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No pain, no gain: Made in China's Gym Party |
So, it's been another blistering year for Ignite, which saw more than 80 companies present work across 14 venues between 2nd and 7th June - the festival continues to grow in breadth, quality and ambition. New work
from emerging local artists rubbed shoulders with acclaimed pieces from
established companies from across the country in a diverse, vibrant programme
that couldn’t fail to excite. As well as in spaces used to hosting performance,
audiences found themselves in pub back rooms, cellar rooms and garden rooms,
both outside and inside the newly renovated library, in sacred places and
reclaimed spaces, and on the city’s streets. The city felt alive with
possibility.
Exeter Phoenix offered a broad programme across a few of its
performance spaces, including Gym Party,
Made in China’s visceral take on what it actually means to win. Dressed in
white shorts and vests and wearing wigs that match the neon names above them,
Chris (Brett Bailey), Jess Latowicki) and Ira (Brand) vie for our votes, aiming
to be the one whose name stays up in lights at the end of the show. As they
flex and stretch in preparation, warming up for the challenges ahead by running
around in circles, their energy and eagerness to please at first appears as
upbeat as the pumping music. Only on closer inspection do we begin to notice
the small stains on their vests, splashed there from the trickle of blood from
their nostrils. It soon becomes clear just what they’re expected to give in the
pursuit of victory.
Through a series of increasingly unpleasant rounds – tasks
to induce vomiting and injury, at the very least indignity, including dizzy
racing and stuffing their mouths with marshmallows – we bear witness to the
extremes of engagement encouraged by our competition-obsessed culture, and the
toll it takes on the human spirit. As the brutality creeps in – and with the
‘contestants’ constantly reminding us that they are here for us, and we are
here for them; that without us, this wouldn’t be happening at all – we become
increasingly complicit. ‘Forced’ to make ever more uncomfortable choices (which
of them is the most attractive, the most trustworthy, which one would we save
from certain death?), and to watch the penalties suffered by the ‘losers’, we
must address our behaviour as part of the crowd. To acknowledge that inaction makes
us just as culpable as the aggressors.
But it’s not just the school-sports-day-from-hell aesthetic
and the searing cruelty that evoke playground nightmares; interspersed with the
‘games’ are recollections from childhood, and we’re encouraged to see the
trio’s 12-year-old selves, to hear their failures and disappointments, to feel
anew the crushing need to fit in, to be liked, to please not be the only one
not asked to dance. Painful and disturbing – and gruesomely funny – Gym Party is a piece that slaps you
about the head and demands that you pay attention to your role in the status
quo.
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Right here, right now: FellSwoop's Current Location |
Also interrogating the nature of how we behave as part of a
crowd is FellSwoop’s Current Location.
Inspired by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, this new play by Japanese writer
Toshiki Okada (devised and adapted by the company) is full of foreboding and
creeping unease, as five women from ‘the village’ react to the arrival of a
sinister blue cloud. Four are members of a choir, and are tightly bound to each
other until a fifth woman, a woman no one knows, joins them. There are rumours
that the cloud heralds the destruction of the entire village. Should they
believe the rumours or not? Should they stay or should they leave? And who is
this ‘Hannah’, really? As fear tightens its grip and the community starts to
fracture, it becomes clear that what you choose to believe can have serious
consequences.
FellSwoop’s spare and precise production is well suited to
the slightly austere setting of a crisp new space at the refurbished Library –
the eerie tale is conjured expertly from words, music and bodies in space. A
moment in which Florence – the ‘leader’ of this tight little unit – angrily
pulls down the blinds in response to another character’s concerns not only
silences alternate opinion but shuts out the light, literally and
metaphorically. The use of song and vocal harmonies reinforce the text’s
exploration of cohesion, how being so in tune with those around you can reduce
your ability to accept change, to hear other voices, especially when they
question what is collectively being ignored.
That the actors sit amongst the audience reminds us that a
performance creates a temporary community; when they begin to hum or vocalise
responses to the narrative, the sound could be coming from all of us – as ‘the
crowd’, we too are complicit. Quietly gripping and thoroughly unsettling, it
climbs inside you, this piece, like the best examples of sci-fi in which the
monster is revealed to have been within all along.
A similar sense of disquiet underpins A Conversation, Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari’s brilliantly sinister
piece about human interaction and dialogue. Above an ominous tone, a voice
intones, “Have you ever stopped to think that your happiness, as well as your
success in life, depends to a great extent today upon your ability to carry on
an interesting and intelligent conversation?” So also begins the show’s source
material, The Ethel Cotton Course in
Conversation, a 1935 set of lessons in the art of how to get along – in
life and with one’s fellow men (gender equality isn’t really part of Ethel’s
remit). Standing amid piles of suitcases and packing crates, a ‘fog’ swirling in
the spotlit darkness of the Bike Shed’s brick-lined gloom, Barrett delivers
Ethel’s pearls of wisdom accompanied by a soundscape of increasing discordance and
the slapping tide, as if we’re missionaries on some chilly dock about to embark
for the colonies and he’s arming us with the weapons of mass civilization.
But this inventive solo piece is more than just a satire on
the casual racism, misogyny and presumptions of universality intrinsic to
Ethel’s imperial worldview; it is an astute dissection of how we interact with
one another and the compromises we make in servitude to our social conventions.
One can be forgiven anything, Ethel’s edicts imply, as long as one isn’t ‘dull’
– are things really so different now?
Lighting and sound are used to great effect in this piece,
but key to its success is Barrett’s utterly beguiling performance. And there’s
a gin and tonic. How very civilized.
Also making eloquent use of lighting and sound at the Bike
Shed was Put Your Sweet Hand in Mine,
Ira Brand & Andy Field’s imaginatively intimate search for the meaning of
love. An audience of 20 sit in two rows facing each other, Field and Brand
among us as they describe eyes across a crowded auditorium, a casual encounter
on the Metro, a romance turning sour as a thunderstorm rages around them. We
are encouraged to look into the eyes of the person sitting opposite us, to
eventually hold their hands in ours, while slowly coming to the realisation
that other people are intrinsically unknowable, even those with whom we’ve
shared our closest experiences.
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Put Your Sweet Hand in Mine: Andy Field & Ira Brand |
There are some beautifully tender moments, including an
argument about proximity – one wanting release from the too-tight hold of the
other – while both hold pieces of ice that diminish in their hands, gradually slipping
through their fingers. Towards the end, standing at opposite ends of the
‘carriage’, they climb into soaking wet clothes pulled from buckets of water and
stand dripping, yelling movie romance clichés (‘you had me at hello’ … ‘in the
words of The Partridge Family…’) at each other across a soundtrack of rumbling
skies and howling rain. But even though we’re right in it, sitting beside and
opposite them as the trace the ups and down of this relationship, it’s
strangely distancing; love and pain described rather than conveyed.
A piece that grabs the heart and won’t let go, however, is Greyscale’s
astonishing Gods Are Fallen and All
Safety Gone. A mother and daughter circle each other around the Bike Shed’s
small performance space – pacing, passing, never quite touching – as they
repeat a conversation about having a bath, the weather, a break-in at Aunt
Marie’s house, the mother’s aching shoulder… Just as their language reveals and
conforms to the rituals of their relationship, so their movements trace the unseen
patterns that are the foundation of family behaviour. Questions about the
daughter’s boyfriend niggle; an inability to accept gracefully and without
complication the simple offer of a cup of tea rankles. As a portrayal of the
intense and often conflicted mother-daughter relationship, it feels very real
indeed.
That the two actors playing the mother and daughter are men
ceases to be of any relevance within seconds; it is the emotional honesty that
registers, not the gender: the disappointment held in a moment’s breath, the
glance that intuits all, the response that holds its truth behind a hesitation.
At the side of the stage, drinking tea and doing a jigsaw together, sit a real
mother and daughter; as the conversations repeat and reprise, and the tension
rises with each disruption towards a new revelation or concealment, they smile
in recognition, share a look, and we become more even more attuned to the
exquisite drama of family life.
At just under an hour, this piece (written and directed by Selma
Dimitrijevic) is a masterclass in precision. As the mother and daughter, Sean
Campion and Scott Turnbull are captivating, creating something so real, so
moving, that when their conversation finally draws to its natural end, my heart
is ready to burst.
Taking place at one of the new venues on the Ignite roster –
and allowing a peek inside a sacred space that is rarely open to the public –
was Coffee with Vera, in which Ruth Mitchell
delivers a masterclass in how autobiographical work can tell a deeply personal
story while drawing in the wider world and experience, and without a hint of
self-indulgence. The performance begins around a long table upstairs at the
Exeter Synagogue, but the story itself starts on the set of Little Dorritt in 1986 – Ruth’s first
job out of drama school – when she meets the peerless character actor Miriam Margolyes.
As they both sit in the ‘make-up removal’ room (key to creating the film’s
authentic Dickensian aesthetic), Miriam scrutinizes Ruth before asking,
“Jewish?” To Ruth’s denial, Miriam replies, “With that name – and that face –
you should be!”
And so began Ruth’s investigation into whether the girl who should be Jewish could be Jewish, leading her from censuses to ancestry.com, from
personal memory through family myth to the creative springboard of ‘what if…’
to the vestry of Exeter Synagogue, where she shares with us her story over
coffee and home-baked cake. Using photographs and marriage certificates, recipe
books and playbills pulled from a suitcase in front of her – and via the
character of Vera Jockleson, Chair of the Ladies’ Guild and consummate coffee
morning hostess – Ruth fuses autobiography and history to create a subtly
moving meditation on the nature of identity and heritage. Seamlessly entwined
is a fascinating insight into the Plymouth Synagogue (the oldest Ashkenazi
synagogue in the English-speaking world still in regular use) and the Jewish diaspora
in the South West.
Although Vera is a great companion, this piece is at its absolute
best when Mitchell is herself, guiding us through her story with warmth and
humour, articulating the difficulties inherent in sifting through the past to
reveal the present, especially when the desire for a fresh start or the cruelties
of persecution have necessitated slippages that are hard to trace.
An autobiographical piece that works less well is The
Wardrobe Theatre’s Wildbore, which
uses solo performance to tell a deeply personal story but suffers ultimately from
a surfeit of introspection. Jesse Meadows offers a character study of her
beloved grandmother, Joyce, in episodes ranging from a first dance to the first
days in the new house that would be her life-long home to political epiphanies;
these are entwined with recollections of time they spent together towards the
end of Joyce’s life. Brimming with love, and with the grief tinged with joy for
experiences they shared, this show is tender and moving, but not developed
enough to reveal much beyond that.
Walking a slightly disconcerting line between the
autobiographical and the dramatic is Write by Numbers’ Blueprint, in which 32-year-old science teacher Kate seeks to
capture her life, and record its important (and not so important) moments in
order to quantify and qualify it before she dies. “We’ll all face this moment
at some point,” she states. Some much sooner than expected.
And so we get 48 such moments – the blueprint for her life –
that make Kate (superbly played by Samantha Baines) who she is, supported by a
series of friends, lovers and colleagues (played by Estelle Buckridge, Lucy
Grace and James Groom), as well as the teacher who inspired her to go into
science in the first place and who counts off the moments with a stopwatch and
a clipboard. There are tallies of the hours spent dancing, the number of days spent
being a teacher, the years it took to find the perfect pair of jeans… Funny and
moving, with diverting segues into quantum physics and particle theory, it
explores the composite minutiae that make up a life, but is overlong (minutes
spent singing Oasis songs? One is already too many) and somewhat repetitive.
Also at the Bike Shed, and delivering some hearty laughs, was
Junkshop Theatre Company’s Hardworking
People, which offers a deceptively subtle take on quite how rubbish modern
life is for young people trying to make their way in the world. Out of
university, armed with degrees, work experience and gap-year credentials, Jem
and Eli should be on top of the world. But Eli’s been made redundant following
austerity cuts at the council and Jem has been sacked because of an ill-judged
tweet that’s just shy of a lawsuit. Neither can get so much as an interview and
British Gas is ready to send in the heavies. How did it come to this?
Beth Shouler’s new play is a fast and very funny look at
what happens when the bright young things have to face the dark days of modern
society’s meltdown. Gone are the days when a degree was the key to a successful
career and two holidays a year. Now, Jem has to gain ‘employable skills’ (“It’s
stacking shelves! I’ve been putting the shopping away since I was nine!”) on
the Workfare programme, while Eli struggles to look ‘casually sexy’ while
slinging shots in a sequinned Stetson. Oh, the indignity.
Lewis Peek imbues Eli with gentle charm, his growing despair
as the rejections pile up highlighting the harsh reality of trying to find
one’s place in a world that doesn’t care. As the more resilient Jem, Rosie
Woodham really shines in what is the more developed role, and pulls in the
biggest laughs as Eli’s nightmare supervisor at the shots bar, preventing these
sections from overstaying their welcome.
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Beauty & the beagle: Victoria Melody's Major Tom |
Also big on laughs, and demonstrating how autobiographical
work can pull in wider themes and issues, is Victoria Melody’s Major Tom. Following success after
success on the amateur dog show circuit, Victoria decides it’s time for her and
her prize-winning basset hound to turn professional. Major Tom might well have
walked away with the title ‘Biggest Ears in the South-East’, but the big time
is a different world altogether, and the former top dog finds himself bottom of
the pile. Although determined, with the help of various men named Brian, to
coach Major Tom to Crufts glory, Victoria starts to feel guilty about exposing
him to such unflinching scrutiny. When a judge criticises Major Tom for having
‘too big a ribcage’, Victoria decides to plunge herself into the perma-tanned
world of the beauty pageant to show solidarity.
By immersing herself completely in the subcultures about
which she makes work (a previous show saw her tackling Northern Soul and
pigeon-racing), Melody has the inside view that allows for complete
authenticity. While it’s clear that she’s commenting on the insularity of these
particular subcultures, and the bizarrely anachronistic tendencies they have to
remain stubbornly stuck in a past that seems immune to conversations about
equality and cruelty, there’s no sneering, no cynicism, even when both Melody
and Major Tom are the brunt of in-crowd snobbery: “It seemed that neither of us
had the pedigree to be there,” says Melody.
And while this piece is clearly making a point about our
beauty-obsessed, judgmental, perfection-obsessed society, it does so with such
charm, that you’d hardly notice. Melody’s barely-there performance style and
dry wit, combined with the perfectly timed and pitched films documenting each
of their successes in the hilariously similar fields of scrutiny, also
contributes to the pleasing ambiguity about what’s art and what’s real.
As for Major Tom, he seems completely unfazed, spending the
majority of the show asleep on a giant cushion, pausing only to wander off the
Phoenix’s main stage in search of… we’ll never know. Such is the inscrutability
of the basset hound. One thing is certain: he possesses perfect comic timing.
Physical comedy of the highest order is at the heart of
Spitz & Co.’s Gloriator at the
Bike Shed. Created by Pauline Morel and Susie Donkin (who met during a
Spymonkey workshop in 2012), this hugely enjoyable show follows French actress
Gloria Delaneuf’s (Morel) mission to create a touring version of Hollywood
blockbuster Gladiator that addresses
the film’s lack of female representation. Gloria, naturellement, will play all the major characters (in a scene
between Gloriator and the emperor Commodus, both at the same time), and
Josephine Cunningham (Donkin), her UK tour manager, “will play everyone else”.
Including Gloriator’s horse.
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Hold the line! Spitz & Co.'s Gloriator |
As the imperiously pretentious Gloria reveals her vision,
using every theatrical weapon in her armoury, from ‘acting of the head’ (her
facial responses to the original film’s trailer) to mask to mime, the
permanently bullied Josephine translates, tries to control the cardboard set
and costumes, and attempts to reclaim some smidgen of autonomy through small
acts of rebellious disruption. With a rapier-sharp script, and tight direction
from Angus Barr, Gloriator is hilarious
from start to finish, but there’s more going on, too – it skewers gender and
racial inequality across the entertainment industry while also having some fun
with the Anglo-French relationship.
Morel and Donkin give tremendously skilled performances that
combine precise physical control and dexterity with subtle characterisation,
revealing all the delicate shifts in balance that perpetuate Gloria and
Josephine’s love-hate relationship. A comedy duo of immense talent.
Equally playful and delightfully disruptive – and having as
much fun pulling apart its source material – is Tom Frankland and Keir Cooper’s
Don Quijote, a raucous, riotous,
anarchic show that is beautifully staged at The Hall, a historic ex-church/school
making its debut as an Ignite pop-up venue. It is perhaps here that the
festival’s guiding motto – any space can be a theatre – reaches its most apt
union, with a show that champions personal transformation in a venue that is
being painstakingly restored as a labour of love.
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Tom Frankland & Keir Cooper's Don Quijote |
Using shadow play, live music, and a different guest actor
playing the eponymous Don each performance, this show hits the major plots points
of Cervantes’ book as well as incorporating its meta-textual elements.
Subversions come and go – the soothsaying monkey, for instance – like so many
petals in the wind, but while this piece might be less concerned with the
content of the novel it utterly embodies the spirit, and pumps you full of wonder, hope and joy. It is a
dizzying call to arms to be a Don Quijote rather than a non-Quijote – to do
what’s right regardless of the consequences or societal censure.
Immersed from the get-go, the audience sits on cushions in
the midst of the performance, shuffling around to watch projections, live
action and the deconstruction of the novel via angle grinder, paper shredder
and industrial fan as they occur. Once we’ve readied Quijote (played here by
Rose Biggin) for her quest by covering her in cardboard armour with miles of duct
tape, she extends her hand to an audience member to join her on an adventure and
they head out into the night, returning at the show’s close to reveal the
pledges they’ve made, small personal transformations that will ripple outwards
with the potential to alter everything.
Slightly ramshackle, with low-fi charm and a vibrancy that
is completely bewitching, Don Quijote
is fun, funny and inspiring. After seeing this show you will believe that you
can change the world.
Coordinated and led once again by the Bike Shed Theatre,
supported by Exeter City Council, the Phoenix arts centre, and the Northcott
and Cygnet theatres, Ignite creates a palpable buzz around the city, and I’m
feeling a bit despondent now it’s all over – surely the marker of a great
festival. And proof once again of the contribution that David Lockwood and the
exemplary team at the Bike Shed are making to Exeter’s cultural landscape.
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