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: Thirunarayan Productions, 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 learning disability arts charity Carousel. She is an occasional performer and installation maker in collaboration with other artists, and is a Trustee at Brighton Open Air Theatre.

Third World Television: The Epicene Butcher and Other Stories for Consenting Adults

In the ancient Japanese picture-based story telling tradition, Kamishibai, the travelling tellers sold sweets to gather in an audience. For this Brighton Festival show, anyone who sat in the front row was given a lolly, one provocatively pre-sucked by the cheeky Chalk Boy (Glen Biderman-Pam). Chalk Boy acted as scene changer and entertainer, silent throughout, writing up introductory captions before each tale. First up, ‘Perverts, this one’s for you.’

Jemma Khan, performer and artist, lived in Japan for two years and trained with veteran Kamishibai artist Rokuda Genji. She was inspired to turn it into a contemporary form and teamed up with South African colleagues Gwydian Beynon (writer) Carlos Amata (artist) and director John Trengove. The Epicene Butcher is bang up to date with stories about the dream life of cats, Super Mario facing off turtles, the Fukushima earthquake and a version of Hentai (animated pornography) performed with hysterical girlish giggles.

The set-up is kept lo-fi and simple, as it would have been on the road in 1920s Japan – a wooden frame into which paintings are slotted and revealed as the story is told. Jemma Khan, dressed like a stereotypical Harajuku teenager, adopts different accents to suit each story. She has extremely clear pronunciation and a tone of voice that is easy on the ear. The form of presentation doesn’t change over the fifty-five minutes so there is little element of surprise in the staging, apart from Chalk Boy’s louche interventions and an eclectic selection of music.

But the content, both visual and aural, is surprising and occasionally surreal. The drawings range from competent to beautiful. There are close-ups and landscapes and panoramas, some are like a comic strip, one is purely graphic and one has a touch of Hokusai. Gwydian Beynon, who has written several popular South African soap operas and TV dramas, is playful with words and has a brilliant grasp of the bizarre and gory. The story of the Epicene Butcher is a great piece of writing with gothic rhyming phrases.

Sightlines at the Dome Studio Theatre were not ideal for a piece that really needs to be seen head on, and from not too far away. A little knowledge of Japanese culture adds to the experience. Banzai!

Red Herring Productions: Funny Peculiar

What makes a person ‘eccentric?’ A lack of inhibitions? Non-conformist behaviour or dress sense? An obsessive interest in just one thing?

The group taking part in Funny Peculiar, a walking tour of Brighton, is asked to consider this question before setting off. It is the first of series of quiet, contemplative moments amidst the madcap escapade presented by Leslie and Lesley (aka Paschale Straiton and Ivan Fabrega – see what they did there?) A background in street theatre and community performance allows our hosts, in sunny orange and yellow outfits, to guide us with assurance and composure even as things go wonderfully, intentionally awry. Their illustrated leaflet, with portraits of the Brighton odd-bods, is a helpful reference en route.

A beautifully designed music and soundscape by Joss Peach, with voice-overs, guides us through Brighton’s gardens, back alleys, and seafront with tales of local eccentrics. Many will be familiar, some may be invented, a few might surprise, but each pocket biography is deftly written and occasionally brought to life. These are thrilling moments. There is audacity, wit and participation as we learn about Brighton’s notorious characters and also about ourselves. It is worth staying close to catch the quips. It won’t give too much away to quote ‘The Cameltoe Arms’ or Leslie’s ‘nice work with the probing finger’ – double entendre is rife. Passers-by become close personal friends: ‘oh look, there’s Godfrey with his two bottles of water. He has everything in pairs.’

There are facts amongst the fiction, improvisation amongst the set-pieces. I was reminded during the audio-guided sections of Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice which had a similarly elegant spoken commentary.

It is heartening to see how quickly strangers can become friends, how we are so willing to engage and take instruction. By the end of seventy minutes, Lesley and Leslie have made blissed-out eccentrics of us all.

Circa 69: The New Ten Commandments

‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. It seems a clear enough rule by which to live a decent life. But when you start to unpick it, complications sneak in. So it goes through all the propositions put to us, the ‘focus group’, by Simon Wilkinson (playing some version of himself) and his ‘intern’ from Lourdes, Liyuwerk Sheway Mulugeta (co-creator of the piece), on behalf of the mysterious LDD – a market research group who have ‘tasked’ the group with ‘re-thinking, re-branding, and re-launching the Ten Commandments for the 21st century’.

Sitting at a long table, with colour-coded folders and badges, Simon and Liyuwerk pitch questions to us about morality, society, environment, economics and love. We are asked individually and as a group to discuss these questions, some of which are intentionally provocative. Once the question has been chewed over, we each write a new commandment on a post-it note.

The group at this particular session was mainly one big gang of friends, who had no idea what they were going to see and at first seemed a bit out of kilter with the roles being played by Simon, Liyuwerk and us. But gradually real engagement took hold, people argued with passion, sometimes opposing the ideology put to them.

Projected still and moving images, graphic statements and reportage both real and fake punctuated the verbal presentation. A film of Ethiopian children arriving in Paris to be adopted was a sudden slap of reality. This was Liyuwerk’s story. She told it quietly with the words ‘Mama Baba’ projected on her forehead.

Having written our new commandments, we then filed one by one into a ‘voting booth’ to pick our favourites. The process was managed with a light touch.

In another room, Elvis, on a film loop, thanked us for participating. Simon, speaking through a megaphone ‘for effect’, told us a story of everyday heroism, and announced the winning commandments, which would be listed on the company website – remaining there until outvoted by a subsequent ‘focus group’.

The New Ten Commandments was an interesting, lively event, dependent on the people around the table, and encouraging thought and debate within a theatrical conceit. What we only touched on, though, was the legitimacy of commandments or rules and their necessity in the 21st century. Those handed down by Moses came from a deity, head of a monotheist religion. Take away the belief in ‘one god’, which might be thought better than another person’s god, and many of the world’s problems would surely dissolve.

The piece doesn’t quite end when you leave the building, as some people were selected to pass to the second level of market research and asked to make a telephone call. I won’t spoil what happens next, but it serves to keep the conversation going, to blur fact and fiction, and contribute to the show.

As piece of interactive theatre, it brought to mind Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe’s The Oh Fuck Moment, but here we were talking less about ourselves and more about the world at large. The performances had the right level of friendliness and control, the imagery and film-work were slick and illuminating. If the overall concept is a strange one, The New Ten Commandments makes a potent and engrossing night out.

Two hours later and ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ becomes ‘Don’t Kill People Who Don’t Want To Be Killed.’ Better? Discuss.

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.

Total Theatre