Review: The Rinse Cycle at the Charing Cross Theatre

Written for Theatre Bubble, March 2016

Wagner’s original Ring Cycle, which forms the content for the majority of the Unexpected Opera Company’s latest show at the Charing Cross Theatre (here the Rinse Cycle (gettit?), was originally a series of four epic music dramas – each meant to be performed over consecutive nights to give the performers (and the audience) something more than an intense 16 hour musical experience. Here, typical for the launderette setting, these four operas have been stuffed into a two hour time slot, scented with a sweet charm, and left to spin in a merry and hectic stage experience.

The five performers, each operatically trained and incredibly talented, all acquitted themselves marvellously. Alongside the performance of Wagner’s score came a metatheatrical series of romantic capers between the characters themselves. It certainly took a while to adjust to this structure and form, but it worked a treat. Though clearly their acting took second billing to their singing, the five created a wonderful and hilarious experience for the audience. It’d be unjust to single any of them out.

This was not a show for Wagner purists, as the characters frequently had to provide quick exposition and witty barbs to make sure that the whole plot was dealt with quickly and effectively. Overall the tone of the show seemed to pitch itself somewhere between Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (with actors often breaking off to explain leitmotifs or comment on how similar the narrative is to that of Tolkien), Michael Frayn’s Noises Off  (with its equally ludicrous backstage farce), and the recent production of Jurassic Park at the Edinburgh Fringe. There were enough sex gags to shake a conductor’s baton at.

True, some of the jokes were cringe-worthily borderline racist and a couple of the characters seemed entirely two-dimensional, but what was most important was that this mattered so little – Unexpected Opera have created a merry night of exceptionally talented performers having a chance to take their material and do something different with it.  The low-budget dragon or plastic helmets could be forgiven in an instant. After a near-incomprehensible ending to the meta-narrative and a good old sing-a-long, the audience (and this reviewer included) mostly left the audience beaming.

Credit must also go to the pianist, who tackled Wagner’s score with panache and delicacy – the music was stripped down to its most necessary motifs and functions, whilst leaving opportunity for some wonderful harmonies and moments to really show the composer’s finesse. Wagner really likes to get the most out of his orchestra during his operas, and showing that range of tone and timbre on a single piano was done perfectly.

It took a while to gel with the Rinse Cycle, but what emerged was a fantastically heartwarming and endearing show. Don’t miss it whilst it’s on at the Charing Cross Theatre!

Photo by Robert Workman

Review: I am Not Myself These Days at Shoreditch Town Hall

Written for Theatre Bubble, March 2016

In retrospect, I Am Not Myself These Days is a fantastically pertinent, almost tragic title for Josh Kilmer-Purcel’s autobiography. Here produced as a one-person show adapted by and starring Tom Stuart, what is most strikingly apparent is how suitable the text is for the stage – Kilmer-Purcell’s life and the existence of his drag act counterpart Aqua is rendered intimate, vibrant, brimming with intensity yet always incredibly humane.

Kilmer-Purcell’s life is an emotionally charged one – the drag artist, freshly arrived in New York, is utterly infatuated with the coke-abusing, addict-housing prostitute Jack, a masculine figure characterised by Stuart’s asides and rapid drop in vocal pitch. It’s an alarmingly powerful effect – both Kilmer-Purcel and Jack inhabit the one body, both with characteristic complexity. Kilmer-Purcel’s love of their boyfriend is entirely intrinsic – they exist within the same body. As the show progresses, Aqua and Jack’s relationship goes from exuberance to disillusionment, becoming violent, turbulent, stunning. 

There was a plethora of fantastic directorial choices from veteran Nick Bagnall. Usually committing himself to larger ensemble pieces, particularly Shakespeare, Bagnall is here allowed to flex his creative freedom on material that feels far more personal and intensely emotional. A desk fan is placed on a filing cabinet, and all of a sudden Aqua is driving down the streets of New York on the back of a motorcycle – escapism and youthful abandonment fabricated through mundanity. Aqua’s drag costume, decked with two fish-bearing glass breasts, were equally superb. In moments of rage the water in the breast-fish-tanks became torrents of anger, sloshing around vigorously before calming again as composure is restored. It was a subtle yet sophisticated decision.

One of the most enticing and exciting elements of the show has to be the set from designer Ti Green. Choice lighting decisions and a perfectly placed frame divide the stage into two triangles of equal size, illuminated by naked bulbs lining the stage. The frame is incredibly apt – the stage seems to have a giant mirror running down the middle, reflecting a number of different things: the relationship between hope and reality, love and infatuation, or even the two aspects of Kilmer-Purcel’s identity, be it as the wild and youthful Aqua, or the bassoon-playing, sensible Josh that emerges at key points of the play. This axiomatic contrast in character was present but never overly done, and Tom Stuart’s text was suitably embellished to reflect the complexities of the gender relationships within drag acts.

There was something incredibly Joycean about the piece. Whilst the frame may have existed as a mirror, it was also a frame in the portrait of a drag artist as a young person. Aqua’s New York, just like Joyce’s Dublin, was a character in its own right. Garish pink and blue neon LEDs lined the walls, flashing and disturbing the audience. The audience were thrown from penthouse, to club, to metropolitan street with each passing second, inhabiting a world stocked with eccentric and flamboyant characters, each vivified by Stuart in what the press release describes as a ‘tour-de-force’.

Certainly Stuart has to be applauded, and whilst there was a force behind his character, it never felt overbearing. One-person shows can become emotionally draining experiences, but what Stuart accomplishes is a humoured and natural engagement with audiences. The emotional resonance of the play lay in its humanity – Aqua was an incredibly naive person who, through intense experience, emerged transformed. The text itself was full of lyricism and enchanting lines ‘I’m used to blackouts…I don’t know who I’ll wake up as’, and Stuart’s delivery of the single name ‘Jack’ seemed to have the same impact as a besotted Kate Winslet character trying to stop Leonardo diCaprio from drowning in the freezing cold Atlantic. Stuart’s change in physicality, from the assuredly feminine stance of Aqua through to the hunched Jack, were all pulled off with aplomb, and the magic never broke as the performance continued.

The decision to add lip-synced songs throughout the performance was equally successful – as Aqua transformed as a character so too did the tone and timbre of these renditions, ending with a final play of N-Trance’s Set You Free embellished with bitter irony – rather than liberate her, love has instead inhibited and confined Aqua to a single, drug-addled penthouse.

But why is Kilmer-Purcel Not Himself These Days? The tragedy of the autobiography and Kilmer-Purcel’s life lies ultimately in the fact that Aqua existed only temporarily – her mortality defined only by her audiences. As the performance closed so too did her life, passing from life to death with the speed of a goldfish, as she herself put it. She existed, by the end of the show, merely as a deposited pair of stilettos and blonde wig next to the performer. The text took on a metatheatrical significance – Aqua had only ever existed in the imagination of Josh Kilmer-Purcel, but, for that brief hour, she was there in the imaginations of the audience too, spreading love, joy and entertainment. An unmissable accomplishment all round.

Photo: Manual Vasson

Credits: 

Written and performed by Tom Stuart

Adapted from the autobiography by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Directed by Nick Bagnall

Designed by Ti Green

Lighting Design by Guy Hoare.

Review: Firebird at Trafalgar Studios

Written for Theatre Bubble, 25/2/16

Half way through Firebird, currently playing at Trafalgar Studios 2, a single mattress is unceremoniously dumped from the lighting rig, landing with a thump in the centre of the stage. There it lies, coated in blood and torn sheets, as the next scene begins. What had before been a gentle and lilting performance is instantly transformed into a more sinister, more cerebral piece.

Firebird is centred around Tia, a 15-year-old, naive, lonely girl, raised in a housing estate by a foster mother she seemingly despises. Seduced by the charm and free chips of an older man, AJ, she is thrust instantly into a murky, uncompromising and far more tragic set of circumstances: sexually exploited by AJ and others and locked alone in a room for an undefined amount of time. The full effects of Tia’s naivety are played out as she attempts desperately to escape the set of situation she’s found herself in. Firebird, with its 75 minute runtime, is certainly an exhaustingly packed and emotionally charged piece, but also one that is perhaps plagued by the sheer volume of narrative issues it is laden with, the script never really doing justice to the various levels on which the play operates.

The bluntness of the bed-drop scene change is far more symbolic than perhaps intended. With this huge transformation in tone that Firebird betrays a problem – writing that had formerly been laced with subtlety and charm is instead rendered blunt, uncompromising and exhausting. 

The show opens to two girls, a wheelchair-bound Tia and Katie, her friend from the ‘Centre’ playing in a field with a believable rural bliss. This seeming innocence is refreshing – the two girls show polarising attempts at escapism – in Katie’s case it is to dream of an alternate reality where she runs a zoo, for Tia it is supposedly in leaving the strictures of a urbanity to move to a more liberating field space. The two bounce off one another with an unending sense of energy, giving the piece a real sense of possibility and opportunity.

But as the play progresses (or jumps back in time), the subtleties of Phil Davies’s script are forgotten – emotional impact is no longer expressed through content, setting, or implication but through shouts, screams or arguments. Statement seems to replace inference. Firebird loses its textual intricacies and becomes far more brutal – issues and questions that have important and pressing nuances are never really explored, instead they are simply shouted out into the audience with nothing more than a casual frankness. Questions of age divide, sexual manipulation and assault have all been examined recently in plays like NYT’s Consensual or in Theatre503’s Clickbait, but here they lose an essential level of necessary subtlety. A 75 minute could perhaps be extended to really show the emotional resonance of some of these problems.

That is not to dismiss the writing from Phil Davies – the show a fantastic job of conjuring a metropolitan  environment rent with difficulties – a lack of police empathy for victims of sexual assault, or the way in which teenage girls value their own self worth. These were distinguished moments of importance. So too was the way Davies transformed the connotations of his opening scene through retrospective awareness; what began as childish innocence upon reflection has undertones of sinister manipulation – Tia isn’t trying to befriend Katie, but rather to deceive her in the same way AJ did. The childish innocence of Katie and Tia becomes a fabrication. The direction too showed some fantastic touches – the show never felt static and the use of video screens during an interrogation scene felt entirely and perfectly oppressive.

The plaudits of the show must go to the cast – especially the central performance from Callie Cooke as Tia. Though the show crammed in a huge emotional weight, she carried the narrative with a sense of believability – it was an exhausting performance and one that bodes well for the actor’s future. Phadlut Sharma has an interesting task of assuming the two central, male roles (AJ and the police inspector investigating Tia’s case) – two characters positioned in places of seniority and influence over Tia. What is most striking is how Sharma makes these two pivotal roles so subtly different yet tonally similar – reflecting the injustices of a masculine dominance in contemporary society. One mis-step is the fact that Davies brings up AJ’s ethnicity – casually using racial slurs and evoking ideas of segregation for the play. These concepts linger, never to be brought up again or addressed in the performance. In the programme interval Davies acknowledges this fault, though never seems to find a remedy for it. 

Firebird is based on investigations into the now-prominent Rochdale cases – Tia’s story being an ‘amalgamation of a few different people’ that Davies knew from school (he grew up in the area) and imagined being involved in those events. It’s an unsettling notion – that this girl is a hybrid of various examples of grief and suffering –  almost a fictitious creation based on event rather than in her own right. It is a challenging idea to grapple with (one that Tim Crouch confronts in The Author with some success) – how far can a writer go in basing their play on the ideas of victims or sufferers? Is Davies highlighting the plight of the victim, or using the story to create what he sees as an interesting and engaging narrative for audiences? A difficult question with few answers.

Firebird is a play that attempts to do a huge amount in a short amount of time; the cast here shine in a show that deals out a lot while leaving unfortunately less to chew on. It is an exhausting performance – one that reflects a disturbing, broken Britain and its inhabitants – an important, pressing depiction. 

Firebird will be playing at the Trafalgar Studios (2) until March 19th.

Photo: Robert Day

http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/firebird/trafalgar-studios/

Cast and Crew: 

Producer: Tim Johanson

Director: Edward Hall

Writer: Phil Davies

Designer: Polly Sullivan

Lighting Designer: Tom Nickson

Sound Designer: John Leonard

—

Callie Cooke: Tia

Tahirah Sharif: Katie

Phadlut Sharma: AJ/Simon

Review: Jeramee, Hartleby and Ooglemore at the

Written for Theatre Bubble, 16/2/16

The phrase ‘magic of theatre’ is one thrown around frequently by thespians and reviewers alike. With theatre supposedly comes a conjuring, a box of tricks or a rabbit pulled from a hat. But as Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore demonstrates, if there is magic to be found in theatre, it lies not in technical wizardry, but instead in the simplicity and physicality of performance in its own right.

Sometimes it takes a near-complete absence of comprehensible language to understand this. Set on a sloping beach front (the audience resting somewhere in the shallows), the cast of Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore are restricted to saying their three titular words; using them infrequently and only when necessary. As a result, the vast majority of the performance happens in a comfortable and near total silence; the whole show resting on the physical comedy of its actors. The plot remains reassuringly simple: a day on the shore shared between two supposed siblings, (Hartleby and Oooglemore, played by Amalia Vitale and Fionn Gill), and their paternal figure Jeramee (Dorian Simpson). What emerges is 50 minutes of a quaint and charming performance.

This absence of linguistics is the sort of flourish expected from a show directed by Tim Crouch, but what is quickly apparent was that whilst the actors only have three words to use, it always feels like they are saying exactly what was they need. A removal of language augments the quality of the show, and places the onus on the actors themselves rather than what they are saying. As the trio move through a series of relatable sequences (Hartleby gets dressed, Oooglemore loses his beach ball, Jeramee gets frustrated trying to set up his deck chair), it’s clear that there is no need for language: the audience, especially the rows of younger children present, were more than ready to use their imaginations to fill in the gaps and construct the meaning of the words for themselves. If a character says the word ‘Ooglemore’, the context and nature of the delivery are more than enough to make that word comprehensible. The indefinable becomes easily applicable. It is the sort of linguistic interrogation expected by the likes of philosophers like Saussure or artists like Magritte, but here played out in a children’s theatre, on a beach, with a brightly coloured beach ball. The talents of writer Gary Owen, freshly lauded for his Iphigenia in Splott,  are seemingly endless.

Praise must be given to the lighting design from Phil Bentley, subtly transforming as the tone of the show progressed. Lily Arnold’s costume design was a marvellous cavalcade of clashing colours, splendidly suited to the near-clownish nature of the performers. Amalia Vitale’s Hartleby deserves singling out for her entrance and opening few minutes, introducing the audience to both her character and linguistic parameters of the show. The whole performance rested on the success of those first moments. Later on, her and Gill’s fake sparring match provides a centrepiece for the whole show – oral and physical synchronisation provided a mesmerising and entirely fake game of basketball. It was a wonderful sequence to round off the show. The magic of this show rested not on what was present, but entirely on what was not, be it coherent language or a basketball. Crouch, after his successes with I,Shakespeare, has once again made theatre readily accessible to children.

There are, of course, some quibbles; Oooglemore’s decision to urinate in the sea (in the midst of the audience, no less) seemed oddly out of place, whilst the storm sequence felt underwhelming: the actors standing by as a parasol floated away. Given their talents for physical theatre, it felt a lot more could be done at this point to show the full intensity of this blustering gale.

In spite of this, Jeramee, Hartleby and Oooglemore stands as a fantastic accomplishment: though aimed at those between 3 and 7 years, adults and children alike were laughing resoundingly for the full fifty minutes(the fact there have been ‘adult’ performances added on the 23rd February and the 9th March is telling). A treat at The Unicorn for all ages.

Photo//Richard Davenport

Review: Ursula Martinez at the Soho

Ursula Martinez’s Free Admission is a one-person performance that actively defies any attempt at ‘conventional’ categorisation. It tiptoes very deliberately along the fine line between absurdity and reality, reflecting of course, how frequently the two overlap. Her current run at the Soho essentially consisted of an hour of anecdotes, insights and reflections, each rapped off one after the other with almost every sentence beginning with the word ‘Sometimes…’. The lilting structure created a warped, almost transposed form of observational humour. The mingling of anecdote and insight is theoretically comedic, but in actuality is far more complex than this: a constant juxtaposition of tragedy with laughter-demanding witticism meant the show ends up consistently, and deliberately it seems, undermining its own notion of comedy.

It is an accomplished albeit unsubtle tactic. The oscillation between humour and deadpan reflection means that audiences are confronted with truths about racism, sexual assault or sexism, as well as countless other pressing topics that are indeed necessary issues for debate and performance. Given the cursory and expansive way in which Martinez presented herself however, she never really seemed to confront the wider permutations and intricacies of the issues she discussed, but instead ensconced them in fresh doses of comedy. The show inhabits a space that is a reaction against the fallacies of reality, rather than one that confronts it. The didacticism that Martinez supposedly aspired towards felt largely undercut by an underwhelming structure: simply naming and listing various injustices did not feel like going a long way to showing the true seriousness of their existence.

While this was certainly problematic, Martinez did succeed in a number of respects. Free Admission managed to show the manifestations of the true absurdity of reality – be they funny or not. In a show laden with truisms, it is only right and correct that some of these reflect deeper and less heartwarming truths. For the most part, of course, this is a scintillating performance, but one that actively tries to come with a hard edge. Not all of it, it must be said, was loaded with commentary and incisive attack, with some fantastic one-liners: ‘Sometimes, I was convinced my ex-girlfriend deliberately faked not having orgasms’.

By far the most intriguing and inspired aspect of Martinez’s show is her choice to deliver almost all of it whilst constructing a solid brick wall onstage. Emerging with a tray of cement and a hidden pile of bricks, understatedly and methodically she slowly but surely piles the bricks on top of each other, and, with each brick laid, we as an audition are able to see less and less. It is a fantastically ambiguous symbol, and can be read in a volume of different ways: an appropriation of a masculine stereotype, an active defiance of the audience by interfering with their ability to see, a sad reflection of ideological divides? Or maybe even a literal fourth wall constructed on stage? Every interpretation is potentially valid, and there was certainly a rhythmic soothing to the process of watching the wall being built.

Yet for all that, as a naked Martinez strolled defiantly out onto a wet Soho street to the sound of the Rocky theme, the performance somehow felt as though it never quite hit the nail on the head. For the most part it was pensive, or contemplative, and despite its ending, it felt as though Martinez never managed to issue a rallying cry she was aspiring towards. Instead, she held up a bluntly accurate mirror to the audience, and it was an hour of revelation at its most cutting.

Review: Macbeth – tale of sound and fury

Half way through 6Foot Stories’ performance of Macbeth: A Tale of Sound and Fury, one of Angelo Badalamenti’s songs from Twin Peaks(Freshly Squeezed, if memory serves) makes an unexpected albeit welcome appearance in the background of one of the scenes. Though it takes some gall to use such a soundtrack in a performance, such Lynchian music was, as it turned out, incredibly apt for this production of Macbeth, and if David Lynch were to ever tackle the Scottish play, it seems that he would do it in a very similar vein to what is currently being shown at the Hope Theatre in Highbury. Its mixture of occult, comedy, tragedy and hyperbole were entirely akin to something right up Lynch’s street. The unnerving disparity between gore and laughter that has typified many of Lynch’s works was certainly present on the night.

Indeed, 6Foot Stories achieved something rather fantastic with their adaptation of Macbeth, which, through a drastically cut down runtime and intriguingly bold reinterpretation of the text, avoided many of the gripes that surround current performances. The premise was new and invigorating – three fortune tellers (based in a scrapyard) retold the immortal classic in their own special way, swapping in and out of character as they desired. Shakespeare’s words and characters became nothing more than playthings as  parts were thrown between performers, and lines were redistributed on a whim. Though this may have risked becoming frenetic and overwhelming, the cast managed to orchestrate their Shakespearean chaos in a way that was riveting and energetic – the story flew by with refreshing speed.  A Tale of Sound and Fury was certainly an apt description for the performance – there were huge swathes of both throughout the 70 minute runtime.

Structurally, the show limited itself perhaps with its casual regard for character. Throwing dialogue and roles between actors (each part created by a single item of clothing, be it a sash (Macbeth), a shawl (Lady Macbeth), or a crown (Duncan) etc) was certainly an accomplished feat by the cast, but in chopping and changing roles so frequently, the actors hampered  the character progressions so important to the show – Macbeth’s delusions of immortality for instance were not as pronounced as they needed to be. As the show progressed, this became more and more ludicrous – Macduff’s son a toy monkey, Lady Macduff simply a strip of cloth, each quickly dispatched by Macbeth’s crafty french assassin (in that scene depicted as a snake sock puppet). Again, the casual flippancy for creating character undermined the emotional resonance of these scenes, and the audience were often unsure as to whether or not a scene was comedic or tragic. The show started with a commitment to maintaining a balance between farce and tragedy, but fell perhaps too far into the former camp – while some audience members last consistently, others were perhaps slightly more bemused. Furthermore, often it was easy to mistake the three fortune tellers for the three weird sisters – or maybe they were the same people? It was hard to tell.

This was still a great and non-stop 70 minutes, with some fantastic directorial touches – Macbeth, after slaying Duncan, emerging with the daggers cradled against his chest, bloodied like a new-born babe. Macbeth’s crown made out of nothing more than tin-foil, exposed as worthless and meaningless; purely artificial in the realms of theatre. The textual condensation  and reinterpretation was done incredibly well, rivalling that of the likes of Smooth Faced Gentlemen in terms of maintaining the key themes of the play while omitting half the dialogue.  Macbeth: A Tale of Sound and Fury is well worth the visit, and leaves you ready to subvert Shakespeare’s texts with the drop of a hat – for this 6Foot Stories must be commended.

Review: Minotaur at the Unicorn

Written for TheatreBubble, January 2016

There’s something rather profoundly positive about the tragic Minotaur, currently playing at the Unicorn Theatre. While the plot of the play itself, which sees the minotaur slain, Theseus crowned King, and Aegeus falling to his death, certainly has a downbeat tone and ends with no small amount of ambiguity (will Theseus go on to be a good King? What happens to Ariadne?), there was something rather thrilling about this piece of theatre being produced by Unicorn themselves.

A retelling of a Greek classic carries with it both expectation and to some extent the chance to break the mould of orthodoxy that can surround the story. Through their revision of the Minotaur story, writer Adam Peck certainly went for the latter approach. The young Theseus, travelling to find his absent father King Aegeus of Athens, wanders into a political mess on the isle; the Athenians are being forced to hand over 14 children to the King of Crete. This infant transfer is to serve as payment for the murder of the Creteians King Minos’s son (Minos being played by a wonderfully Machiavellian, almost Tim Crouch-esque Rupert Holliday Evans). The children, Minos decrees, will be fed to the famous minotaur – Minos’s own son cursed to live in the legendary labyrinth in bestial bull form. There, the minotaur is tended to (and humanized) by his sister Ariadne, who visits and sings to him regularly. From here the story progresses as mythology dictates – Theseus slays the Minotaur, returning home King of Athens after his father’s suicide.

Though the plot is well known, this is no legend by numbers. Theseus is no longer a hero but a slightly deluded youth, just as the  Minotaur here is no longer a monster but a tortured and lonely soul. The emphasis is placed on the familial context of the play, and when the Minotaur dies, it is a brother that is lost rather than a threat removed. Marianne mourns his passing, and the masked, horned head of the beast is taken off to reveal the man beneath. No one cheers at this supposed victory. Ben Adams’s physicality as the Minotaur is essential and poignant here.

As a play aimed at children (though there were many teary-eyed adults come the final blackout), Minotaur succeeds wonderfully. Never slowing or stopping, its hour-long runtime kept all attentive from start to finish. But being captivating is only one side of the story. The play manages to delve into an often retold  classic and showing that there are always interpretations; ideas can always be presented in different ways. This is an incredibly important lesson to learn when you’re young – the stories you hear are not necessarily the ones that need to be told. Theseus and the Minotaur is not a tale of man conquering beast, but instead a family tragedy given mythical form. These lessons are still key today.

So many elements of this show deserve praise – be it the set, in its antiquated in-the-round style, or the beautiful minotaur mask; both monstrous and humane. If there are to be quibbles they’d be minor – Ariadne seems potentially sidelined in a very masculine piece, and Aegeus’s suicide felt slightly anti-climactic, (suffering the same fate that many productions of Les Miserables do while trying to show Javert’s death). But these are minor issues in a fantastic piece, and well worth a visit, no matter what age or level of classical awareness.

Review: Light by Theatre Ad Infinitum

Written for The Metropolist, 3/2/16

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Light will, over its coming run, invariably be compared to Complicite‘s latest brainchild, The Encounter, which opens at The Barbican soon but stole all the headlines at the Edinburgh International Festival in August. While the latter uses aural ideas to weave a complex, enthralling, and sometimes astounding theatrical experience, the former, currently running at the Battersea Arts Centre, uses visuals and light to fabricate its own space, world, and narrative. The parallels in sensory experience are handy, but by no means just. Light‘s use of sensory exploration arguably does a lot more with visual than The Encounter does with the aural, and as a result it readily embraces its namesake and the connotations that come with it. Make no mistake, this is excitingly bold theatre.

Light‘s concept is remarkably easy to sum up, though for the performers fiendishly difficult in its execution. Through the use of light, be it torch, spot, LED or flood, the five actors and inevitably underappreciated horde of a technical team fabricate a dystopian society – citizens are all connected through chips in their brains, controlled by the Supreme Leader. Alex, our protagonist (and son of a dictatorial father and rebel-leading mother), is forced to confront the extremities and problems within the society his father rules.

The plot is, perhaps, derivative – science fiction references come from Tron, Inception, Minority Report, even the trench scene from A New Hope gets a nod. A few other influences are here – the narrative structure with its sporadically brief flashforwards seems evocative of Soderbergh’s The Limey, while the dysfunctional-familial-turned-political-intrigue is almost a page out of Dennis Kelly’s Utopia. In fact, Alex’s fantasies about murdering his father and finally finding an intrinsic connection with his mother seem largely oedipal. As a result, the science fiction element seemed like an unnecessary preoccupation – Theatre Ad Infinitum’s main successes instead come in the entirely ‘real’ scenes being created – a dimly lit table for two; the silhouette of two hands slowly exploring one another and rejoicing in each other’s company. These were the moments when Lightbecame utterly exceptional.

But this was a shortcoming that had to be flagged before the heaps of praise could be given. The five actors on stage fabricated, both physically and visually, a stunning production that felt almost dance like: with so much of the stage remaining unlit for the duration of the show, there seemed to be another, equally beautiful performance that will forever be confined to the shadows between the lights. Each performer would weave around the other, sometimes emerging into a beautifully placed spotlight but often simply remaining in perfectly poised pitch black. It was an incredible piece of sustained movement that has to be witnessed, since so much of it cannot be seen.

With the show operating without dialogue and occasional sound effect, the job of fabricating an oppressive and tyrannical dictatorship falls to the actors and their physicalities. When actually illuminated, they perform perfectly, giving nuanced performances despite intense multi-roling. The sounds themselves must be mentioned, having an unsettlingly organic squelch, exactly as you’d expect from a play expecting its audience to envisage metal chips being shot into brain matter. Throughout the 80 minute runtime, not once did the illusion break. As the cast stood exultant and exhausted as the play ended and the lights came up (the house lights, bringing a yellow warmth for the first time), the audience became aware of just how artificial the performance space was – by appropriating the light in the room. Theatre Ad Infinitum had constructed an astoundingly enveloping and oppressive tale. Light is a performance that will always prove how important and innovative theatre can be, and simply should not be missed.

[IMAGES: Alex Brenner ]

Review: Dorian Gray at Trafalgar Studios

Adapting The Picture of Dorian Gray is no mean feat, and a task that few would seem ready to take on. The book is prone to such intense textual wit, laced with a tongue in cheek attitude and pondering nature that it seems to need a novel-based context to allow its ideas to fully breathe.

As a result, transferring the show to the stage was always going to present difficulties for Merlin Holland (Wilde’s one grandson). There must have been a number of reasons why Wilde himself chose the novel over the theatrical form, and this fact seemed to irk the production to a certain extent. Confined to the black box stage, with minimal set dressing while still aspiring towards an original, 19th Century setting, European Arts Company’s Picture of Dorian Gray seems to lose some of the wonder of Wilde’s tale. It cuts back at the novel into a two hour show – the content is bite-sized, and sometimes not given the same room to breathe as it is in the books.

This is remedied somewhat by some assured performances – particularly from Guy Warren-Thomas in the main role. What begins as a timid and muted Gray becomes gradually something more reptilian and inhuman. The face, ironically, transforms, even as it remains fixed in time. Inexorably, Gray’s tortured morality is teased out and his personal ultimatum is laid bare; Warren-Thomas here is comfortably convincing.

The four person cast were all promising and used their multi-rolling skills to great effect; seldom resulting to caricature and often showing great physical flexibility. The multi-roling also supplies a fun theatrical phenomenon – as Warren-Thomas’s Gray remains constant, the changing faces and characters blur past him in a state of constant flux – a nice touch. John Gorick’s Harry Wotton, though at first marred by a perhaps too emphatic languor on a chaise longue, eventually became a fantastic centrepiece in the closing scenes and aged his character with suitable aplomb. The size of cast had its faults however – scene changes dragged and lost the rhythm that a lot of Wilde’s text relies upon. It is entirely possible that the show, given a larger stage and larger cast, could breathe a new lease of life into the script; it felt slightly wanton in its current form.

There is never anything wrong with performing an orthodox show, and Holland, the director Peter Craze and the team have to be commended for their search for Wilde’s purity. While the second act certainly has moments that create a rhythmic and stimulating show, on the whole The Picture of Dorian Gray feels almost too adventurous for such an enclosed space. Unlike its protagonist’s painting, hopefully in the future it will be allowed to age well and given room to breathe.

Video: Slag, A Rehearsed Reading Featurette at the

Created for some Oxford-based students putting on a fantastic rehearsed reading at the end of January.

Shot with the D3200 (before I got my new lens!) on 18-55mm, was a bit dark and grainy but didn’t look too bad.