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.

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.

Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze: À Bas Bruit

On stage is a large wheel and a low platform with a moving travelator. There is also a thunder-board and a slatted screen, some boxes, some lights. They are there as tools rather than a set; there are lights around the walls, cables, projectors. It is a casual affair.

We are given a page of translated texts with our programme. It has four extracts on it, three of which refer to solitary walking, as a way of experiencing the landscape and people, and of enhancing creativity. Two male performers enter the space, one goes to the wheel, the other passes a lamp-light over the slatted screen and releases a film, crackly and atmospheric. The walking begins…

Mathurin Bolze is one of the leading lights of French contemporary circus, last seen at LIMF with Du Goudron et des Plumes (2011). This year’s MIme Festival offering, À Bas Bruit, ‘explores what happens when feelings and ideas rebel against the established order of things’, and is inspired by the work of avant-garde film-maker and anthropologist, Jean Rouch. For the first time, Bolze directs without himself performing in the piece.

À Bas Bruit features three performers, Elise Legros, Cyrille Musy and Mitia Fedotenko – all, as you would expect, very highly skilled acrobatics and dancers. There is clever, fluid work on the travelator (which, along with the ‘hamster wheel’, perhaps represents the treadmill of life). There are duets and throws and catches and leaps. The films are projected on to different surfaces and generally feature people walking amongst autumnal scenery. There is a nice scratchy soundscape and some songs to provide a human voice. The lighting (Jeremie Cusenier) is magnificent; and the staging (Frederic Marolleau) and sound design (by Goury) are impressive. It is an accomplished, well-produced and layered piece. The audience can relax and enjoy the physical expertise on show.

For those who seek a bit more than entertainment it is less satisfactory. The relationship between them and us is distant: there is a lack of character, no emotional pull.

There are a couple of very odd segments which do make you sit up. Mitia Fedotenko suddenly goes into a good clown routine. It is the first time there has been any contact made with the audience. It springs out of nowhere and bears no relation to anything that as gone before. It feels shoe-horned in to demonstrate ability and add variety. Elise and Cyrille have a jokey routine on the travelator, then Elise gets battered for being a bit irritating. The male-female dynamic is incredibly stereotyped throughout.

Eventually all three take to the wheel, building up tremendous speed, and then reach a point of total stillness. This would have been a great ending, with just Mitia’s head in a golden light. Instead, the cast shifts boxes around and prepare other surfaces onto which photographed faces of many ethnicities are projected, in homage (we presume) to Jean Rouch’s work on African ethnography.

The title translates as ‘low noise’. I wish it had made its propounded ideas of rebellion and mass movements a bit louder.

Ivo Dimchev: Lili Handel

Let’s hear it for transformation. There is a slow tottering walk on stilettos, the body quivering in its shag-pile jacket and beaded thong, the head bejeweled, bald, white. On the sound system the slowed down groan of Nat King Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and then the words: ‘Hello, I’m Lili Handel, let’s have a party.’

Quite who, or what, Lili Handel is is one of the main conundrums of this astonishing piece of performance theatre, by a man totally subsumed by his creation. Many have taken Lili to be an aged diva, and, in the hoarse whispers and tortured opera arias, there is more than a whiff of Baby Jane in this character. But to me it seemed less gender specific, almost more animal than human.

Over the course of an hour, Lili was playful, malicious, provocative and needy. It was rather like watching a precocious, talented child doing whatever the hell they wanted. Whether scampering about slapping the buttocks squealing delightedly ‘stop it, that hurts’ and checking to see how pink they were getting, or doing elephant impressions with a battered horn, Lili was constantly surprising. The interruptions – ‘we definitely need some good poetry now’ or ‘this is too exhausting and doesn’t make a lot of sense’ – demonstrate that beneath the apparent buffoonery is a layer of questioning about performance itself.

Ivo takes this further by asking an, in this case, unfortunate audience member if he’d like to go to the pub and have a chat, or stay with the show and provide some motivation (Lili’s motivation has gone). Sadly the chap is stuck for words and it gets a little embarrassing. Similarly, auctioning a vial of blood isn’t as lively as it could be. ‘I got £50 in Bristol,’ Lili murmurs. But what’s the right price for an artist’s blood? What would Bryony Kimmings say?

The show is all about the body and Lili’s love / hate relationship with it; ours too, as viewers and voyeurs. It is a willful, shape-changing thing; the flesh pale and solid but vulnerable. Throughout the show Ivo’s physical skill is magnificent: look how he arches backwards over the chair with a seemingly rubber spine. There are some stunning movement sequences – an odd running motif while sat down wearing a battered sort of Stetson, or twirling a ribbon to make us relax and enjoy the beauty – and everything is elegantly choreographed. Vocally too his range is extraordinary, from a conversational back of the throat mutter to the howl of a wild beast, and proper operatic technique.

Some have found this show baffling and boring. The Brighton audience appeared wooed by a performer so at one with his creation, who knew his craft, created magic, kept us guessing and made us think. Lili Handel is an old piece and Ivo has made many others since, but this is the only one that gets booked in the UK. Programmers! Please bring him here again, I think there is much more fun to be had.