Author Archives: Lisa Wolfe

About Lisa Wolfe

Lisa Wolfe is a freelance theatre producer and project manager of contemporary small-scale work. Companies and people she has supported include: A&E Comedy, Three Score Dance, Pocket Epics, Jennifer Irons,Tim Crouch, Liz Aggiss, Sue MacLaine, Spymonkey and many more. Lisa was Marketing Manager at Brighton Dome and Festival (1989-2001) and has also worked for South East Dance, Chichester Festival Theatre and Company of Angels. She is Marketing Manager for Carousel, learning-disability arts company.

Happy Clap Trap

Matt Rudkin’s Happy Clap Trap variety night was winkled out from its familiar tiny stage at Brighton’s Marlborough Theatre for a one-off festival special at the Spiegeltent.

The audience was rather scattered around the space; the Mayor and her entourage hiding in a back booth. A wise decision, given the over-enthusiastic antics of Moth-woman (Sarah Delmonte) and Spider-man (Joe Kenny), whose role it was to grapple acts off the stage if they overran.

Compere Matt Rudkin is a senior lecturer in Theatre and Visual Art at the University of Brighton, ex-street performer, puppeteer and maker of the peerless Naïve Dance Masterclass with Silvia Mercuriali. He opened the show as a disco-robot dancing to Totally Automatic and later appeared with his manikin puppet, manipulated out of sight by Annie Brooks. We were encouraged to make monkey noises or scream rather than clap as acts appeared, and did so with brio.

First up was Big Mac Beth, a confrontation over a tenner between the Scottish king and the wobbly ghost of Banquo. Seren Fenhoulet and Elicia Walpole, current students, performed with gauche confidence, a nice line in surreal patter and good visual gags.

Mr Phil Lucas does a quick-fire image based set, with clever graphics, a scampi mitten and some stabs at popular culture. He shows footage of himself falling over in rehearsal. He shows it twice.

‘You, you can look at me,’ declaims Marion Déprez to an audience member. She is an overly pretty French woman who wants to be Tommy Cooper. Marion transforms from stern to ingratiating in seconds and is a natural clown.

Phil Jerrod does a slick comedy routine, starting with a riff on beards. It is sharp and witty observational material, imaginative and funny. It feels a bit too slick in this slaphappy environment, but it is good that he mingles with the audience.

It seems rather self-congratulatory to read a story written when you were seven to a paying crowd, but Fraser Geeson’s added lavish sound effects bring out the silliness of it.

Also present tonight are David Bramwell on Tibetan Lama Lopsang Rampa (aka Cyril Hoskin, a plumber from Devon) and Lucy Hopkins reprieving her La Vie en Rose piece from Le Foulard.

In all there was lots to enjoy here and all the acts were of a high standard. In comparison to the regular Happy Clap Trap night there was more stand-up than performance. The mix would have been even stronger with a bit more of the bizarre, off kilter live-art and less show plugging.

Lucy Hopkins: Le Foulard

Into the Spiegeltent, her ‘foulard’ billowing behind her, prances the compact, black-clad Lucy Hopkins, Artist. The stage platform is attained with intentionally awkward grace and our hostess introduces herself with grandiose prose, precise annunciation and enormous disdain for us, her captive audience. What follows is a beautifully constructed hour of playful interrogation into what it is to be an artist. An Artist, who, ‘like most’, makes work about herself. Lucy conjures three characters with deft use of her foulard – ‘it’s a bloody scarf, I made it myself,’ she exclaims later, when it all gets out of hand.

An aged crone, finger crooked just so, makes fleeting silent interventions. The passionate Spaniard, holding her arm aloft like a Roman senator, makes heavy work of an English language lesson: ‘he dips his biscuit, I have dipped my biscuit.’ The naïve, socially inept dreamer, with her long skirt and mad ideas, translates La Vie en Rose so we can all share her imagined joy. With great economy of movement and expression Lucy interweaves these characters as they fight for precedence and begin to upstage the Artist. How frustrated she becomes, held hostage by her own brilliance at acting. As the giggling dreamer begins to make friends with a chap in the second row, the Artist booms ‘It’s an art show; it has nothing to do with the audience!’

Having trained with Lecoq and Gaulier, it is no surprise that this is in essence a clown show, and whilst Lucy has ability in all of its forms she never overplays; her fine singing voice is reined in, her acrobatic skill evidenced in just one back-bend. There are hints of Liz Aggiss in the extravagant gestures, and of Joanna Neary’s Peg Bird character, with her arrogant despair at fellow artists. There is insight here too. So many actors fear becoming their characters; Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, June Brown – destined to be Dot Cotton forever. It pierces the conceit of the Artist as a somehow enlightened individual with greater insight than the rest of us.

Using the Spiegeltent’s colourful lighting for the occasional dramatic pose or solo, working with the space creatively, giving to the audience even when we are not worthy, Le Foulard is an elegantly crafted show. I take issue with Mr Gaulier, whose opinions Hopkins relates to us: she is not boring and she does not look like a sausage.

Gob Squad: Before Your Very Eyes

Do you still suck your thumb? Is Peter ‘The Cat’ Bonetti still in goal? Are you in a west end musical yet?

These, I like to think, are the questions my younger self would ask my older self. Hindsight can be so useful. The Gob Squad company of young actors went through this process in real time and the outcome is one of the many tremendous scenes that coalesce… Before Your Very Eyes.

The piece was reviewed by Mim King for Total Theatre in June 2012, when it was shown at The Unicorn as part of LIFT and it remains as fresh, original and emotionally charged as it was then.

The tight direction, the assuredness of the cast and clever way in which the work manipulates the actors and the audience, remain. What has changed, of course, is the age of the actors. The gap between their younger selves, captured on film, and as they are now – young adults really – gives an even deeper sense of time passing and impending mortality.

By the time you read this, Gob Squad may have given the final ever performances of this show, in Ghent, hosted by the commissioning partner Campo. For a piece about the passing of time, how apt that it is itself time-limited. As they filed out of their mirrored stage box, backwards, and into the film of their younger selves, played backwards, a real shiver went down my back. That it must remain only in our memories is beautiful.

Ridiculusmus: The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland

In 2012, Jon Haynes & David Woods decided that their next show would be a family drama. They quickly discovered that mental illness played a central role in both their lives, and set about investigating how their experiences could become theatre. A trip to Finland was pivotal to the making of the show. At a conference about the Open Dialogue method of treating schizophrenia in Western Lapland, they took part in a series of treatment meetings (in character) with powerful, emotional results.

Two years on, Sick! Festival hosts the premiere of its commission of the show, to sell-out audiences for this much-loved company. It is a very ambitious premise; an attempt to marry form and content by splitting the audience in two and giving them a simultaneous performance of two plays with the same characters but different action. Turns out it is too ambitious; by the second night they have scooped out a chunk of text and done away with the repetition of the opening scenes.

The family drama features two brothers, Rupert (Richard Talbot) and Richard (Jon Haynes) their father Graham (David Woods) and his new wife Jade (Patrizia Paolini). David also plays a doctor. We first meet them through a series of fractured vignettes, the doctor and his patient (Richard), the brother and the step-mother arguing over food. The set divides the action with a screen of windows through which we can see and just about hear what is happening on the other side. The intention is to create a kind of auditory hallucination, to put us in the place of the schizophrenic, witness to multiple voices and characters. There are bright, scrutinising lights (Mischa Twitchin) and a subtle sound design (Salvador Garza).

There is some great dialogue in these opening scenes. Richard’s delusions are delicious; he is a Nobel prize winning novelist, actually Nabokov and Edna O’Brien. He was born from Hitler’s frozen sperm. The doctor tries to get to the trigger of his psychosis… there is something about his brother’s death, but gets nowhere. Richard refuses the drugs offered. The characters move between the dividing screen, punctuating each other’s conversations, overlapping the dialogue and gradually building up a sense of who they are and how they relate.

In the second half, with the audience shifting ends, the full-blown family saga unfolds. This is richer stuff. The father is a gruff bully, his younger wife is trying hard to accommodate a new family with help from a variety of head-dresses, the brothers are fighting over who was closer to their dead mother. A heightened, melodramatic moment features a toilet roll dolly to comic effect and of course it all ends badly. Hallucinatory elements creep in; the dad puts on a weird bull mask, brother Rupert a tall pointy witches hat.

The performances are all strong; Paolini’s role as the unhinged mother, burping and hopping like a frog, is quite wonderful. Perhaps due to the day’s large-scale changes, the company did not seem perfectly at one with the material; I sensed some unease between them. Once fully embedded the relationships will flow and characterization become stronger.

In Western Lapland, schizophrenia has been successfully treated by people coming together and listening, talking and being open to difference. The person at the centre of the process is not seen as ill or troublesome; they have a set of problems that need help. Ridiculusmus take this as a metaphor for dramatic practice and make us all part of the discussion, part of the attempt to move forwards without buoying up the profits of pharmaceutical companies.

There are not there yet with this play, which was rather unready for a world premiere. It is a fascinating subject and the elements are all there for another piece of classic Ridiculusmus; thought provoking, adventurous and always a little, dare I say, bonkers.

a smith: Two from a smith

Andy Smith is on a mission; he wants to change the world. He wants us to change the world, all of us, together, in this room. Smith is a writer, dramaturg and performer, most recently with Tim Crouch in what happens to the hope at the end of the evening, which he co-wrote. These two plays form part of his practice-as-research PhD at Lancaster University.

He opens with Commonwealth (2012). Standing behind a music stand and reading from a folder, small bottle of water anchored stage left, Smith begins Act One, The Situation. It is the mise-en-scène for this play, in which we are people who have come together in a room to hear a story. Smith slides slyly from the general to the personal; maybe the people listening to the story in that room, or this room, feel annoyed about something, maybe they are waiting for the story to begin. Gently his words, with their repeated phrases and questions – ‘Are you with me? Good’ – allow the audience to imagine this other room, allow us to visualize scenes. Thus Act Two, Speculation, suggests a Town Hall stand-off situation, or the effects on a relationship over a choice of cheese. By Act Three, The Suggestion, we are into more political ground, a plea for collective thinking to affect change. Smith makes us consider how making choices and taking chances can move things forward. That is his story, and our story, it is what the people in the room have listened to. It is a deceptively simple forty minutes. It gives space to your individual thoughts whilst you listen to the fractured abstraction of the text. I pictured Independence Square in Kiev, and how people there had come together to create change, and how people in cities in the world do that because there is nothing else they can do, and how much better it would be if people could just talk. Smith’s optimism is infectious.

All that is solid melts into air (2012) is a more strident manifesto (in fact the title comes from the Communist one). It is a play stripped to its core; its message a call to arms for us to change the world. Sitting this time, and talking without a script, Smith tells us that he thought about using lights to create mood, or film extracts to give context, but decided against it. All that is needed is in his words and in our imagination. The piece is beautifully written, cleverly layered and punctured with out-takes: ‘I think I know what you might be thinking, but stay with me please.’ It is as much a treatise on theatre, on the power of theatre to create communal acts of challenge, as a personal plea from a solo political being. For we are all here, with him. Just being and breathing. We are all in it together.

As dematerialized, totally in-your-head theatre, the double bill packs a punch and almost forces you to listen hard, conjure and think. It is not without lightness – ‘Shut up Andy!’ – and is passionate in its quiet, undemonstrative way. I wonder if the experience would be made more powerful if audience members could see each other better; from a seat in the front row I could only see Smith, so the feeling that we were all together was diluted. I’d have liked to see the faces of others and to acknowledge our collective presence in that room. But that, of course, would have made it another kind of play.