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.

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.

Martin Schick and Damir Todorovic: Holiday on Stage – Last Days of Luxury

Dear Martin and Damir,

I am writing to congratulate you both on winning the Nefertiti Award for your performance Holiday on Stage at the Basement last night. It was well deserved, though I know lots of other companies who should have won it instead. Yours sincerely, a fan.

Wrong-footing, double-crossing, provoking and mollifying, Martin Schick and Damir Todorovic enjoy testing the moral high ground. They play with themes of celebrity, cliché, politics and the nature of theatre in a delightfully deadpan double-act. They pitch competition against cooperation, constantly undermining their words and their actions.

Having received their award, the pair bring on a wonky door – the stage door – a sofa and a clothes rail. The makeshift screen at the back is projected on with logos of the show’s funders. ‘This union promises hope’ and ‘art is a universal language’ are a couple of phrases that are lifted from real famous people’s pronouncements and formed into a conversation that somehow makes sense.

‘Let’s do something beautiful,’ says Martin, so they strip down to their buff coloured pants and strike a contemporary dance pose across the front of the space. They then try to look at themselves from a distance, to see what we are seeing; they are not impressed.

It is the non-stop inventiveness that is so compelling. They make everything seem simple and slapdash, but in fact it is clever and thoroughly prepared, in a pleasantly loose way. The element of competition builds when Moonsuk Choi knocks on the door. He is a tall Korean who wants to be an artist. A series of questions are asked of him to see if he qualifies for such elevated status, and he dances to prove his worth. This sudden placement of pure contemporary dance is at first troubling. Is this meant to be funny or serious? Is it pretentious or beautiful? It’s another square in the patchwork of Holiday on Stage, questioning our preconceptions. Another two wannabe artists join: Rosalind Wynn, who can’t do much so is asked to clean-up, and does so through a remote control vacuum cleaner; and Karoki from Iran, an illegal immigrant who can dance a bit.

The sofa being too small for all of them, they have a competition to judge their value, with the audience asking questions. ‘Who has the biggest feet?’ ‘Who can speak more than three languages?’ ‘Who is wearing a Christmas jumper?’

Holiday on Stage – Last Days of Luxury was extraordinary. It managed to be lavish yet frugal, funny, meaningful and engaging. It was the first piece that Martin and Damir have made together; their chemistry is remarkable and their physical differences make for a great stage picture, whether they are in pants or tutu’s or rabbit-head tops. They use their dance ability limitedly; they are a bit of a tease. The company as a whole is great, and hats off to Karoki who had only joined it the day of the performance.

I would like to meet the woman who supplied the final question; it summed up the essence of the show so well. As the performers competed for a glass of champagne, she asked, ‘Which of you likes to share?’ Rosalind stepped up to the glass, and shared it. And the list of credits rolled on and on, and the mess on the stage remained, and that was a great little holiday we shared.

Stillpoint: Moon Project

In Stillpoint’s Moon Project there is good chemistry between Rachel Blackman’s character Leilah, and Jules Munns’ Shahab, demonstrated through language and physicality. He is soft and languid, she is tense and jerky; the way they move illustrates their differences and is a strong visual metaphor for the ensuing action.

Moon Project is about a collision and the effects that it has on those involved. It is also about being far from home and family, the nature of love, and what a person wants from life.

Leilah works in the bowels of a building, a museum, and in her black two-piece and glasses seems yearning to find light and flight. She has attempted that – a hang-gliding class – but couldn’t take the leap. Shahab has travelled widely, leaving family in Iran and settling in Britain for reasons he can’t explain, even to himself. He seeks companionship, through a series of women, but can’t find love.

When he flings Leilah into the universe via the bonnet of his car, he does a runner. That’s what he does.

Stillpoint puts movement at the centre of its productions; it’s the form through which narrative and character grow. At times it is a great shorthand and captures an idea or conveys a thought with graceful economy. But it can shift into unnecessary mime. Not every gesture – phone calls, eating – needs to be so sharply defined. It becomes a distraction, largely because the acting is so good. Rachel Blackman is compelling as Leilah, releasing her pent up knowledge and passion without entirely letting go. Jules Munn is convincing too, making a hit-and-run driver a sympathetic character.

The dialogue is cracking; witty and natural and not over-explanatory. There is a lot to explain, rather too much in fact. Moon Project is multi-layered and struggles a bit to get everything in; Leilah’s metallurgist father, Shahab’s mixed parentage, his poetry and her obsession with space travel. Whilst this keeps an audience on its toes, some of the backstory feels superfluous.

Structurally the piece works well, first defining the characters then gradually bringing these two very different people together. The hospital scene, whilst pivotal, is over-long. It provides a change of pace but creates a dip. Greg Mickelborough’s lighting in this scene is very effective, and is good throughout. There is a good choice of songs and sounds by the company.

It’s the relationship of the two that forms the heart of the play. As they inch towards a relationship, we kind of want Leilah to let her hair down, but Moon Project has others ideas. It fast forwards to 2019, to Leilah and Shahab as friends leading separate lives, each having found what they needed from life, each still looking to the stars.

Rosana Cade: Walking : Holding

It is a pleasant enough way to spend forty minutes on a wet Saturday afternoon, walking around town holding hands with a succession of people of undetermined sexuality. Conversation could, as the creator of the piece Rosana Cade said at the outset, come from either of us, or not come at all. As we set off under a big black umbrella, Rosana explained that she liked holding hands with her ex-girlfriend in public, but the effect that had on the public in Glasgow was less appealing. So how do I feel about walking around with her as my partner? I feel fine. We do a quick turn round a male gay sex shop, stop and read some ‘proud’ graffiti and agree that Brighton is a wonderfully liberal place to live.

That’s the nub of the problem with this piece. As I am passed on from person to person, there are no hostile glances, no raised eyebrows. In Ipswich and in Cork, the effect on the participant must have been far more profound.

The journey is a somewhat random stroll through parts of Brighton; arcades feature but without an explanation of why, and there are a couple of stops to look at our reflections in windows. At one point, the enigmatic Marta asks me to close my eyes and walk for a while, listening to the noises of the street. That’s the only piece of instruction I get on the journey and I am not sure what it is meant to make me feel. For most of the time the walk is a series of conversations, mainly instigated by me. A couple of the guides, some of whom were young students, were very nervous and their hands shook in mine. It was almost as if I was the performer here. I felt that some kind of narrative should have been threaded through the experience rather than just walking, particularly if the main idea behind it – of facing a hostile or curious public – is missing.

It ended on the beach, waves murderously high, with B.A. from Chicago. She has been in Brighton for four months and is happy as a bird can be. We paddle. She is warm and open and lovely. They have all been nice people, if rather uncertain of their role in this. I wonder what they thought of me?

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