Well, I had a SIMPLY MARVELLOUS day of theatre yesterday. Sometimes you come away from a couple of shows knowing you’ll never ever think about them again, and sometimes you really strike gold.
Yesterday started off at Operation Greenfield at the Soho Theatre. It’s by Little Bulb theatre co and all I knew of it is that Lyn Gardner liked it and that, frankly, is all the recommendation I need. It’s nice to go into a show not really knowing what’s going to happen, and Operation Greenfield is that kind of show where you still don’t really know what’s going to happen up until the final moments. It was awesome. Basically, four Christian teenagers are in a band and want to win this talent competition thing with a song about Gabriel and Zachariah and some other people from the Bible who I’d never heard of before yesterday. (They have all these instruments and props and stuff lying around onstage like Filter do.) Deep down it’s really about pubescent awkwardness though, and they have that absolutely fucking nailed.
In the evening I met up with a couple of new Twitter people which was nice, and saw Kafka’s Monkey at the Young Vic, which I’d wanted to see when it was in Manchester back before I moved in 2009. Kathryn Hunter plays a ‘former’ ape who is giving a talk about his transformation into a man, and it was an absolutely stunning physical performance. Everything I could say about how real she was has been said a million times before, but she embodied the monkey so much that it seemed to actually change her physically. I was v impressed.
*insert something about the weather here*
Blah blah ice cream barbecues blah blah “makes a nice change” “it won’t last” blah blah fucking BLAH.
You know what I did on the first nice sunny day which I was free to spend as I liked? I went to see Terminus at the Young Vic, a heavy-going wordy thing featuring popped eyeballs, a demon made of worms, and a woman performing a DIY abortion with a sharpened broom. It’s not that I don’t like sunshine and actively wanted to be a miserable bastard for the afternoon, more that I felt sorely under-served by the London theatre performance schedules this week. I was heading to the 1 on 1 fest at Battersea Arts Centre in the evening, but that didn’t start until 7, and everything else that caught my eye was evening-only too. Whatever happened to the Wednesday matinee? With such a dearth of choice I just went for the show that had £10 tickets for students. And at least the dude in the picture looked a bit like Lovejoy. I used to love Lovejoy when I was a kid. Not that stupid ginger posh woman though. I used to think she was Annie Lennox. Fucking harpy.
So anyway, I sweated my way to the theatre on Wednesday lunchtime and was faced with one violent monologue after another. It was brilliantly performed, and beautifully written, and the guy did indeed look like Lovejoy, but there’s a time and a place for popping eyeballs, and just I don’t think Wednesday afternoon was it.
The 1 on 1 fest was much more appropriate to my mood. I chose the Immersive menu, although it was a genuinely difficult decision. Next year I’m going to spend a few evenings there are do a whole fuckload of stuff, because only three short pieces simply left me UNSATED. (Is ‘unsated’ a word? Fuck it. This is BLOGGING.) The first one was ‘And The Birds Fell From The Sky’ by Il Pixel Rosso and it was a clever concept. You strap on these headphones and video goggles and after a brief sojourn in a wheelchair, are manoeuvred into the back of a car, all in time with the images of (I think) Mexican clowns getting hammered and pissing about. Vodka is squirted at you and, at one point, someone farts in your face. (“Charming”, I hear you say.) It was difficult to follow, which was a shame, because the video goggles did actually work very well.
Next up was a bit of nonsense based on Where The Wild Things Are. It started off with me climbing onto a bed and being rocked from side to side as if it was a boat. I’d watched the Spike Jonze film version while shaking off colonoscopy sedative back in December, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the artists intention to bring those memories back up but, hey, that’s the risk you take with immersion innit? I got to doing a monster impression while wielding a fork though, so everything equals out.
Then I finished off with a Lundahl and Seitl piece. They’re the ones who did that awesomeness in Birmingham Art Gallery for Fierce Festival recently. This piece, Rotating In A Room Of Images, wasn’t quite as involved or slick as that, but was much more unsettling. Lots of it was performed in a complete blackout, and there was one point at which a dude appeared inches from my face and I jumped about 8 feet in the air. He nearly laughed at me but recovered himself LIKE A PRO. The rest of the night was really just spent hoping that my heart rate couldn’t be heard in Clapham Common.
Catcher In The Rye would be much improved with rapping
As I mentioned in the week, I saw Vernon God Little last night, which was even funnier than I thought it would be, and excellently staged. Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of stuff that spins round on wheels, and there was lots of wheely spinning stuff in Vernon God Little. A bar that became a lorry cab, sofas that turned into a bus… The bit where he’s seduced for a confession was hilarious too, with a silk sheet showing just the right amount of silhouette. V clever.
It was the music that really made it into a powerful story though. Jesus (the dead gunman in the school shooting that starts everything off) appears regularly, singing softly or playing the guitar, and the other cast members use their voices wonderfully too. They do a gorgeous version of I’ll Fly Away near the end, and there’s a rock’n’roll court scene with electric guitars and a proper soul sister judge. Oooh, and line-dancing too! And just when you think Vernon’s taking on adult responsibilities, he’ll break into a little rap that reminds you that he’s really just an awkward teenager who can’t express himself. You’d never imagine a show that’s so brash and slapstick in parts could be as clever and affecting as it was.
(I wish I could line-dance. It’s not really something you can learn on your own in front of a mirror, is it?)
I only have myself to blame. I had heard about a circus version of Faust featuring music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and I’d gone and got my bloody hopes up again. But then I think about the number of times this has happened in the recent past and I start to think that perhaps I am just out of step with current tastes.
This Faust (by Vesturport and Reykjavik City Theater) plays it for laughs and cheap kicks, and the potential for dark and beautiful aerial choreography just ebbs away. I had a similar problem with the RSC’s take on Faust at Latitude this summer. It’s too easy to make everything into a Rocky Horror-style romp (fucking hell I hate the word ‘romp’) and forget to reflect at all on the endlessness of Hell, or the nature of humanity. Now, I’m not going to get all Popeish about it, but pious or not, this is a play based on the assumption of the eternal soul, so act like it fucking matters.
Visually, there were nice moments; the cast dropping out of the sky in beams of light and landing on a net above the audience was exhilarating, but for every one of these Mefisto pulled six John Lydon poses and contemplated sodomy with the bare-arsed patients of an old folks’ home. The RSC’s bit of silliness at Latitude finally brought it back to one man’s primordial fear (and was arguably more effective for all the daftness), whereas this was rarely more than pissing about on bungee cords.
