Collisions

Sunday 2nd June 2019

Collisions @ The Etc Theatre, Camden

An hour or so of improvised theatre, featuring our Sussex Way neighbour, Tom Barnes. Aki and I took the bus to Camden Town and walked up the High Street. The area is a magnet for the homeless, and some hardy souls had set up a soup kitchen and were doling out provender. The pavements are blackened and stained with last night's vomit. Camden Town has long since lost it's allure...

The Etc Theatre is housed above the Oxford Arms and is tiny, smaller even than I'd recalled. It was a warm night, and the room was hot and sweaty even as we took our seats. The audience numbered maybe 10 or 12, and we were asked to volunteer what was on our minds. I thought this a particularly open approach to garnering the raw material to feed the ensuing improvisation. The Showstoppers team, on the other hand, ask very specific questions of the audience, which gives them a much more certain framework from which to evolve their show. 

As a result, I felt the themes gathered were treated in a way that didn't give us a rounded 'play', as advertised, but a series of unconnected scenes and monologues. It was pretty slow going for the most part, though I enjoyed a couple of the monologues, particularly one delivered by one of the older actresses who we discover going through her dead mother's wardrobe trying to pick out some clothes in which to bury her. She painted an extraordinary picture of the walnut grain on the wardrobe doors, and described each dress along with an associated memory...great stuff.

Tom was keen that I join the rehearsal slots, every Monday night, but I'm not sure it's quite my cup of tea, though I think I'd enjoy it. I'd rather find some comedy impro to get involved with...will see.

Fevered Sleep

Friday 26th April 2019

Fevered Sleep

Interrupted sleep. I wake at 4am. I need to visit the loo, but first I have to take my mask off. I think I've slept well, at least so far (I usually wake up earlier than this).

Fevered Sleep. The house lights go down and the four male dancers settle stage left; the nine girls stage right. There is a large sheet centre stage, made up of pages of newspaper stuck together with thick white tape. The wall at the back of the stage is covered in newspaper, and there are pieces of screwed up newspaper littered beneath it.....from which a fifth male dancer covered from head-to-toe in newspaper and tape, like a well-read Worzel Gummage, suddenly emerges and teeters toward centre stage.

I switch the Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine off; the whirring whooshing stops as the supply of pressurised air is cut off. I slip the elasticated headband over the top of my head, and the nasal 'pillow' falls away, taking the pipework with it...I'm free to head for the convenience.

The dancers, adult and pre-teen, meet centre stage and lift the sheet of newspaper off the floor. It billows like a wave, then suddenly falls in a simple act of stage trickery over the head of one of the male dancers, transforming him into a shapeless monster....the girls squeal in delighted terror and dodge frantically about the stage, daring themselves to land the odd blow on the meandering beast. I'm transported back in time to a vision of my father pulling his baggy woollen jumper over his head, the emptied sleeves turning into monstrous elephantine trunks, and my sister and I laughing and screaming at the same time as the thing chased us about the house.

I'm back in the bedroom. I sit on the edge of the bed and take a sip of water from the bottle on my bedside table. I don't usually don mask and pipework again at this point, as my sinuses are usually a bit blocked up, which interferes with my breathing through my nose, but tonight things feel clear, and I re-position the mask, head strap, and pipework, switch the machine back on, and get back under the bedclothes.

The girls mimic the movements of one of the professional dancers, straining their bodies into unfamiliar shapes, smiling the while; they get their own back later, as they voice movement directions through microphones which the male dancer has to attempt to emulate.

I have to confess that me and my CPAP machine don't get on terribly well. The machine was donated to me by the NHS following a diagnosis for chronic sleep apnoea. While I'm very grateful, the machinery makes for an uncomfortable night of interrupted sleep. 

Fevered Sleep; a ground-breaking theatre company headed by David Harradine, a canny and inventive Yorkshireman who happens to live in the flat below our friend Katrina in Clapton, east London, with his husband, the actor Carl Hawkins. Their website describes the work as experimental, risk-taking art, developing "brave, thought-provoking projects that challenge people to rethink their relationships with each other and with the world". The final section of the piece sees myriad dance formations filling the stage from left, right and centre, the girls being hurled through the air at speed, the unbounded joy of the experience reflected in their bright eyes. It works like a fevered dream.


https://vimeo.com/153937408

L-R Lesley Allan; Katrina Duncan; Aki;
Me enjoying pre-show tapas in the Norfolk Arms

Don McCullin in Concert

Weds 24th April 2019

Don McCullin - In Concert

Aki asks me who we are seeing tonight. We are sitting at a table for two in The German Gymnasium in the heart of regenerated Kings Cross; she's just ordered the pork knuckle with sauerkraut...I've plumped for the chicken schnitzel with sweet potato fries. There are two half pint 'flagons' of pilsner fizzing away on the table in front of us.

"Is it a folk band?"

"A folk band?" I cry with comic scorn..."Nope".

"Classic?"

"Classic...!?! I hope not!".

I'm determined she doesn't find out who we are about to see at Kings Place this evening. I booked the tickets last month as a late birthday surprise, shortly after we'd visited Tate Britain to attend an exhibition of Don McCullin's more famous, or infamous, black & white prints, documenting some 60 years of his bearing witness to man's inhumanity to man. A BBC documentary added further interest in him, as we learnt he'd been born and raised in Finsbury Park, at No.40 Fonthill Road, just around the corner, a stone's throw from one of our favoured local Italian restaurants.

Aki's pork knuckle looks huge, served with potato dumpling and a beer jus. I bet her she won't be able to finish it. I get stuck into my chicken schnitzel, which is painfully hot and scalds my tongue, so I'm surprised to find the fries are lukewarm. 

As we enter the foyer of Kings Place, I instruct Aki not to look at any posters for fear of her discovering what we are about to see. We get through the foyer without incident, but as we reach basement level she notices the pile of books being prepared for signing at a table outside Hall One, and she gleans the author's name on the spine! Darn it....but she looks pleased.

It's pretty much a full house. Some of Don's more famous images are being projected onto a large white screen above the stage, and there are two empty chairs and a small table with glasses of water set centre stage. Fergal Keane, the BBC reporter, who was reporting from Khartoum only the night before at the public protest against the newly incumbent military regime in the Sudan, enters stage left, and introduces his interviewee in glowing terms, citing his journalistic integrity as an inspiration to his own career. Don McCullin, now in his mid-eighties, enters to a rapturous round of applause and takes his seat opposite Fergal. Mr.Keane has a wonderfully gentle interviewing technique, his sonorous Irish burr reverberating around the intimate Hall One; both have been adorned with head mics. 

Fergal gently guides Don through his early life, career beginnings, and wartime experiences, ending up some 45 minutes later with questions about Don's current obsession with photographing the landscape of the Somerset Levels, where he now resides. Over the course of the evening, Don has hinted that his often harrowing work still haunts him, and admits to having had several bouts of work-related depression which saw him take solace in the bottle. He confesses that he felt his work has not changed humanity one iota...wars are inevitable where humankind rub up against one another. There's a depressing thread running through the evening as we all mentally clock in with the more recent atrocities reported in the news; the shooting of Lyra McKee in Derry, the Sri Lankan Easter massacres, ISIS and their grisly modus operandi. There are fifteen minutes of Q&A at the end, with one woman telling him tearfully that he should look on his body of work as shining a light into the dark places of the human experience, and that he should consider himself doing mankind a great service. It's an emotional moment; and when he leaves the auditorium to a standing ovation, the lights come up to catch us all blowing our noses and wiping a tear from our eyes. An extraordinary evening in Kings Cross.