Author Archives: Christopher Madden

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About Christopher Madden

Christopher Madden is a freelance writer and academic. He works on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, and has reviewed for The Wolf and 3:AM magazines.

Jamie Wood, Beating McEnroe

Jamie Wood: Beating McEnroe

Jamie Wood, Beating McEnroe

Sitting in the lotus position on a mat of taped-together tennis towels, Jamie Wood meditated as the audience idled in. Every now and then he opened one eye to spot someone in the audience, picked up one of the tennis balls encircling him, pointed at the person, and threw it at them. Usually they caught it, and the ones who didn’t had to try again. Any audience member whose energy threatened to disturb Jamie’s Buddhist calm was asked to breathe deeply and control themselves. In other words, don’t go showing off, be centred, and all will be well.

As a young boy, Jamie struggled to find a place in a world divided by fans of John McEnroe and love for Björn Borg. Like Marmite, it was a strictly either/or affair. It was a deeply personal one too, as memories of tennis from that time were tied up in recollections of the performer’s family pinned to the television screen as the famous pair battled it out. Because it was not possible to love both, Jamie stood by Borg, if only for his fetching long blond hair. And of course, unlike McEnroe, Borg exuded the kind of grace and calm under pressure that characterised Jamie’s performance. We, the audience, were therefore being coached in loving Borg; and in loving him we were gently coaxed into falling for Jamie too.

Beating McEnroe’s charm and openness made it hard not to fall for the performer’s argument. This was made all the more remarkable by the fact that the audience was asked to fill in the gaps with possibly the highest levels of participation I have seen recently in theatre. Around Jamie’s coming-of-age narrative, declaimed against a soundtrack sampling news and popular culture from the 1980s onwards, the public were gently invited to step into the performer’s tennis shoes. Your reviewer even made his debut at the Unity Theatre when asked to read out instructions on the back of a postcard for the audience to throw tennis balls at the performer, who stood in the camp pose of the crucified Jesus as we shouted ‘Jamie, you are useless!’ Later, two audience members performed a script that with comical pathos recalled a childhood memory of Jamie and his brother at loggerheads during a tennis match.

The trope of audience participation is obviously well-established in physical theatre circles but can be deployed half-heartedly in some performances. Beating McEnroe went full throttle with it. At times the source of entertainment was the performer flagrantly stepping aside while others did the work. This made complete sense, though, as when another audience member was asked to enact a fight alluded to earlier in the show between Jamie and his schoolyard adversary – only in this instance Jamie played himself. Whether the incident happened or not mattered less than the way in which such clichéd schoolboy angst was mediated through performance. And performance indeed triumphed as the mock fight morphed, hilariously for all concerned, into what seemed like a courtship dance. That the participant performed naturally on stage had everything to do with Jamie’s innate ability to relax his interlocutor – no mean feat in the context of a full auditorium. Referencing autobiographical narrative in order to construct empathy through performance and console the spectator, Jamie Wood will have no problem beating McEnroe again.

Daphnis Kokkinos, Addio Addio Amore

Daphnis Kokkinos: Addio Addio Amore

Daphnis Kokkinos, Addio Addio Amore

The German artist Paul Klee famously said that ‘drawing is taking a line for a walk’. This simple statement hones in on the essence of form, its freedom and vitality a part of the organic process of creation. Receiving its UK premiere as part of Physical Fest 2013, Daphnis Kokkinos’ physicality in his first solo show, Addio Addio Amore, recalled Klee’s conviction on account of the coherence of gesture and the fluency of the dancer’s ideas. Kokkinos is a member of Tanztheater Wuppertal, the company founded by the iconic dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, and the qualities manifested in this performance hail unmistakably from this stable. The show began with handmade film footage of a field trip to India on which Kokkinos joined other company members and Bausch herself – for a number of years Kokkinos was Bausch’s assistant. Before he entered the stage, the audience watched images of villagers washing dishes on the edge of a river. Such apparently mundane actions were gradually transformed upon repeated viewing into a series of beautiful gestures possessed of their own striking form. Little wonder, then, that Bausch undertook these field trips as if to plumb the world for a repertoire of gestures which would undergo transformation in the rehearsal studio.

Kokkinos appears at the edge of the stage dressed in a suit and holding flowers. He remains silent as the film footage rolls. It’s an image that announces the performance as an active homage to his revered mentor. Naturally enough, memory of Bausch is embedded in muscle memory, andAddio Addio Amore references the iconic grammar of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s method as the palette for a largely autobiographical work. Kokkinos referenced moments from his childhood in Crete and from more recent times with Bausch within a structure composed of imagistic vignettes. In one story Kokkinos tells of sharing the same bed as his older brother and being woken up by grunting coming from under the bedclothes. Both performer and audience were inevitably on the same wavelength here, and the story was a source of much knowing laughter; but while Kokkinos resists looking under the covers eventually he surrenders in order to confirm the inevitable. However, his brother had all the time been doing sit-ups! Kokkinos exploits the moment, not to mention the laughter, when he invites a good-looking male from the audience to do sit-ups, asking him to grunt into a microphone as he does so. Later on, Kokkinos runs through the audience and in and out of the auditorium to depict his mother’s frantic search for the family dog Aphrodite. The clarity of this action is beautiful – pantomimic, even. In the middle of all this running he performs a flirtatious shoulder dance for another unsuspecting audience member.

Coquetry was the source of much genuine comedy in Addio Addio Amore. The man who did the sit-ups was asked again to direct a flirtatious dance straight from the old days of Moulin Rouge to a woman in the audience. A handsome male objectified for the entertainment of women? A queer discourse ran subtly through the piece: the idea that dance forms can be ascribed to gender is a result of patriarchal convention and has little to do with the body’s fitness for this or that type of movement. Kokkinos drew on the trope of participation as he prepared for his next section, and the sense of others filling time for him was deftly balanced with commentary on what it meant to direct and be directed. It’s as if the framework of the show as an homage to Bausch could do little to avoid exploring the subtle power relations underlying the mentor-protégé relationship.

Addio Addio Amore’s form and movement were invigorating but never ostentatious. Kokkinos’ material had been selected with a view to its natural integrity, as in the moment we are told about an old lady who walked the streets of his childhood home bent-double without a walking aid. This image captivated the young Kokkinos, and he imagined the poor old lady lying in bed in the improbable selfsame position. Kokkinos’ observational methods are surely influenced by Bausch’s experimentation, reminding one of John Cage, who said that music was all around us if only we had ears. The same claim can be made about our vision and movement. From the villagers washing dishes in India to the Cretan invalid, Addio Addio Amore drew upon such striking physiognomies as the basis for some choreographic alchemy.

Cut to the Chase: Tony Teardrop

Cut to the Chase: Tony Teardrop

Cut to the Chase: Tony Teardrop

 

The Bombed-Out Church is a Liverpool icon. Tourists love it as a photogenic ruin. Locals flock to it for cultural events programmed by the redoubtable Urban Strawberry Lunch. Everyone loves a ruin. For Tony Teardrop, Cut to the Chase draws upon the Church’s reputation as a hangout for some of the city’s homeless. It’s a production that tests the company’s site-specific practice to the limit, since its situation in the Church can’t avoid questions of ethics in its embrace of poetic justice. While there has always been psychogeographic poetry in Liverpool’s homeless congregating around the Bombed-Out Church, the enjoyment of irony is a luxury for those who aren’t caught up in it. Tony Teardrop is hugely entertaining, but more importantly still it is an empathic tale about those whose lives are in ruins.

 

Plonked in an easy chair and sipping from a can, we met Tony in the lounge of a hostel at which he is meant to be a temporary resident, giving orders to the other residents – and also giving it them straight. Although his avuncular manner could turn on a sixpence, Neil Bell’s high-octane performance was subtle enough to prove that Tony was a passionate and determined individual rather than a callous one. He talked rather grandiosely about aesthetics and science, Michelangelo and perspective in art, but Tony was no mere showman: his obsessive discourse eloquently bore the hallmarks of accumulated knowledge and lost potential. His intellectual and creative spark, however, had been short-circuited by schizophrenia.

 

Aided and abetted by the other residents, the hostel manifested Tony’s determination to make it a home. Mountains of tat were assembled in the yard, and the new manager – ‘Hitler’s Knickers’ in Tony’s moniker – was equally determined to make their home clinically efficient. Defiant to the last, Tony worked throughout on his creative and technological masterpiece, in which the aforementioned tat was fashioned into a ‘tuck-tuck’, a bicycle with bells and whistles of which the boy from E.T. might have been proud.

 

The core storyline of Tony’s creative process was part of an episodic structure whose momentum depicted the restless reality of the homeless. It would be simplistic to cavil at this form, since the pace and timing of the episode are apt for a world in which things rarely remain in place. Assemblages of furniture and half-finished structures evoked the communal spaces of the hostel in the background, whereas the long and wide stage in the foreground enabled bodies to range freely. The city was depicted through sheer physicality, and the roofless and windowless church in which we sat shivering opened our ears to the city’s throb and hum. While off-script the actors observed the action as if to evoke the paranoid surveillance under which vulnerable people feel throughout the wakeful hours. The Brechtian note of this direction addressed itself to the audience through meta-theatrical moments in which the Bombed-Out Church doubled-up as the locale of action and the space of performance. A contemplative moment had Tony instruct new hostel resident Billy, a wise young man played with assurance and maturity by Robert Schofield, on seeing the world anew merely by looking at the sky from the other end of the Church. ‘It’s only the Bombed-Out Church,’ Billy retorts, in an attempt to shake Tony out of reverie. The intended effect of this ironic play-off was to unseat the spectator by means of an imagined reality. Empathy is not a given, in other words, but it can win over if only we shift position.

 

One of the play’s discrete messages, particularly during a crisis for which there seems to be no plan B, is that more than ever we need to think of the victims of violent capitalism. But we can also be victims of circumstance. Homelessness is represented in the play neither one-sidedly nor in celebratory mode. It is a life few would choose to live if possessed of adequate agency. Esther Wilson’s granitic script avoided sentimentality through caustic repartee, as if affection was something the characters could ill-afford. Wilson’s ear for the brutal sarcasm and unforgiving wit of real people revealed a writer who has engaged in actually listening to them.

 

Homeless people’s lives reset the meaning of the comfort zone. Boundaries are constantly tested and can dangerously overflow. The play’s climax demonstrated this to exhilarating effect, but its fuse was burst in a comic ending which had Tony riding off on his homemade tuck-tuck. Before this he confronted Hitler’s Knickers as if his life depended on it with a moving speech on what it meant to make and have a home. ‘You’re too far west and I’m too far east,’ Tony angrily informs her, in an image that has both of them waving hopelessly at each other from opposite ends of the human spectrum. Off he went, as the audience was told throughout the play, to a reunion with his estranged children, for whom the bike was made. Resisting facile resolutions of both dramatic and moral kinds, in the end the play encouraged us to think that Tony just rode on and on, regardless of whether he reached his destination or whether it was possible to have one at all.

www.cuttothechaseproductions.co.uk

 

Told by an Idiot: My Perfect Mind

Told by an Idiot: My Perfect Mind

Told by an Idiot: My Perfect Mind

The set design of Told by an Idiot’s My Perfect Mind looked clinical and was full of disparate objects: screens, a wind machine, table and chairs, and a thundersheet from which a ramp sloped downwards at an awkward gradient. I immediately drew a blank: how would these things come together coherently? The smooth hessian or stark white of the objects’ neutral colouring suggested negation, a purposeful reticence of design anticipating noise and vividness. A doctor with a dodgy German accent (Paul Hunter) opened the performance with a lecture on the scientific workings of the brain. But this doctor was fascinated more by when the brain goes wrong than when it ticked over undisturbed, demonstrating the former by rolling a ball down the slope into a tray of crockery. The sound of smashing did everything to alert the audience to the split-second violence of medical malfunctioning. How rapid, we were led to think, comes the disaster.

For Edward Petherbridge, the disaster arrived at the worst time (although there is never a right time). The cruel irony for this classical actor was being violently struck down by a stroke while rehearsing for King Lear in New Zealand. The irony was not only cruel but double, the production being the first occasion on which Petherbridge would have acted in the coveted title role. Despite the physical impossibility of fulfilling the demands of the performance, strangely, perhaps even miraculously, Petherbridge remembered all of Lear’s words. But though language was willing, the body was not. And while Lear inhabited his body, memory of the actor’s own life was cut loose from its moorings.

The life of the stroke victim is a broken narrative whose fragments are constantly wrenched free from oblivion. My Perfect Mind explored this scenario with gentle wit and pathos – and at times a little nervously too. Petherbridge was a stylistically astute if inevitably flawed interlocutor for the shape-shifting Hunter, who stepped in and out of character in comic attempts to bring the actor’s family and professional comrades back from the brink. As is to be expected from Told by an Idiot, Hunter’s clowning had an acute focus, which is just the kind of attention required of one goading the amnesiac back into the full bloom of memory. Such was the reliability of his prompting, the wide-eyed manner with which he hung on to Petherbridge’s every word and physical gesture, it was tempting to view Hunter as the kind of fool from whom Lear himself might have benefited. By contrast with Shakespeare’s mad king, though, this was a relationship in which listening was reciprocal. At times Petherbridge acted the fool himself, if only to prove to his companion that he can serve irony too, and that memory and logic were on the mend. Yet the improvisational air of some moments, in which a nervous pause interrupted the flow or a fact stuttered into existence, opened up the sense of a halting articulation fought at great emotional cost.

Although both actors hail from contrasting theatrical traditions and generations, their quirky coupling made total sense. There were touching echoes of Morecambe and Wise: their scrambling for props, their deft navigation of a set replete with physical obstacles, the frequent misfiring and recovery of lines, the puns and wink-winks. Given his stature as a classical actor, not to mention his acquaintance with some of the greatest performers of the twentieth-century (the audience was treated to some revealing anecdotes in relation to such figures), Petherbridge could almost be the lost guest of a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.

My Perfect Mind was eminently entertaining but the performance was no mere entertainment. One favourite detail for me amongst many was the tendency for a chair to slide a few feet down the slope no sooner had Hunter sat on it. Catching himself in time by grabbing the table’s edge, this moment of classic physical comedy made me laugh while reminding me that nothing was ever as stable as I might like to think. If I wasn’t quite on the edge of my seat, perhaps I should have been. And to be sure I was mesmerised by the hugely comic but peculiarly gripping rendition of Shakespeare’s storm scene (Morecambe and Wise again). It is testament to Told by an Idiot’s idea of putting on a show about not playing King Lear that I walked away from the theatre glowing but also with the melancholy thought of having made contact with a lost moment of glory.

www.toldbyanidiot.org

Told by an Idiot: My Perfect Mind

Told by an Idiot: My Perfect Mind

The set design of Told by an Idiot’s My Perfect Mind looked clinical and was full of disparate objects: screens, a wind machine, table and chairs, and a thundersheet from which a ramp sloped downwards at an awkward gradient. I immediately drew a blank: how would these things come together coherently? The smooth hessian or stark white of the objects’ neutral colouring suggested negation, a purposeful reticence of design anticipating noise and vividness. A doctor with a dodgy German accent (Paul Hunter) opened the performance with a lecture on the scientific workings of the brain. But this doctor was fascinated more by when the brain goes wrong than when it ticked over undisturbed, demonstrating the former by rolling a ball down the slope into a tray of crockery. The sound of smashing did everything to alert the audience to the split-second violence of medical malfunctioning. How rapid, we were led to think, comes the disaster.

For Edward Petherbridge, the disaster arrived at the worst time (although there is never a right time). The cruel irony for this classical actor was being violently struck down by a stroke while rehearsing for King Lear in New Zealand. The irony was not only cruel but double, the production being the first occasion on which Petherbridge would have acted in the coveted title role. Despite the physical impossibility of fulfilling the demands of the performance, strangely, perhaps even miraculously, Petherbridge remembered all of Lear’s words. But though language was willing, the body was not. And while Lear inhabited his body, memory of the actor’s own life was cut loose from its moorings.

The life of the stroke victim is a broken narrative whose fragments are constantly wrenched free from oblivion. My Perfect Mind explored this scenario with gentle wit and pathos – and at times a little nervously too. Petherbridge was a stylistically astute if inevitably flawed interlocutor for the shape-shifting Hunter, who stepped in and out of character in comic attempts to bring the actor’s family and professional comrades back from the brink. As is to be expected from Told by an Idiot, Hunter’s clowning had an acute focus, which is just the kind of attention required of one goading the amnesiac back into the full bloom of memory. Such was the reliability of his prompting, the wide-eyed manner with which he hung on to Petherbridge’s every word and physical gesture, it was tempting to view Hunter as the kind of fool from whom Lear himself might have benefited. By contrast with Shakespeare’s mad king, though, this was a relationship in which listening was reciprocal. At times Petherbridge acted the fool himself, if only to prove to his companion that he can serve irony too, and that memory and logic were on the mend. Yet the improvisational air of some moments, in which a nervous pause interrupted the flow or a fact stuttered into existence, opened up the sense of a halting articulation fought at great emotional cost.

Although both actors hail from contrasting theatrical traditions and generations, their quirky coupling made total sense. There were touching echoes of Morecambe and Wise: their scrambling for props, their deft navigation of a set replete with physical obstacles, the frequent misfiring and recovery of lines, the puns and wink-winks. Given his stature as a classical actor, not to mention his acquaintance with some of the greatest performers of the twentieth-century (the audience was treated to some revealing anecdotes in relation to such figures), Petherbridge could almost be the lost guest of a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.

My Perfect Mind was eminently entertaining but the performance was no mere entertainment. One favourite detail for me amongst many was the tendency for a chair to slide a few feet down the slope no sooner had Hunter sat on it. Catching himself in time by grabbing the table’s edge, this moment of classic physical comedy made me laugh while reminding me that nothing was ever as stable as I might like to think. If I wasn’t quite on the edge of my seat, perhaps I should have been. And to be sure I was mesmerised by the hugely comic but peculiarly gripping rendition of Shakespeare’s storm scene (Morecambe and Wise again). It is testament to Told by an Idiot’s idea of putting on a show about not playing King Lear that I walked away from the theatre glowing but also with the melancholy thought of having made contact with a lost moment of glory.

www.toldbyanidiot.org