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.

Inua Ellams: Black T-Shirt Collection

There are several pairings in Black T-shirt Collection, the third work by Nigerian-born Inua Ellams, who has enjoyed a swift ride to becoming a playwright of national status since his first production in 2009.

First, there is black and white, the colours that define the set. There are black blocks, a white cardboard box, a mono animation projected onto the back wall, and then there are the black t-shirts with white slogans that become the defining symbol of the play.

Inua introduces his protagonists, brothers Mohammed and Matthew (two ‘M’s), one Muslim and one Christian, one natural and one fostered. The rest of the family are two women, the mother and a sister.

The play begins with the announcement of the death of Mohammed and works backwards in detailing how he met his end. It is not altogether a linear narrative and moves across time and continent elegantly as the story unravels.

Inua is primarily a poet. His language is rich, defining place and atmosphere in bursts of prose or rhyme that repay close attention. There is a recurring motif of light filtering through dust, of things not quite in focus. This feeling of blurring vision mirrors the tale being told.

Matthew is an artist and entrepreneur, the younger of the brothers. Mohammed is a social creature, outgoing, with an easy rapport with his neighbourhood mates. He seems at home in his skin. Matthew reveres him and they have a close relationship despite their different religious backgrounds and parentage. So close that when Mohammed is outed in a clinch with another man, Matthew insists they flee Nigeria together.

Here the plot whizzes along with speed, journeying to Egypt, London and eventually China as the T-shirt business becomes a worldwide brand. There are encounters with PR folk and kindly hosts, they upscale to production lines and distribution contracts, and fame and fortune come quick. The demands on the brothers naturally causes tension between them.

The heart of the piece gets clotted up in this socio-political landscape. In the earnest need to make a statement about globalisation and exploitation of labour, the nub of the story retreats.

Too many characters lack sufficient depth, the descriptions of the business world are superficial, and the brothers, who have such strongly defined characters, begin to become caricatures.

I longed for it to remain focused on Nigeria and Egypt. We could have learned more about being a gay man in a dangerous country, about the massacre in Jos and the religious divide. About the family left behind which was given very scant coverage. It may be that these themes were investigated in the previous plays, and thus Inua felt the call to extend his geographical horizons. But it made for a long listen, with little visual distraction.

Inua is a fine presence on stage, confident and in full control of his material. The movement was a little too illustrative in places, but overall his delivery is strong and his voice certainly one that needs to be heard.

If Black T-Shirt Collection was intended to be a dynamic overview of globalisation from an unusual perspective, for a young audience at the National Theatre and around the country, it hits the right buttons, as its reviews to date support.

www.inuaellams.com

.dash: And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out

And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out was one of those most frustrating of fringe shows, where it’s clear lots of thinking and ideas have informed what you are watching onstage but they don’t make it into the work. A miniature train set loops around the space, there are two running machines, side by side, a drum kit and a model box, and a live feed camera trained on the interior. An intriguing collection of ingredients, but it wasn’t clear to me why they were there.

We enter the space to the shambling drone of a narrator of sorts, brandishing a mic, whose monotone monologue circles around a framing idea for the piece – that they are going to talk to us about stars. Bookending his ramshackle presence is a leanly choreographed female narrator, much more able to get to the point, who interrupts and underscores the narrative throughout with lavishly detailed descriptions of the lifecycle of a star. The metaphorical connection they wish to make is between two individuals meeting, building a relationship and splitting up, and this epic tale of particles colliding to make light.

But there wasn’t enough light in the story for me to feel this metaphor could hold true. Put simply, there wasn’t enough believable love. So much focus was on the form of the storytelling, the frame, the ways in and out, that there was no space to share with us the beauty and power of the love in the relationship – a connection that for me felt necessary to justify the weighty parallels being drawn.

The company have devised some witty and believable material for their couple to play out, although they’re a young company and the relationship too feels quite immature (not necessarily an issue in itself, but becoming more so when placed alongside epic tales of stars gathering and collapsing). They are combining some interesting languages on stage and their storytelling feels fresh: it has a familiar frame but their storytellers never pushed us into overdone quasi mystical territory. Their technological ambitions were hampered in a festival venue and the intention behind the use of live feed wasn’t clear to me, but I admired the company’s energy and I would like to see them develop this piece further.

www.dashtheatre.co.uk

Ivana Muller: 60 Minutes of Opportunism

I decided to see 60 Minutes of Opportunism knowing precious little about Ivana, her work or this particular piece, just taking the words and image from the Basement’s brochure as my guide.

The seating is raked up one end of the space, with a long and empty vista ahead. Into this walks Ivana, wearing a green top, black trousers, carrying a backpack and with a pouch on her chest. A microphone dangles by her hip. She has a faraway look in her eyes. There is a continuous beeping sound. I like her look and composure as her voiceover begins to reveal the premise of the performance.

Ivana has been asked to make a show in which she is physically present on stage, rather than behind the scenes (she is a choreographer) and with no use of film. Not trusting her ability to dance well enough, or not wanting to, she subverts this request into a text-based piece which requires the audience to look at her and listen, to imagine scenes, to visualise her dancing, to take a journey with her.

The text is punctuated by the repeated refrain ‘I want to take this opportunity to…’ Opportunism has a negative connotation. She’s taking advantage of our patience as an audience and offers a playful challenge. The piece is series of suggestions, commands, jokes, asides and thoughts. Ivana controls the voiceover and switches between this and her live voice via her chest pouch. High-heeled shoes are taken from the backpack to help us view her as a dancer; longer legs, more feminine. She holds a ‘dancer’ pose. The shoes don’t stay on long. She pretends she’s got a bomb in her backpack. She smokes a cigarette, despite having given up. She sings us a song to her own Karaoke backing. Although little happens in terms of movement or action there are plenty of images conjured through the writing. There is a clever wit at work playing with the relationship of performer to audience, of self-representation and the audience gaze.

In essence she plays with the conventions of what we expect a performer to do. The Ivana whose voice we hear is somehow different from the one on stage. She says this is the first time she’s been on stage since 2002, yet the physical Ivana is touring the show and has performed it fourteen times (I admit I looked that up on the interweb). That it doesn’t become pretentious or boring is evidence of the thought and skill that have gone into its making and to Ivana’s confident, disarming performance.

Covering herself with a black cloth, she begins to crumple. The narrative becomes more internalised and revealing now that we can’t see her. She, however, can see us.

At forty minutes in, and acknowledged by Ivana, it is the right time for something new to happen. From the rear door, other black cloth covered people appear and adopt fixed poses. It’s like a railway station concourse full of static commuters – uniformed, homogenous, rendered invisible. One becomes a mountain for Ivana to climb. The audience needs a change of viewpoint and she needs to overcome her vertigo. The cloths are removed to reveal the characters beneath; volunteers who hold their poses beautifully and with great strength of character.

By the end of the show I feel I have got to know Ivana, to like her style, her voice and her mind. When she finally meets our gaze, puts her eyes into ours, it feels like an act of friendship and a thank-you rather than a smug establishing of authority. It has been an intricate and intimate hour of self-centred opportunism that didn’t alienate the audience. We hear repeated beeping again… is the bomb about to go off?

www.ivanamuller.com

Action Hero: Watch Me Fall

I have an in-built suspicion of young companies who suddenly become darlings of the critics and the theatre-pundits.

Action Hero is one such, and though I enjoyed their previous production, A Western, I couldn’t compute the measure to which it overwhelmed many who saw it.

So I was pleased to find myself engaging far more with Watch Me Fall, which to my mind is a piece with more to say and a more theatrical construct for saying it.

Based around the theme of daredevils, but largely focused on Evel Knievel, it has a traverse set-up with the audience on two sides. We are onlookers at a series of stunts rather than participants, encouraged to whoop and holler from the start. This is what expectant audiences do. We are here to see something spectacular happen. We can see that this will be stunt-lite, given the limits of the space, the ping-pong balls, mini-Coke bottles and mini-bicycle, but still we join in with the unashamed crowd rousing from the tousle-haired James Stenhouse. The well chosen music contributes too.

Referencing daredevils such as Henri la Moth who, aged 71, dived 40ft into only 14 inches of water and Roy Fransen, who dived 60ft into a blazing pool after first setting light to himself, under various pseudonyms (Dunc Danger, Jonny Legend, Dick Cheney) James performs a range of innocent stunts for our pleasure. Assisted by Gemma Paintin in a stars and stripes dress, they pop ping-pong balls from mouth to bucket and play mini golf, set light to the crash helmet, do weight-lifting with big bottles of Coke.

Our discomfort grows as the stunts take a tougher turn. Gemma kicks James around the head with real energy, he waterboards her with Coca-Cola and then he makes the jump off the ramp on the little bike, landing in a broken heap. This final act mirrors the grim end of Knievel’s career in 1975 when he broke many bones and finished up in a coma for months.

Action Hero layer this engaging spectacle with ideas around the attractiveness of the alpha male and the public’s seemingly unending thirst for entertainment at any cost. It doesn’t go particularly deep, but it is thought provoking. I particularly liked the nod to London 2012 and the incongruous sponsorship of sport by Coca-Cola, and the frisson of danger from being so close-up. The whole was made more enjoyable by the presence of a group of young kids opposite me (a breakdance troupe perhaps) who were very keen to get some free pop, keen to chuck balls around, and genuinely pretty terrified when events turned dark. They are the audience that matters. I wonder what star rating they would apply?

www.actionhero.org.uk

Sandy Grierson / Lorne Campbell: Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture Dance and Box

‘Arthur Cravan: poet and boxer, captain of industry, sailor of the Pacific, muleteer, orange-picker in California, hotel thief, snake charmer, grandson of the Queen’s chancellor, nephew of Oscar Wilde, lumberjack in the great forests, chauffeur in Berlin, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s great nephew’…and so the list goes on.

He is best known as a writer and weaver of tales, which gives the performer of this piece the opportunity to take as many liberties with fact and fiction as they like. To play with form, to play with the audience and to effect an act transubstantiation, as actor becomes subject.

Sandy Grierson and co-creator Lorne Campbell have taken the play through many stages of development to reach its current state of text, movement and meta-theatrical construct. The audience is in on it from the start; there is no pretence or over-cleverness. If you are told at the beginning that Sandy (playing Sandy) met his great grandfather Arthur Cravan in a drum and bass club in Lisbon in 2010 – and that Arthur was born aged 22 – you can relax and enjoy the ride to come.

Highly enjoyable it is too. Our programmes become paper hats and several of us are given roles to play, or asked questions, and memorably, brought on stage to box (in my case Tom Morris who did sterling work with the fists). Sandy is magnificent and mercurial given the complexities and conceits of the text and the physicality of the role. There is a delightful looseness of limb about him and he works the stage like a prize-fighter, confident in control of a small range of props and the audience.

The story moves through various episodes in Cravan’s life, introducing a range of characters: Marcel Duchamp, Trotsky, Apollinaire and Mina Loy, the love of his life. Audience members are allotted these names but other than Mina are not invited to engage much more. The piece ends beautifully as we pass a paper boat around the auditorium, waving goodbye to Mina on the coast. We are asked to consider our options – to leave forever or return to port and Mina. Sandy tells us: ‘Know that dreaming you are here, know that dreaming you are there, is exactly the same. Know that a slight imaginary choice is the only difference and that for good or bad you are making it.’ And we still have our boats, if we should ever need to use them. It’s a great metaphor for what theatre can do, how it can affect change and take you places whilst being aware of the actor on the stage and our complicity and involvement in its making.

Total Theatre