Soho Theatre: Springing to Life

I found it eventually

Press Release from the Soho Theatre begins...

Welcome to 2015, where everything is political in the lead up to the impending May 2015 general election.

Hang on, they have got to be kidding. An election, in 2015? We just had a big one - well, I suppose it was not an election, it was a Referendum, but it still had campaigning and talented artists sacrificing their ability to make work that expressed a political view (not the No voters, but still...).

Does this mean more political theatre?
As the media hone in on the political stage, Soho Theatre’s toeing the party line by announcing upcoming Spring theatre highlights with their own version of what a party can be. Exciting, evocative and powerful new work, new collaborations and London premieres dominate this season, where – if you read between the lines of the manifesto – you'll find serious and satirical metaphors on the housing crisis, social marginalisation and isolation, unemployment, youth prospects, rural degradation, cultural collisions and anarchy in the face of the establishment.

Seriously, as long as it is 'read between the lines' stuff. It is very rare that 'reading the lines' agit-prop theatre is any good. Rare, not impossible...

But it’s going to be more fun than that.

Soho Theatre begins its 2015 theatre programme, like any good political campaign does, by sending in the clowns. Kraken (6–18 Jan), is a simple man travelling through an illogical world. The award-winning, Gaulier-trained physical comedian, Trygve Wakenshaw, mocks and revitalises his own (mostly) wordless rhetoric as he wills you the audience to suspend your disbelief. 

It's next door. I got confused.

Why can't you send him up to Scotland? I thought that having Boris as Mayor was enough slapstick for everyone. 

The 2014 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Barry Award nominated follow-up to Squidboy comes to Soho Theatre for its London premiere as part of the London International Mime Festival. 

Meanwhile, the greatest orator of physical rhetoric and coercion of the mob from violence to peace and love – Doctor Brown – returns to Soho Theatre with a trilogy of his most recent, award-winning, work in three consecutive weeks – Because, Becaves and Befrdfgth (12–17, 19–24, 26–31 Jan).

Okay, the political thing was a way in, wasn't it? These are really political works (except in the weak 'everything is politics' way).

The epidemic of loneliness and social isolation, and its close relationship with mental health in both younger adults and the elderly, hit headlines earlier this year when the Office for National Statistics found London to be the loneliness capital of Europe. 

I don't think it did in Scotland. These are important issues - I am familiar with emotional loneliness (and the physical variety. I am still available, ladies), and mental health problems, but is this like London waking up to the problem because it finally impacts on London.

Oh, yes, this is aimed at London audiences, and the previous comment could be seen as bitter and inappropriate parochialism. 

Making its London premiere in February, following its critically acclaimed preview run during the final week of Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is a deeply personal show by Kim Noble. A 2014 Total Theatre Judges Award winner, Kim Noble: You're Not Alone (3 Feb – 7 Mar) has been described as funny, provocative and “the very definition of a must see”. A profoundly moving piece of theatre by one of UK’s most incredible live performance artists that will stay with you long after you leave the theatre.

Yeah, we had him in Scotland first. 


Taking a moment to see that the grass is not always greener on the other side, Soho Theatre looks across the pond at those who have fallen short of the coveted ‘American Dream’. Bristol’s most exciting young company, FellSwoop Theatre, blend live music, mime and heart-wrenching humour in Ablutions (10–22 Feb) based on Patrick deWitt’s Booker-nominated novel, telling the grimly funny story of a Los Angeles barman’s demise into the sodden depths of the underworld as he embarks on a road trip of his own spiritual ablution, and constitutional abandonment.

Sounds intriguing, but I am not sure what constitutional abandonment means. There seems to an alternative American Dream these days - romanticising getting pissed up and failing. 

Heading to Britain’s rural regions next, and the prospects of employment for young people, with two young men who can’t even kill a cow. Produced by the Midlands’ Pentabus Theatre, Milked (3–8 Mar), written by their playwright-in-residence Simon Longman, is a bold black comedy about friendship and unemployment in the countryside – and a cow called Sandy. Two young men are faced with the reality of what the world has to offer them, within the confines of their regional setting, and what they have to offer out in return. The run is part of Pentabus’s national tour.

With a soundtrack by the Wurzels, perhaps?

The housing crisis forms the premise for the first official comedy from theatre heavyweight Philip Ridley. Radiant Vermin (10 Mar – 12 Apr) makes its world premiere at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory Theatre before its London premiere and five-week residency at Soho Theatre. 

Win. Ridley rocks - only I see why they are calling it his first official comedy. His scripts are hilarious, but only if you have a dark sense of humour. 

Radiant Vermin tells the story of Ollie and Jill, a young couple who want to tell you how they got themselves off the waiting list and onto the housing ladder. Radiant Vermin uncovers what (sinister) lengths a couple would go to, personally and within their community, in order to achieve their dream home: it’s Hunger Games, but for the middle class, and they did it all for their baby…

The Hunger Games is about the middle class and their attitude to life, ain't it? 
Right, that'll do for this press release. If it gets too long, no one will read it. 

A Dramaturg Questions: Mercury Fur (Riot Productions)

The Script
Mercury Fur runs at over two hours - longer than Forced Entertainment's Bloody Mess (which was good enough to convince a generation that their post-dramatic theatre was definitive, even when the company was churning out generic misery devised rambles) or Les Ballet C de la B's VSPRS (and that changed my understanding of dance's potential to express complex ideas). Does it deserve this length, or can it be edited?

There are two strands (at least) to the script: the story of the 'butterflies' and the social chaos that leads the government to bomb London. While these strands do weave together - it is suggested that butterfly use leads to a culture of drugged-up thugs looking for the main chance - they are distinct and not necessarily integrated. How can the production link these ideas?

There are a great many monologues. There is a character called 'party piece,' but each actor gets one in the form of relating a story from memory. If all of these monologues are kept intact, how can the play maintain pace and the through line of the narrative?

Elliot and Lola are lovers, yet they fight throughout. Does the script allow any space to reveal their intimacy?

The Space
The Assembly Roxy is a long 'stage.' How can you avoid spending time on slow exits, especially in the finale, which limps towards an ending (even though their are corpses and bombs going off)?

The acoustic is not great, either. What steps can be taken to ensure the speeches are always audible - again, especially in the dialogues)?

Scenography
Is it a good idea to use a mobile phone off-stage to make the sound effects for a mobile phone on-stage?

There is much made of the lighting in the flat being natural, from daylight (a curtain is pulled down to let light in). How can this be emphasised in the lighting score without asking for suspension of disbelief (which is the audience's to give, not the company to expect)?

What would the hair of lumpen proletariat gangsters look like in a 'post-apocalyptic' world? Would it be a

neat cut, or a bit grubby? Since there is chat about the need for one character to have a bath, and worries about the lack of hot water in the flat, is it possible to go too far in uglying up the cast?

Cast
All of the cast are young, but it is clear that The Duchess is the mother of Elliot and Darren. How can this be made clear?

Again, the age of the actors is a concern: do they have the stamina to maintain two hours of tough acting that switches between power dynamics? Given the content, do they have the emotional strength?

Ethics
There is some heavy duty stuff in Mercury Fur. Does it need a trigger warning on the publicity?

While it is great to see a multinational finance company supporting the arts, the description of their business (especially the line about 'what if there were 58,627 other just like them... they shared the same name') sounded a bit like something from Ridley's imagination. Are they a good fit for a play so steeped in anti-capitalist values?

A Student Essays: Mercury Fur (Riot Productions)

Philip K. Dick notwithstanding, most futurological writers are not prophets but fantastic commentators on their present. Mercury Fur seems preoccupied with a near-future in which law and order have decayed and, in a landscape of burnt out tower-blocks and abandoned homes, examines the conduct of an underclass for whom only the oblivion of drugs and offering dubious services to the wealthy can provide meaning and survival.

Name-checking various locations around London - and climaxing in the appearance of a city money-man who has an appetite for sexual destruction - Ridley's 'future' is a dishevelled remix of the capital, circa 1990. The disused tower-block that becomes the location for Spinx's 'party' could be one of the sink estates in Brixton or Kings Cross where the Housing shoved undesirable residents and the obsession with 'butterflies' and their diverse colours reflects the ravers' fascination with varieties of LSD and Ecstasy (mitsubishi or getafix, anyone?).

Equally, the finale - in which London is finally bombed by its own hostile government (as the city wanker points out, it has gone beyond the control of the state) - is a paranoid extension of London Alternative Culture's world-view, circa 1994 (check Spiral Tribe's own webpage for a spot of history that echoes with the fears of the party scene). Given that the Conservative government was enacting laws that made certain types of music illegal to play in public, this sense of oppositional wasn't exclusively drug-induced hysteria. Ridley's 'future' is a decaying urban infrastructure, ignored and then punished by the state, providing a lumpen proletariat, which preys on itself, for the wealthy to exploit.

Unsurprisingly, the debut of Mercury Fur was controversial - the fight-loving Lyn Gardner throwing down with Michael Billington to defend its integrity - but its descriptions of rape and casual violence are brutal but torn from the headlines rather than a sick imagination. By framing the murder of a child (dressed up as Elvis and provided as entertainment for a wealthy patron) in an almost familiar London, Ridley's point is clear: the horror is lurking beneath the surface.

The controversy about the content does disguise the weaknesses of the script: the subplot about the arrival of the mysterious butterflies that fuel the drug trade is given too much attention, reducing the play to a series of monologues interspersed with shouted arguments and the gradual realisation that many of the characters are related forces story heavy interludes. But weaving a complex world around the central debate makes the question more urgent: can love, under extremes of pressure, become the motivation to kill the beloved to save them from harm?

A Critic Writes: Mercury Fur (Riot Productions)

Clocking in at over two hours, and unfolding Philip Ridley's paranoid description of a dystopia bounded by the degeneration of order and the easy availability of psychotropic 'butterflies,' Mercury Fur is a bold choice for Riot Productions, but certainly lives up to their vision of 'theatre as an art form with a social purpose to initiate debate.' The eight strong cast conjure up Ridley's bleak future through a mixture of East End gangster poses and an increasingly hysterical series of emotional dependencies, climaxing in a suicidal clinch that questions how far love can save anyone when society is collapsing.

The young cast cope well with the challenges of Ridley's characters: in a disintegrating world, power dynamics shift, forcing the actors, by turns, from vulnerability to determination. Sebastian Carrington-Howell brings a vicious passion to Elliot, butterfly dealer and event organiser to the underworld: as his brother Darren, Tommy Rowe captures a drug-addled sincerity while Frazer Hadfield is a naive, enthusiastic Naz, who stumbles upon the brothers' 'party.' Only Oli Clayton is allowed anything like consistency of character: his 'party guest' is a swaggering monster, half city-boy wanker and half sexual psychopath.

The Assembly Roxy, a deconsecrated church, is an ideal venue for Ridley's messy city, lending a faded grandeur through the architecture and setting the inhumane behaviour inside an echo of past aspirations: unfortunately, the breadth of the stage slows down the action, as the characters pace to the dispersed exits. There is also a difficult acoustic, swallowing some of the lines, especially during the heated arguments.

And although Ridley is a celebrated - and fashionable writer - the script lacks the tautness of his later work. The ending drags and the slow introduction of each character reduces the narrative to a series of speeches ideal for auditions but less impressive when maintaining the tension and menace lurking beneath Ridley's most intense passages. Jocelyn Cox allows each character to have their moment, but this makes the pace lag: in exchange for powerful scenes between Elliot and his lover Lola (a terrified but sly Ku Boane).

Yet the ambition of Riot Productions is well served by the undercurrent of horror in the script, and their connection of Ridley's dark urban decay to contemporary doubts and disorder is timely. The script's preoccupation with psychedelic drugs and mind control mark it as a 1990s' text (Jeff Noon was working a similar vein in his science-fiction novel), but Cox and her cast and crew have demonstrated that it has relevance and dynamism even after the total victory of the capitalist spectacle.

Riddlin' Philip

 Having seen a couple of Philip Ridley's plays this year, and read a collection over Christmas, I feel entitled to make a huge pronouncement about his art. Although he has insisted that the contemporary theatre is currently asking questions about form that were posed in visual art during the 1960s, his scripts seem to employ a technique that goes back to the Renaissance.

The clue even comes up in some of his titles: The Pitchfork Disney, Dark Vanilla Jungle, Tender Napalm. Sweet'n'sour is more than just Ridley's favourite Chinese takeaway. The competing flavours battle at every level of his work (director Eve Nicol memorably defined this as 'tickles and terror). Cosmo Disney, the cockroach eating urchin in Pitchfork and Cougar Glass (from The Fastest Clock in the Universe) are seductive and repulsive in equal measure - the latter, with his taste for young boys, shares a sweet tooth with Disney's protagonists The Stray Twins. Never mind the amount of confectionary devoured by the characters: Ridley laces his treats with rat poison.

He brings chiaroscuro across into playwriting,  but his facility for the telling phrase and the extended monologue gives the impression of an almost conservative writer. He subtly undercuts the audience's understanding of events, questioning the reliability of the characters' commentaries. 

It is this mixture of dark and light, the chiaroscuro, that defines Ridley's scripts and makes the violence all the more chilling. Like a good classical author, however, Ridley doesn't revel in the on-stage representation of cruelty. The threat hangs heavy, and occasionally breaks out into a ruck, but the atrocities tend to happen off-stage or, in the case of Pitchfork, in the protagonists' dreams.

Even in his most narrative driven works (Dark Vanilla tells a story from beginning to end, albeit through a very unreliable narrator prone to black-outs), Ridley carves a reality both familiar and alien. Familiar in so far as the props and places are recognisable (chocolate, consumed to excess; stuffed birds; paedophile rings) but alien in that the characters are isolated in their own worlds. Cougar pretends he is young, so as to better seduce teenagers, The Stray Twins keep the doors locked. Even when he does get physical (Ghost from a Perfect Place has a girl-gang getting medieval on an old gangster's ass), Ridley frames it within a universe that veers violently from mood to mood, never dropping narrative for a surreal rush but always challenging the surface impression and hinting at bleaker depths.

Ridley's background - he is also a visual artist and a filmmaker - may have encouraged his adaptation of Dark Vanilla, the young woman could be either sympathetic victim or deceitful abuser (she's both) and whether she is villain or heroine is never established: Pitchfork features detailed descriptions of dreams that appear to contain elements of the play's previous scenes.

There's a lovely sense of Brecht's alienation effect at work - the characters are always distanced from the audience, ambiguous - and Ridley juggles the fundamental division in theatre (between what is actually happening on stage, and what that is supposed to represent) until it is impossible to decipher whether the scripted action is set in reality or is a more symbolic psycho-drama. Tough stuff indeed, and a reminder that the cool, searching intelligence can upset the format without losing a dramatic punch.

Pitch Black

The Pitchfork Disney is a tough challenge: set either in a dystopian future, down the back of someone's subconscious or in a house two doors down from mine, it constantly flickers between moods and modes (paranoid and funny, seductive and monstrous), connecting its four characters through their barely expressed desires and shared alienation. The protagonists (a pair of twins, full grown, not identical but infantile) discover that their fear of the world outside is justified, when Cosmo Disney and his acquaintance (Cosmos doesn't do friendship) turn up and usher in sexual longing, the threat of violence and snapshots from the entertainment underworld.

Heroes Theatre make the most of Ridley's script's ambiguity. The staging is sparse - a single sofa - but colorful - the world beyond the twins' house is guarded by a shimmering tinsel curtain. Eve Nicol's direction refuses to force any additional context onto the series of disjointed, disorientating episodes, allowing the disorientating collision of dreams and fantasies to exist in a suspended reality. From here, both Alan MacKenzie (Presley Stray, the male twin) and Stephen Humpage (Cosmo) are given space to turn their speeches (described by Nicol as 'party pieces') into extended monologues of unfocused terror. Since Presley's main strategy for coping with horror is relating his fantastical dreams, even the sharp interjections of Cosmo never ground the play in a recognisable reality.

Although Ridley is strongly associated with the British neo-brutalist writers of the 1990s, Pitchfork's aggression is psychological. Pitchfork himself is a mash-up of gimp, enforcer and freak show star. Handled with menace by Patrick Stratford, he delights in exercising his power in a final comic moment, yet is manipulated by Cosmo into exploiting his disability. The tension between Cosmo and the Stray twins comes not only from Cosmo's paranoia about homosexuality - and rapacious desire for the sister - but in the conflict between their world views. Cosmo claims no parents and absolute self-sufficiency, while the twins depend on memories of their parents to define their existence.

By allowing the script to exist in a contextual vacuum, the production emphasises its various themes: Cosmos' skills as a showman become strategies to remove Presley and leave sister Hayley open to his attention; the conflation between the sentimental and savagery exposing how violence can be masked; the dreams of Presley spiralling towards an erotic fantasy of complete annihilation - and lurk at the back of it all, a fear of death through intimacy (an unsurprising trope from theatre made in the time of AIDS' emergence).

The taut direction, and largely naturalistic performances (Humpage, in particular, plays up Cosmo's street urchin distrust rather than his fairground extravagance) drives this interpretation hard and fast: Ridley's language is both poetic and littered with pop culture references, like a literary bricolage that slams together pain, hope, life, desire, lust, suppression, ghosts, fear, compassion and rage.