Posts tagged ‘matt trueman’

  |   Newer Entries »
3 February, 2010

My Stories, Your Emails

Barbican, 2 – 13 February 2010

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

Ursula Martinez is an enigma and so is her new solo show, My Stories, Your Emails. An original member of La Clique, Martinez exists in the borderlands between stand-up comedy, burlesque dance, stage magic and performance art. Similarly, My Stories, Your Emails is a lecture, a stand-up act, a play, a confession and an autobiography while simultaneously being none of these things.

It also appears simultaneously to be a constructive, creative response to a potentially upsetting situation and a petty, misdirected act of vengeance.

As the title suggests, it’s a show of two halves. The first involves Martinez reading (mostly) humorous autobiographical anecdotes from a lectern. Her deadpan delivery is disconcertingly reminiscent of Jimmy Carr, though Martinez excels at getting laughs by leaving stories hanging, instead of by comic over-explanation.

The stories serve as a brief introduction to Martinez’s life, revealing aspects of her upbringing and career, details about her family and so on, without sketching anything like a complete picture of her as a person.

The second half concerns a similarly incomplete picture – a video of her magic/striptease act Hanky Panky, which was released onto the internet without her permission – and some of the astonishing conclusions people the world over drew about her as a result. It’s a pageant showcasing some prime examples of that uniquely 21st century prose genre, the speculative online solicitation, in which the objective is to coat every syllable in steaming sexual subtext, but convince the receiving party that you are not just another hopeless case begging for sex.

There’s a surprising variety of pretexts, from those who idolise Martinez as a campaigner for Nudism, to those who want to book her act, through those seeking friendship to those barefacedly requesting sex. What they have in common is that they all think they know, understand or have some kind of claim over Martinez just because they’ve watched a video of her stripping and making a silk handkerchief disappear.

The concept of this segment is a problematic one. A piece of Martinez’s work not intended for mass online consumption ended up online; she responds to this by taking fanmail (complete with full names, photos and even some telephone numbers) presumably meant for her eyes only and performing it publicly. The majority of the men (and they are all men) don’t come out of it especially well. On paper it feels like an eye for an eye.

But she performs the emails without commentary: the men are allowed to present themselves in their own words (though she provides each with an appropriate accent). It also becomes clear from occasional instances of two-way correspondence that their permission has been sought and granted to incorporate their words and pictures into the show.

To presume to draw a definitive conclusion regarding the motivation and ethics behind My Stories, Your Emails would be to make the same mistake as the men. Best just to present the facts and let Ursula Martinez remain an enigma.

Written by Ursula Martinez

Crew includes Mark Whitelaw (director)

Cast includes Ursula Martinez

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
14 December, 2009

The Stefan Golaszewski Plays

Bush Theatre, 2 December 2009 – 9 January 2010

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog and cross-posted to The Collective Review

Two one-act plays back to back don’t usually make a successful two-act play. Right? Which suggests it’s probably no coincidence that Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved and Stefan Golaszewski Is A Widower work so well as a double bill; it seems likely they were always meant to be performed together.

It was clear from the plays’ debuts, a year apart at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, that they were stylistically and thematically of a piece. Each is a monologue in which Golaszewski relates romantic episodes from ‘his’ life, or a fictionalised version of it (in Widower he imagines himself in the year 2056, following marriage and a moderately successful TV career), aided by some simple props and a gift for writing fresh, cliché-free imagery.

What wasn’t immediately obvious back then was how neatly the two would bolt together for their London transfer. At around an hour each they were bite-sized enough for the choice-rich, time-poor Festival theatregoer, but the double bill is substantial enough to be worth a London audience’s while. More importantly, the emotional and thematic trajectories of Golaszewski as a character and a playwright are revealed and reinforced by the juxtaposition; images, foibles and techniques introduced in About A Girl pay off with interest when revisited in Widower.

Little gimmicks used in About A Girl simply to create sight gags give rise instead to pathos when they recur in the altered context of Widower. Golaszewski’s tendency to idolise women is the quirky fulcrum of About A Girl, but Widower acknowledges the disadvantages of such an attitude when applied to a more adult kind of relationship; the wide-eyed, innocent awe of female beauty that characterises About A Girl is only briefly retrodden in Widower before tragedy abruptly erases it in favour of a whole new range of grown-up emotions like bitterness, desperation and regret.

Individually the plays are snapshots of a man at two different stages of emotional maturity. Combined, they sketch a more complete portrait of a man learning the hard way that the reality of long-term commitment can never be as idealistically romantic as rose-tinted recollections of unrealised adolescent love. Underscoring it all are the insecurities of a young playwright coming uneasily to terms with his own premonitions of future emotional disillusionment and bodily deterioration. The whole is unquestionably greater than the sum of its parts – and given all the stars, awards and praise each play received individually, marrying them is sure to result in a critical mass of acclaim.

Written by Stefan Golaszewski

Crew includes Phillip Breen (director/designer)

Cast includes Stefan Golaszewski

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
21 November, 2009

HALL

16 – 26 November 2009

Reviewed for the London Theatre Blog

This latest addition to the audio-instructed performance genre is, at least in terms of sheer scale, the most ambitious work of its kind yet attempted. But while that ambition is what makes HALL worthwhile – not just as a dramatic experience but as proof that audio-instructed performance still has exciting new places to go – it is also the root of the production’s problems.

The Hall itself, a secret location divulged only after you’ve signed up for your audioguide, is vast, varied (with a pleasing balance of long corridors, poky cupboards and cavernous junk-filled auditoria) and eerie, especially after dark. A number of performers bustle around some areas; in a spooky contrast, others are deserted and echoing. Participants’ audioguides must be started precisely on time, and the cast’s choreography has to be timed to the second, otherwise the performers won’t be doing what the guides say they’re doing where the guides say they’re doing it.

As if that wasn’t enough to handle, the audioguides vary depending on the participants’ start times, so the performers aren’t just repeating one sequence of movements and lines, but a whole cycle. No wonder the company ended up overreaching themselves.

There are just too many things that can go wrong, on the company’s end and on the participants’. I started my audioguide ten or fifteen seconds too late, which made me very slow to respond when asked questions by performers. My fault! At one point I was led to an office where a man at a desk issued me my Freedom Pass. My guide drowned him out with instructions to read a magazine while I waited; there were none. Not my fault! Later I was directed to enter a specific numbered door. It was too dark to make out the door numbers, I entered the wrong one, and the next five minutes of instructions demanded interaction with objects and performers I couldn’t find. Partially my fault, but not entirely.

Issues like the production quality of the sound file, or the minutiae of the synchronisation between audio and live performance, are infinitely less interesting to discuss than the story the production is telling, or the atmosphere it creates. In this case, unfortunately, I can’t criticise the narrative because I missed chunks of it; the best I could do was notice recurring characters, like the architect (female, but referred to confusingly as “he” by the audioguide), the shy young actress and the corporate spy. And I can’t criticise the atmosphere because I was too busy checking that my problems weren’t due to my mp3 player having accidentally paused itself or skipped ahead to breathe any of it in.

Viewed in context, HALL is a necessary step in the evolution of audio-instructed performance to a form capable of telling big, sprawling stories as well as brief, compact ones. Viewed in isolation, unfortunately, it’s a logistical shambles with potential but no punch.

Written by Lowri Jenkins

Crew includes Felix Mortimer (artistic director)

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

Tags: , , , , , ,
22 August, 2009

anomie ***

Zoo Southside, 7 – 31 August 2009

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

You can rely on Precarious to deliver a technical spectacle. Prerecorded and rotoscoped footage of the six performers is as crucial to the action as the performers themselves, and the two often seamlessly combine, with the performers partially hidden behind flatscreen TVs that display their obscured limbs or heads like a technicolour X-ray. Synchronising between live and prerecorded movement requires the cast to be masters of timing, and so unison dance sequences are flawless, performed as if by afterimages of the same body.

But unlike Precarious’ masterpiece The Factory, anomie – which follows six social misfits living in the same apartment building – lacks strong thematic justification for its technical wizardry, so while the integration of screen and performer is an undeniable triumph of pinpoint timing and rehearsal, it can also feel like a gimmick, style divorced from content. The company’s other speciality, dance and physical theatre, is anomie’s strong point, remaining fresh and engaging throughout while also building clear (if not always subtle) characterisation, and making inventive use of mattresses as crashmats, scenery and allegory; though there are too few of the haunting tableaux that made The Factory so memorable.

Written by Precarious

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
24 March, 2009

The Overcoat

Lyric Hammersmith, 23 March – 11 April 2009

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

Your rational mind may blow a fuse trying to decode a plot from Gecko’s reimagining of Gogol’s short story, The Overcoat. So disengage rationality altogether and appreciate the play’s highly developed aesthetic and broad, emotional storytelling instead.

Gecko actively discourage intellectual engagement with the plot. Each of the seven ensemble performers speaks a different language for the duration of the performance, forcing the focus onto action rather than dialogue (unless you’re prodigiously multilingual).

The company’s onstage world is a gloomy one. Dimly downlit in stark whites and greys through copious stage fog, government clerk Akakki (Amit Lahav) and his colleagues work hunched over tiny desks in isolated pools of light. The furniture is hard iron, the walls are streaked with grime and the ensemble’s faces are shaded in stylised black and white.

The only colour in Akakki’s monochrome world is the rich brown of his dream overcoat, hanging out of reach as a target to strive for. Akakki believes replacing his battered old overcoat with this fantasy version will open the door to success in his career and love life. This is about the only plot point the company communicates with any clarity.

The majority of the company’s effort goes into communicating emotions. Gecko’s development and rehearsal process – one which is becoming increasingly popular with new companies – involves every aspect of the production throughout, creating a whole product, rather than a collection of interlocking pieces to be constructed later.

The onstage result is that Akakki’s feelings infuse everything, from the lighting to composer Dave Price’s Romany-flavoured musical accompaniment to the physicality of the ensemble, simultaneously. However obscure the plot may have become, this kind of emotional holism ensures that it’s clear throughout what we’re meant to be feeling, and makes it difficult not to be swept along with Akakki’s exaggerated highs and lows.

It’s unfortunate, when the emotional trajectory is the only part of the production that comes across with any clarity, that it zigzags back and forth so much without ever really progressing.

Akakki fantasises as a way to escape his dreary workaday life. His fantasies are lit more warmly, but just as dimly, so it’s sometimes difficult to follow what is real and what make-believe.

This is part of the play’s barmy appeal – is anything real? does anyone know what’s happening? – but since Akakki fantasises mostly about how deliriously happy the overcoat will make him, the majority of this short production turns into a rinse-and-repeat cycle of magnified (and therefore simplified) joy and despair that never seems to lead anywhere.

The play is full of the imagery of advancement. The office boss resides on a high platform, and when one of Akakki’s colleagues is promoted, his desk is literally cranked up higher to meet him. Akakki climbs the walls to reach his goal, and is pushed off to dangle unglamorously by his crotch when he’s found wanting.

People who enjoy theatre principally for the stories will find Gecko’s Overcoat frustrating. But its rejection of traditional plot structures in favour of visual metaphor and emotional bombast is what makes it consummately theatrical: in any other medium it would gutter and die, but on the stage it shines.

Adapted from a work by Nikolai Gogol

Crew includes Amit Lahav (director), Ti Green (designer), James Farncombe (lighting designer), Dave Price (composer) and Dan Steele (sound designer)

Cast includes Natalie Ayton, Amit Lahav, Robert Luckay, Dave Price, François Testory, Sirena Tocco and Tom Wu

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
24 January, 2009

Love in (3) Parts

Southwark Playhouse, 12 – 31 January 2009

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

Southwark Playhouse’s Love in (3) Parts follows Paul (Rich W. Burton) and Claire (Sally Kent), a middle-class white couple, as their relationship progresses from awkward first date through all the surprises, arguments and reconciliations that follow.

So what is there to differentiate it from the morass of similar plays telling similar stories?

First, there’s the inclusion of musician James Dey, who provides incidental and background music on guitar, keyboard and glockenspiel, as well as singing. Like the play as a whole, Dey’s music is langorously, almost sleepily paced, especially for the first forty or so minutes of the seventy-minute production.

The whole affair is very relaxed and unhurried; there’s very little tension, either in the production or the relationship it portrays.

Dey’s instruments are cleverly built into various bits of Kath Singh’s set, a contemporary black and white Everyflat. Dey himself ambles about the stage doing his own thing, for the most part invisible to the couple. Whether he has any relevance to the plot, or is simply there to add an extra musical dimension to the production, isn’t made explicit until very late in the play.

This is symptomatic of the play’s general tendency to spend too long setting things up and leave itself too little time to fully exploit the situations they bring about.

The other major example of this problem, and by coincidence the play’s other major distinguishing point, is Paul’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). He can’t leave the flat without clicking the lamp on and off three times; he can’t relax unless his pencils are lined up parallel on top of the television; and when he arrives home he has to fold his coat and scarf just so, and count out his loose change onto the sideboard.

Mostly this issue is used to demonstrate the play’s central axiom, tabled by Paul during first date dinner: that at first you love a person’s quirks, then they drive you mad, and eventually, when they’re gone, you miss them.

But for too long we linger on the threshold between stages one and two, in which Claire finds Paul’s rituals merely interesting.

It’s a shame, because when they finally do drive her mad we’re treated to the strongest scene in the whole play, in which Claire is driven to deliver a wholly unfair ultimatum – the “habits” or her – and enact it with unexpected cruelty.

It’s the one time either character does anything at all unexpected. Paul’s OCD notwithstanding, both are deliberately written as typical Everypeople. Neither one ever seems to strive for anything; they drift from one situation to the next as languidly as Dey’s music, without actively embracing or resisting a single one.

There are plenty of little ideas and devices worthy of some praise: from the satisfying eventual resolution of Dey’s ghostly presence, to the eerie moonlit ambience provided by the snowing television screen, to the well-observed and believable stumbles and false starts that break up the awkward, meaningless first date dialogue. Both performances, too, are surefooted, and thoroughly plumb what depths the characters do possess.

But ultimately the play needs more than little ideas in order to say anything about love that hasn’t already been said the same way a thousand times. The best thing to say about it is it’s nice. Not life-changing, but not bad either; just nice.

Written by John Shaw

Crew includes Dan Mallaghan (director), Kath Singh (designer) and James Dey (musician)

Cast includes Rich W. Burton (Paul) and Sally Kent (Claire)

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
21 November, 2008

You Me Bum Bum Train

Cordy House, 20 November – 20 December 2008

Reviewed for the British Theatre Guide

It’s seven o’clock in the evening and there’s a crowd forming outside Cordy House in Shoreditch. Enormous inflatable tentacles reach out across the street from the building’s roof. Three people are hard at work in the loading bay, building a Rube Goldberg water feature. Their hard hats occasionally spray the queue with water.

No one in the crowd seems sure of what’s going on. Most have turned up on the recommendations of friends, with little or no idea of what awaits. Even the door staff are confused by the ridiculous phrase, “I’m here for You Me Bum Bum Train”.

On some levels this is strange, because You Me Bum Bum Train has been running in one form or another for around eight years. Part theatre piece, part installation and part rollercoaster, it began life in Brighton and returns every so often like Brigadoon.

Once past security the source of the confusion becomes apparent: Cordy House is also home to the Mutate Britain exhibition, which accounts for the majority of the crowd. You Me Bum Bum Train occupies a tiny booth in the corner of the gallery.

Beyond the sign-in booth is the world’s smallest karaoke bar. Free rum cocktails are available – and necessary to loosen up the inhibitions, both for the karaoke and the Bum Bum Train itself.

The Train is a labyrinth of rooms, scenes and situations through which the participants (“audience” is definitely the wrong word) pass one at a time, wandering, crawling or being pushed in wheelchairs.

Each room is joltingly incongruous with the last. Emerge from the trapdoor at the end of the ice tunnel and find yourself in a boxing ring; push your way through the nightclub queue to find yourself in a frail old lady’s bedroom.

The seventy or eighty performers populating the maze don’t allow anyone to loiter. Sometimes this is a relief; sometimes it feels a shame not to linger longer, continuing conversations with some of the Train’s more colourful characters.

There’s no overarching theme or narrative. The emphasis is on a personal experience: of flying blind into the unknown, of being an active participant yet still a helpless observer, and of a seemingly exclusive artistic underground.

There’s a sense of élitism that comes from simply having found out about the event, and that feeling of having discovered something exclusive is part of the attraction.

But there’s something problematic about it as well. It isn’t only the uninformed who are excluded: narrow crawlspaces and steep stairs place certain physical restrictions on who can and cannot take part.

Additionally, the conclusion of the Train – in which participants are ejected without ceremony or aftercare back into the Mutate Britain exhibition – rapidly dissolves that sense of belonging.

The experience is designed to be fleeting. Many of the scenes in the maze feel cut short before you can fully sink into the situation, and the Train as a whole feels unjustly brief considering the £15 entry fee. Realising that this is an intentional part of the mystique does nothing to dilute the sense of disappointment.

Yet, having said that, the first thing I did after leaving was recommend the experience to several local friends, if only to have someone else with whom to discuss it. The creators can apparently manufacture the marketing Holy Grail, positive word of mouth – an impressive achievement above and beyond the event itself.

You Me Bum Bum Train is not something everyone can enjoy. But whether it’s a cynical comment on exclusivism or an encouragement to theatregoers to abandon their role as passive observers, it’s evidence of experimentation in British theatre – something the industry can’t do without.

Need a second opinion?

Posted in Reviews | Leave a Comment »

Tags: , , , , , , ,
  |   Newer Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.