Friday, 15 May 2015
NOSE 2015 - Art Right in Front of Your Face
Free arts festival, 15th-17th May, multiple venues across Exeter
Now in its 4th year, the NOSE festival hits Exeter this weekend with an absolute blinder of a programme. True to its commitment to place art in public spaces, right in front of your face, NOSE presents performance events, a photographers' gallery, an audio tour, plus more, all around the topic of Routes and Chutes. And it's all FREE!
Tonight, Friday 15th May, there's a 'proto-immersive' performance piece O-B-A-F-G that sits the audience in a dark room (at Exeter Phoenix Black Box) for an audio 'play' - you can also listen in online (or at 106.8fm in the Exeter area) to Phonic.FM and create your own 'happening' at home. Free tickets here.
The Foxhibitionists will be hitting the streets from 5pm tonight (and Saturday 16th at the same time), exposing the pubic to their art. Keep your eyes peeled for some foxy individuals in trench coats...
Up at Exeter University, at Russell Seal Fitness Centre, there's Psychogeogging - run around the city without ever leaving the treadmill.
On Sunday 17th follow artist Rosie King's Walk Along a Promise - an installation in Princesshay, 10am-5pm.
From today, there's an audio tour, From Books to Tree, that starts at Exeter Library and ends up at the Heavitree - one of Mythogeoghrapher Phil Smith's famous 'mis-guided' walks.
Will you be able to find the 'dead drops' secreted around the city to download free stuff?
Check out the website. From Saturday 16th, there will also be info boxes around the city (Exeter Phoenix, Bike Shed, etc) where you can grab a free badge and a full brochure.
NOSE, 15th-17th May. All over Exeter.
Thursday, 19 March 2015
The Orchard
The latest project from Dreadnought South West is a new play, The Orchard, that imagines a meeting between radical suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and moderate suffragist Millicent Fawcett. We might be back in similar territory to their last piece, Oxygen, which in 2013 celebrated the centenary of the Great 1913 Suffrage Pilgrimage, but this time the work is more clearly untethered from its historical moorings. The conversation between Emmeline and Millicent draws on history and yet feels so very contemporary, in that we're still - 100-odd years on - debating the same issues around equality, democracy, women in politics and the vote.
With Emmeline on the run from the authorities - she's recently been released from prison, where she'd been on hunger strike - she and Millicent seek somewhere safe to talk, away from the glare. An orchard in spring - life blooming all around them. And here they discuss their politics, their commitment to the cause - equality for women - and their very different approaches to achieving their aims. Militancy, window-smashing, bombs... Emmeline believes that only radical action can make the government listen; for Millicent, persistent, consistent peaceful campaigning is the only reasonable route to take.
As Emmeline and Millicent, actors Ruth Mitchell and Michelle Ridings interrogate each other's position as the audience sits in traverse, eyeing each other as much as the performers. It's like a debating chamber, the House of Commons - the action playing out before us, the debate constantly moving forward, digging ever deeper into what it means to stand up for one's convictions, fight for one's beliefs, do what needs to be done to achieve one's aims. This might be a peaceful orchard, blossom all around, but the arguments are vital and throb with passion.
And what's most exciting is that this process is a truly collaborative creative endeavour, involving the actors, playwright Natalie McGrath and director Josie Sutcliffe, as well as the audience - after each performance, the audience is invited to discuss what they've seen, share their thoughts and ideas, and these conversations then feed into the development of the script, altering it, shaping it, making it afresh every performance. It's a living thing that grows each time it is shared; the more people see it, the more voices that add to its development, the more representative it will be of what we really want to talk about, as theatregoers, as citizens, as voters about to throw our two-penneth into the big election hat.
Theatre doesn't get much more exciting than that.
The Orchard is on at Exeter Phoenix on 19-20 March, 7.30pm, £8/£6, tickets from
www.exeterphoenix.org.uk, 01392 667080
Plymouth:
Barbican Theatre, 24 April, 7.30pm, £8/£6, tickets from
www.barbicantheatre.co.uk, 01752
267131
Wednesday, 4 February 2015
Merit at The Drum, Plymouth
Merit is at The Drum, Plymouth until 14th February 2015
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Rebecca Lacey and Lizzy Watts. Photo by Steve Tanner |
We’re in Spain in the age of austerity – 2013, to be precise
– and Sofia is one of the lucky ones: she has a job. Increasingly, however,
working as PA to one of the country’s richest bankers is causing friction with
her family. As Sofia is no more talented, intelligent or industrious than her
unemployed friends, her mother wonders, what could be the real reason that
Sofia was successful where so many others have failed? Might she have given more
than just the right answers in the interview?
It is through the prism of this prickly mother-daughter
relationship that Alexandra Wood explores the impact of the global financial
crisis on families and communities; how the growing chasm between the haves and
have-nots might distort value systems on both sides. While mother Patricia needles
away at Sofia about the nature of her relationship with boss Antonio – whose
place at the top of the capitalist machine proves that he is ‘rapacious,
corrupt, corrupting’, a manipulator of markets and people – Sofia finds herself
forced to defend her employer, mainly through reference to his philanthropic
activities and charitable donations. As mother and daughter thrust and parry
their way through the debate, with Patricia increasingly resorting to emotional
blackmail to get her way, it becomes clear that the truly ruthless manipulator
might be much closer to home.
Matthew Wright’s set design, with its mix of tiled stone
steps and the suggestion of modernist glass and steel, conveys the clash of old
and new Spain, of traditional family values against pernicious individualism. The
stepped layout allows for director Jennie Darnell to be explicit about the
power dynamics of each exchange, a little clunkily at times, but the curved
Perspex at the top of the set adds an extra dimension in the way it refracts
the performers’ reflections, so the dominant character is simultaneously seen
in miniature, and vice versa.
However, while the mother-daughter relationship is well portrayed,
with solid performances from Rebecca Lacey (Patricia) and Lizzy Watts (Sofia), the
whole seems hampered by the on-the-nose dialogue about financial inequality, and
the stagey way the argument is handed back and forth. Spain may well be the
stated setting, but it seems perfunctory at best (perhaps because the play
started life as a short piece in response to the Royal Court’s PIIGS season, in
which playwrights were tasked with tackling austerity in the five EU countries hardest
hit); while Patricia occasionally channels ‘old Spanish mama’ by sitting
forwards in a knee-grabbing stance, Sofia could be from anywhere. And maybe
that’s the point – we’re all global capitalists now – but at times it seems almost
as if the two actors are in different plays.
But most troublesome is the twist (no spoilers, don’t worry),
which, when it arrives, drops heavily into the narrative like a boulder from
outer space, making no logical sense and adding neither nuance nor revelation
to anything that’s occurred up to that point. And it’s at this here that Woods’
text, which had been by turns engaging and entertaining, albeit somewhat
repetitive in places, loses the plot completely. This piece needs further
development before it’s ready to fly.
Written by Alexandra Wood
Directed by Jennie Darnell
Cast: Rebecca Lacey, Lizzy Watts
Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes (no interval)
Reviewed for Exeunt
From Devon with Love festival
From Devon with Love at Bike Shed Theatre, Exeter
14th -31st January 2015
An offshoot of Framework, the Bike Shed Theatre’s artist
development arm, From Devon with Love continues to play an invaluable part in Exeter’s
thriving arts ecology, offering a safe space for county-based companies and
performers to put new work on its feet and in front of an audience. Some of the
pieces have previously been scratched at the Bike Shed, or been supported through
the use of rehearsal space, and work shown here for the first time often goes
on to bigger, more developed lives elsewhere. This year, for the first time, Plymouth’s
Barbican Theatre also hosted work under the banner, with the best work from
each city’s programme playing at the other venue and in a closing night
showcase at the Bike Shed.
As always, the programme was diverse, and the quality
variable, but there was some impressively accomplished work on show, not least
of which was Documental Theatre’s Score, a thoughtful, funny two-hander about friendship,
addiction and the restorative power of music. Basing the narrative on what must
have been hard-hitting conversations with women about their experiences of
parenthood while battling addiction, writer Lucinda Bell has crafted a moving
and engaging piece that navigates tricky terrain with candour and intelligence.
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Settling scores: Lara Simpson as Kirsty |
Kirsty (Lara Simpson) and Hannah (Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Milton) have been friends since junior school, when Hannah’s family provided a
model of stability that Kirsty’s drug-addicted dealer father never could. As
time passes, we drop into episodes and experiences throughout their still
entwined lives, as babies arrive, difficulties mount, and their existence becomes
ever more focused on heroin.
The segues between different stages in their lives are subtly
handled and effective, pulling us from a childhood nativity through teenage
pregnancy to motherhood and darker times, always with drugs and music a
constant refrain. While the whistle-stop journey seems a little too pat at
times, what comes across most clearly is the strength of female friendship, its
rhythms, harmonies and counterpoints. Both actors have powerful, soulful voices
(musical arrangement courtesy of Verity Standen) that highlight beautifully the
capacity of music to raise us up, to heal and restore.
The linear structure hampers the credibility at times, and I
wonder if focusing on one part of the women’s lives, then pulling out and back
to reveal the hows and whys would overcome the occasional triteness. There is
great comedy here, too, most of which rings true, even if some of the lines are
clearly from the writer rather than the characters – possibly a result of
dialogue constructed from myriad conversations with different individuals. Ultimately,
though, this is a wonderfully assured piece from a company to watch.
Also using music to add texture and balance was Two Blind
Dogs, a show that gave space to an intense presentation of spoken word
performance from poets Alice and Peter Oswald alongside singer/songwriter Mae
Karthauser. All three presented character-driven pieces, which were intriguing
and detailed – with Alice Oswald a particularly mesmerising presence, utterly
still and irresistible to watch – but for me the highlight was Mae’s beautiful,
ephemeral voice and music, as if she was beaming in from somewhere else
entirely, somewhere as yet undiscovered but completely knowable.
Aminal’s Midnight. Dream. Sleep. created a similar effect in
its exploration of intimacy, in this instance through a one-to-one walking
performance that follows the contours of a relationship with the midnight city
as backdrop. Meeting by the cathedral as the clock strikes twelve, writer/performers
Kelly Miller and Jonny Rowden are each paired with one audience member, who
puts on headphones to hear the story unfold while walking the streets together,
sometimes hand in hand, sometimes in a near embrace. Poetic and lyrical, it maps
desire and distraction, connections and disconnections, that feeling of losing
yourself completely. It’s about knowing someone more than you know yourself,
about understanding – intuiting – their ways of seeing and doing, about being
inside their lives so completely that you feel part of their very pulse. And in
wandering the city at night – abandoned and star-lit – it conjures those any-hour
walks in which time and distance cease to matter, because this succession of
minutes and miles is just for you two, here, now. And how those minutes and
miles gape once love is gone. This is a quietly beautiful piece that might
prove a challenge for some audience members, in that it demands a certain level
of ease with proximity to the performers, but it absolutely reaches into the
intensity of emotional experience.
Also intense, in a decidedly more unsettling way, was Substance
and Shadow’s revival of Christie in Love, Howard Brenton’s 1969 three-hander
about serial killer John Christie, who was hanged in 1953 for the murders of eight
women, the bodies of which were found hidden around his house and garden in
West London. It’s a disturbing play, still powerful in its depiction of a
warped and dangerous mind, and this is a strong production, faithful to the
text, and a perfect fit for the Bike Shed’s subterranean space.
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Tainted love: Midge Mullin as John Christie. Photo by Matt Austin |
A constable digs for bones in Christie’s garden,
discomforted by the crimes and the air of deviant sexuality that surrounds them;
to calm himself, he recites obscene limericks. Shovelling aside piles of
scrunched up newspaper, he eventually unearths Christie himself, who emerges as
if conjured by that strange combination of moral outrage and seedy titillation
so peculiar to the tabloid press. An inspector interrogates Christie about his
crimes, and although Brenton doesn’t offer us any answers to why he did what he
did, it is implied that the line between passion and perversion is anything but
straightforward.
As the constable and the inspector, Sam Pike and Nathan Simpson
convey that tension with real skill; and Pike’s manipulation of a mannequin to
play out one of Christie’s murders is particularly adept. As Christie, Midge
Mullin delivers just the right amount of sinister banality and repressed malevolence,
by turns meek and subservient, then furious, then gloating, so proud of his
ability to creep about in his ‘plims’, silently delivering his judgments on
women’s right to life. Chilling.
In complete contrast, Nuts & Volts’ Lucky Dip was a playful
piece of utter silliness based on the conceit that the company is suffering
artistic differences, its internal conflicts played out in two competing shows,
The Good One and The Rubish (sic) One. Audiences pick tickets out of a hat and
are then separated to either take an innuendo-soaked tour of the ‘back
passages’ of Exeter, or stay in the auditorium to witness the tricks of the
acting trade. Very funny, the show makes the most of the performers’ ability to
camp it up outrageously while poking fun at theatre’s potential for pretension.
Good, old-fashioned fun.
Also funny is Hugh McCann’s one-man show Ensuite, a gonzo
tour of the first year experiences of art student ‘Hugh McCann’ as he gets to
grips with living away from home, appreciating art and finding his way in the
world. Careening round the performance space in shorts, a sports jacket and woolly
hat, ‘Hugh’ is a credible mix of eager naïf and savvy bullshit-detector who
also harbours a semi-secret love of musical theatre. When he purchases 150 Russian
anti-depressants off the internet as a way of greasing the social wheels while
also earning some money, he pulls us along on a surreal journey of
self-discovery via pints of wine, Marcel Duchamp and the floral pleasures of
Kew Gardens. McCann is an incredibly likeable performer, and this piece reveals
that he is also a gifted writer adept at weaving numerous narrative strands
into an engaging whole. It needs some tightening up and further development,
but this is already an impressive piece of performance work demonstrating
considerable skill.
The festival wrapped up with a day of hosted conversations
and presentations that brought together the artists taking part in the festival,
other venues, producers, designers and arts organisations, and provided the
space to forge new connections, share ideas and advice, and generally start a dialogue.
Representatives from the Arts Council offered advice on funding applications, and
there were opportunities to talk to professionals about artist development,
press and marketing, festivals and touring, and working with a producer. It was
free to attend, and the Bike Shed stumped up for breakfast to get proceedings
going, then a delicious soup with bread and salad for lunch, and the room was
filled with a happy hubbub of conversation for the whole day. And a really
positive way to close the festival.
Reviewed for Exeunt
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