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.

LipService: Inspector Norse (The Girl With Two Screws Left Over)

Winter is cold in Sweden. You need to wear a warm sweater. You need to learn how to walk with sticks. You need to know how to construct flat-pack scenery. Thus with minimal fuss the stage is set for an anarchic romp through the Swedish TV crime genre, involving four-piece pop band Fabba, an alarming amount of roadkill, community knitting, and a streetwise moose.

Involving the audience from the start (in order to provide ‘meaningful engagement in the arts’), playing with dramatic devices, and sneaking in some meta-theatre, Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding are delightfully batty and assured performers, whether in character or as themselves. And what great characters they have created. Sandra Larsson, the sweater-wearing detective who doesn’t do small-talk; Erik, the lugubrious cop with his wavering accent; Freya, the brunette out of Fabba – or is she?; and, my favourite, Sven from Fabba, slightly pervy with his plastic playmate and hot tub. It is less bewildering than it sounds – the pair excel in doubling up, and subverting form: ‘I’m going behind the set to change because that’s professional,’ announces Maggie with a flounce.

LipService obviously have a very loyal audience. Much of the ingenious set has been provided by knitting groups on the tour. We happily help to decorate the tree to recreate spring, make our ‘sporklers’ for a firework effect, and do all the sounds effects requested. Filmed excerpts by Vita Fox both support and supplement the story. There is original music and songs (Oliver Vibrans and Malcolm Raeburn).

If it seemed a little small on the Theatre Royal stage, Inspector Norse was a refreshing change to the usual theatre on offer here. There are echoes of Spymonkey in the absurdity of it, and of Forkbeard in the inventiveness. From its lovely ‘humanette’ effect, to crispbreads as foley (they make great crunching on snow footsteps) and the unnecessary plot-point of a knitted spanner, LipService are masters of their material and performance. Skol!

Nicole Beutler: 1:Songs

The stage is bare apart from five microphones on stands at the front and a blurred projection on the far wall. Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti enters. In silhouette, she is a dramatic sharp-edged shape whispering hello to us. Gradually the sound and light build and a tune begins: melodic piano, gentle singing (music by Gary Shepherd). The projected image gains clarity and starts to move, very slowly. It’s a scene from Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma, Città Aperta, the moment when Anna Magnani runs forward, falls and dies. This provides the theme for the series of songs, speeches and movement phrases that follow. Death is always at the door; the protagonist is a tragic figure.

As the show progresses, a variety of women’s stories are sung or given form through movement. Ibelisse is constantly arresting and an excellent all-rounder. Less satisfying is the structure and content of the piece, which became a confusing mismatch of the profound and trite, its style veering from loud to extremely loud to quiet. Whilst the flyer notes that all the women are tragic victims, there seemed to be no interrogation of why, no context to explain their behaviour – particularly pertinent in the case of Medea. Without more substance, 1:Songs lacked impact beyond the physical and technical fireworks.

Reckless Sleepers: A String Section

Four very different looking women, four different styles of black dress, four different types of black shoes, four different dining chairs, and four saws – all the same. From B&Q.

Holding eye contact and draped elegantly over their chairs, like classical musicians summoning a muse, the quartet slowly pick up their instruments and begin to saw at their chair legs.

There is no music other than the sounds they make, human and mechanical. There is no mood lighting and no clear subtext. They are doing what they are doing. All four are dancers so there is a consciously fluid and shapely quality to the movement and they are self aware, complicit in the ridiculousness of their task. Within its loose structure there are bursts of frantic action and moments of still reflection, a rhythm. They are timing themselves by a clock on the wall. We begin to see different personalities and approaches: the cheeky one, the flamboyant one, the sedate one. It’s almost like a girl-band.

As the chairs reduce in height, and saws flail about, and legs go akimbo, the audience giggles and sighs in turn. When will they stop? Chainsaw anyone? But end it does, the women sweating demurely, the task completed to their own satisfaction.

This is a curious piece. It is totally open to interpretation. For Maddy Costa, writing in the Guardian, it was a powerful reflection of the role of women in society – she saw in it the harshness of domesticity, a statement about pornography and the birth of her two children. It did not affect me so directly, but thoughts bubble up over the 45 minutes – it’s like a short durational piece. Do women compete like men and was their technique occasionally rubbish on purpose? Are they in control or being coerced? Are we all failing and falling and doing purposeless things to fill our days? A String Section poses questions, and that is the aim of Reckless Sleeper’s Mole Wetherell’s work; he puts it out there and lets us make of it what we will. Devised by Leen Dewilde, and performed by her and three others, it was an interesting experience, and very watchable.

Stuart Bowden: She Was Probably Not A Robot

Talent oozes out of Stuart Bowden. His imaginative, poetic writing is beautiful. He has great comic timing and clownish physicality. He makes an easy rapport with the audience, ad-libs, gives good face. These skills came together in his latest show, She Was Probably Not A Robot, which developed themes from the previous one, The World Holds Everyone Apart, Apart From Us.

The sole survivor of a catastrophe that destroys Planet Earth – we are all dead, some rather brutally we are told – Stuart mourns his dead ex-girlfriend Veronica, as well as his dog. Celeste, an alien from a distant planet, who is a bit simple and a bit stage shy, has been making a replica earth for 25,000 years, as a hobby. That’s very handy for Stuart.

So why didn’t I find it as compelling and enjoyable as I wanted it to be? The fault lies in the slimness of the story and the fact that nothing is really at stake for the central character, who, to be honest, is a buffoon with not that much going for him.

There are some lovely, macabre scenes. Stuart sleeping with his dead dog on his feet ‘for warmth… no, just for’, and Veronica’s head on the stick of his playhorse for company. There is a running gag on the pronunciation of ‘debris’. He gets the audience singing along to a jaunty refrain – and he has a very fine singing voice. An episode depicting his journey on an air-mattress across rough seas (aka the audience) was fun but went on for too long.

The best moments are where he reflects on Veronica, short descriptions that are left-field and lovely, ending: ‘She was… and then she was not.’

It is funny in places, it is moving in places, it is always watchable, and Stuart is a very likeable performer. The influence of Philip Burgers (Dr Brown) is evident. I’d like to see more depth to the story, less reliance on silliness.

Melanie Wilson: Landscape 11

This is a flinty and enigmatic work by sound artist, writer and performer Melanie Wilson which interweaves the lives of three women, separated by time and circumstance. The landscape of Exmoor and the narrator’s camera are the lenses through which we observe these lives as they slowly emerge from the shadows and take shape. Melanie is Vivien, a photojournalist. She had a friend in Mina, a Muslim women who has been killed, and a great grandmother, Beatrice, whose presence seems to haunt the cottage in which Vivien is staying and whose letters set her off on a trail of self-discovery.

Melanie controls the film and sound from her console desk, in a subtle light (designer Ben Paley). The film projections (by Will Duke) mix close-ups with distant shots of moorland, and some bold mysterious flashes designed to startle. As the story progressed, I longed for a change of voice, for something a little more demonstrative. There was such a coolness to the presentation and delivery that I was prevented from connecting to the characters, despite some pretty harrowing events.

The language was poetic and there were some lovely phrases… something about ‘being aware of the fist of it without being afraid of the bruise’. Generally though I found it rather overwritten, and would have liked a bit more economy, humour and personality to make the women come alive. They didn’t seem properly rooted in their time – the 19th Century language in particular.

The soundscape was strong and effective, bringing texture and atmosphere to the fore. Landscape 11 was a bold mixture of meta-theatrical form with traditional storytelling. It grew stealthily towards a suitably ambiguous end, but, despite love being a central theme, it didn’t pack a tough enough emotional punch.

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