciting cohort of artists and companies and writers and actors all coming through in the North East,” he explains, “so a big challenge for us is how we not only protect that generation of artists, but continue their momentum.” He describes the present as a “really potential-filled, optimistic moment”, but he’s under no illusions about how easily that potential could be wasted if the theatre is not able to continue supporting the development of those artists.

Another repeated word in Campbell’s vocabulary, despite the difficult times that Northern Stage and other organisations currently face, is “optimism”. He remains hopeful about the theatre’s ability to harness its resources in support of the artists it has discovered and nurtured over the years, as well as about the potential of the main stage. “We need to make more work on it,” he states, firmly and unequivocally. “More of our own work and work which tells exciting, contemporary stories about not only the present of the North East, but also the future.” He imagines this stage as “a political space, sort of inspired by Joan Littlewood and John McGrath”.

“So much of it is about exercising community,” Campbell explains as he outlines his approach. He smoothly segues into talking about St Stephen’s, the Edinburgh Fringe venue that Northern Stage first occupied last year under previous artistic director Erica Whyman, and the range of different communities surrounding that project. Linking together artists from across the North of England in an ambitious curated programme, St Stephen’s offers an overlap between different areas, companies and artistic practices, as well as opening a dialogue with other venues and with the communities of both Edinburgh and the Fringe.

Stressing the importance of engaging with the people of Edinburgh as much as with the festival as a separate entity, Campbell insists that this balance is “absolutely vital”. “I think it’s one of the great ignored truths of the Fringe,” he says. “The majority of tickets are sold to Scots who come to the festival; the tourist ticket buyers are still in the minority. So if you don’t connect to a local audience, you’re going to have a very hard time.” Having been brought up in the city and worked at the Traverse Theatre earlier in his career, Campbell has an obvious advantage here. “It feels like an old biorhythm waking up,” he laughs, adding, “it’s going to be lovely to be embedded in it”.

One way in which Campbell is facilitating this dialogue with the local area at St Stephen’s is through The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project. The driving impulse behind this project, he explains, was born out of what he felt was a divide between English and Scottish artists. “I was really struck last year by the real functioning sense of community within the artists at St Stephen’s, but I was also aware that there wasn’t a huge amount of conversation with a very similar group of Scottish artists who were also in the city.”

“I wanted to try and find a project that brought those communities into contact with each other,” Campbell continues, “to talk about something in the political zeitgeist, but also to exchange practice and to be in the same room together.” His unique artistic solution was inspired by border ballads, “a narrative folk tradition that belongs as much to Northumbria as it does to the Scottish lowlands and the borders”. Campbell has commissioned six artists to write their own versions of what a border ballad might look like today, while throughout the festival another epic ballad will be composed by a range of guest artists contributing a new verse each night.

“That ballad begins with a foundling babe being discovered in a Moses basket floating down the River Tweed on the night of the dissolution of the act of parliaments between England and Scotland,” Campbell tells me, “and then the poem will tell the next 95 years of that child’s life and the next 95 years of an imagined non-United Kingdom.” Incorporating a diverse mix of artists with a range of different political views, Campbell hopes to open a lively debate about Scottish independence, which he suggests is “much more than a question about whether Scotland should be an independent country or not”. As he continues, “it’s a question about how optimistic or pessimistic we feel about the potential of our political future”.

The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project is not alone in addressing such meaty questions. Elsewhere in the programme – which Campbell explains was mostly put together by creative associate Mark Calvert before his arrival – a certain shared political impetus animates a wide and varied range of work, from Hannah Nicklin’s very personal meditations on protest to Daniel Bye’s more openly provocative How to Occupy an Oil Rig. “It feels like there’s much more of a zeitgeist running through the project this year,” Campbell notes. “You can see lots of conversations about dissent, about forms and modes of protest, about how you question where you are as an individual in relation to a system. I think it will be very exciting to see how all those bits talk to each other.”

Another strand to this dialogue within the programme is Make. Do. And Mend, a one day event that aims to gather a wide range of voices in theatre to discuss problems and implement solutions. Feeling the need to create an event that acted as well as just talking, Campbell and the team at Northern Stage “wondered what would happen if we tried to create an event which actually resulted in immediate action that day”. Campbell is determined that “you can’t just repeat” and hopes that this gathering will prevent the talking in circles that we are all too good at.

This particular event is being organised in partnership with Forest Fringe, who are back in Edinburgh this year in a new venue on the same side of the city as St Stephen’s. This in itself shifts the context in which Northern Stage’s project sits, providing yet another overlapping community. Campbell is positive about this development, saying that “the geography and gravity of having more on that side of town is great”. He also comments on the growth of curated programmes this year in resistance to the commercial drives elsewhere, stating his belief that that work “doesn’t go away, it just moves, it finds another space on the fringe of the Fringe”. If nothing else, the presence of another artistically driven venue in Edinburgh this year adds another voice to the dialogue. “It’s all part of the conversation.”

Photo: Topher McGrillis.

Blink, Soho Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

The human eyeball is a lot like a single lens reflex camera. Both have a lens, a focus, a destination where the picture is formed. In the same way, love – at least for Phil Porter’s pair of charmingly strange characters – has a lot in common with voyeurism. The initial jolt of something like recognition, long periods of watching and yearning, a gradual descent into familiar comfort.

Watching is central to Porter’s off-kilter romance, visiting the Soho Theatre fresh from Edinburgh. Sophie feels as though she is slowly disappearing and has a desperate need to be observed. Ever since volunteering as the night watchman for the reclusive religious commune in which he was raised, Jonah likes to watch. It is a match made in Peeping Tom heaven. While playing with the conventions of the rom-com, however, this is distinctly setting itself apart from traditional romantic narratives – less hearts and flowers, more foibles and dysfunction. It is a love story, Jonah is keen to emphasise, but perhaps not the kind we’re used to seeing.

As already established, seeing and being seen are overt themes. A number of Sophie and Jonah’s shared activities involve watching, including a telling level of emotional involvement with a television plot, while it is not insignificant that the most erotically charged moment between them is sparked by an act of joint voyeurism. This atmosphere of covert observation is reflected in Joe Murphy’s direction, which places actors Rosie Wyatt and Harry McEntire at opposite sides of the performance space, stealing looks at one another while directing their separate segments of the same story to the audience. They take turns to watch, switching between spectator and subject, but rarely do their eyes meet in a moment of direct intimacy.

What all this watching hints at, other than a natural human instinct towards nosiness, is rather more interesting. Sophie and Jonah’s relationship, for want of a better description, begins through the mediator of a camera in Sophie’s flat, placing a screen between the pair from the beginning. This immediately leaps out as a symptom of the digital age, an indictment of the lack of real connection engendered by our ultra-connected society, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Although these two characters certainly suffer from an allergy to intimacy, Jonah has been brought up starved of technology, suggesting that our difficulties with relationships and our fondness for the false intimacy of pining from a distance run deeper than the digital sceptics might have us believe.

There is also a link to be drawn between the feeling of being watched and the subtle religious references made by the piece. While Jonah’s fiercely pious upbringing is primarily a source of comedy, the concept of a divine being is not just there for laughs. There is something in Sophie’s poignant desire to be seen that speaks of an inherent impulse to believe in a greater power watching over us, while the knowing adoption of the sort of coincidences typical to the rom-com genre throws around ideas of fate and destiny, once again implied to have more to do with psychological need than any universal master plan.

Far from being the exclusive preserve of a deity who directs our lives, Blink seems to be saying that watching is an intensely human activity. It is also an activity that we as an audience are of course deeply complicit in. This is powerfully felt in a brief moment when Wyatt and McEntire, enacting the joint activity of watching television, sit and stare out at us. What we as an audience are doing, crowded into a dark room with a group of strangers to gawp at a couple of people pretending to be other people for an hour or two, is essentially quite odd, a largely unacknowledged observation that the piece could do more with. In a play so concerned with spectatorship, it neglects to truly dissect the act of spectating that makes the piece possible in the first place.

For all the interest sparked by Porter’s intelligent, multi-layered text, the production is largely made what it is by the appeal of Wyatt and McEntire, in whose hands these weird, lonely characters become almost unbearably endearing. They are both kooky while delicately side-stepping cliche, staying just the right side of twee and occasionally snagging our emotions on moments of gutting, unshowy sadness. If it were possible to capture the overall aesthetic of the performances, they linger somewhere between cute and detached; a sort of dislocated realism that might easily be taken for straightforward naturalistic acting but has just the lightest touch of strangeness.

This strangeness bleeds into Hannah Clark’s set, which begs us to look at it. The Ikea-meets-woodland-meets-kitsch design is made up of a back wall of panels showing a blown-up photograph of a forest scene, a carpet of imitation grass, and a selection of office furniture that is gradually moved around the space. Much can potentially be taken from these intriguing choices, but the most striking comment made by the set is one that is married to this idea of intimacy at a distance. Just as Jonah falls in love with Sophie while watching her on a screen, the “outdoors” that Clark’s design presents us with is pointedly fake and photographic – a distant representation that appears on something very much like a screen.

As much as it eschews the trajectory of the rom-com (how many love stories begin with anecdotes about dissecting eyes or removing teeth?), there are moments when Blink trips up slightly on the tropes it is teasing us with. But just as Porter seems to have relented to the irresistible appeal of his oddball characters and given his audience what they want, this anti-climactic possibility is quietly ripped away. This enchantingly quirky piece is too clever to conform to our expectations, as much as it may flirt with them, but in its subversion it equally takes us by surprise. No jaw-dropping denouement, the final narrative twist is unobtrusive, gentle, with a bleak note of inevitability. It is even sadder for this. A fondant with a heart of bitter chocolate, the beauty of Porter’s creation is that the whimsy is always tempered with something altogether darker.

Blink runs at Soho Theatre until 22nd September at Soho Theatre.

Photo: Sheila Burnett

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.