Author Archives: Lisa Wolfe

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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.

Third Angel and SBC Theatre: The Journeys

Here is one of those ideas that seems simple on the surface but which digs deep. Across a map of the world, two men and two women are gently placing split chickpeas in lines, joining points between black pebbles. The lines mark journeys, and notes of some of these journeys are read out at intervals. You can read them too, placed along the map’s edge.

There are stories of migration and immigration, at once personal and political and the gentle rhythm of the work being done on the floor, and the non-theatrical delivery of the readings has a quiet power. Sunlight filters through high, stained glass windows. There are dark wooden pews to sit on. Both add to the peacefulness and intent of the action.

It’s not unlike Stan’s Café’s Of All The People In All The World, which used another well-traded commodity – rice – bringing abstract statistics to life through piles or grains of rice. The Journeys may lack that show’s visual impact and wow factor, but it speaks powerfully of life today for hundreds of thousands of humans.

Some will find the speakers insufficiently performative and mutter ‘use bigger print on the cards’ or ‘get some sight reading practice’. But I found the occasional mis-reads and hesitation refreshing – they are representatives of ordinary folk, and it’s good to hear an ordinary voice.

As invited, I wrote my own migration story, which for my forebears involved a timely escape from pogroms, but which has had little impact on how I have lived my life. The Journeys is a graphic reminder that for many, that is sadly not the case.

The production, presented by Brighton Festival as part of the Caravan showcase, is a collaboration between SBC, the UK’s first Theatre Company of Sanctuary and Third Angel, who have been producing politically engaged work since 1995. Initially commissioned by Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield, it is a piece that can travel easily and resonate widely across borders.

 

 

Stopgap Dance Company: The Enormous Room

It’s a Jewish custom to cover mirrors and black out windows for the seven days of mourning following a death. ‘Sitting shiva’ brings people together to sit without thought of themselves; the lack of mirrors denying vanity and bringing the focus inwards.

This is the state in which we find bereaved husband Dave and his daughter Sam. They’re unable to talk or even look at each other. Each is trapped in their own deep grief. There’s a sense of the past all around: the trace of long gone pictures on the walls, nostalgic 1970s music, a Jack Warner movie on the telly. And there are ghosts, two women, one for each mourner, to help them find a way through their grief and ultimately to find each other.

Stopgap tells this story in a dance of two parts, performed initially against James Lewis’s clever, stacked set of living room furniture and high windows, with lighting designed by Chahine Yavroran (continuing a long relationship with the company). David Toole, known for his work with DV8 and Candoco, and here in his fourth collaboration with Stop Gap, plays Dave.

He’s hulking, moody and uncommunicative, distracting himself with coffee from a flask and an old film, trying to avoid his teenage daughter’s brewing romance. Hannah Sampson’s engaging Sam is every inch the uppity, hormone fuelled teen, unable to stay still except when gripped by grief. This gap between them is partly filled by the two ghosts (Meritxell Checa/Elia Lopez and Amy Butler) whose synchronised movements and similar appearance makes this an interesting quartet. When Sam’s friend Tom (Christian Brinklow – all sharp shapes and break-beat rhythms), and Death’s servant Chock arrive, the stage is suddenly full with competing energy and style. You sense that something is going to give.

Chock is a taunting sprite, emphatically performed by Nadenh Poan, flinging his lower limbs about with abandon, making remarkable use of his remarkable body. It’s a given with Stop Gap that physical difference is celebrated and exploited. In the second part of the show, when all the dancers work as an ensemble and fill the floor, this strength is most in evidence.

The narrative of the final episode is hard to read from the choreography alone: it’s lovely to look at, if over extended, but less clear what it is trying to say. I’m all for dance just happening for its own sake, but there is definitely a story trying to come out here. I wonder too who Dave is talking to when he describes his wife’s accident? If not himself it must be us, but I’ve no idea where we come into this, especially when addressed directly by Chock. Are we being warned of death’s approach too? It’s something to ponder as the talented cast take their bows.

The piece was devised by the company with artistic director Lucy Bennett, and credit should go to whoever suggested and choreographed the performed interval. Deconstructing a set and moving artists around a stage has never been so gripping. David Toole is unceremoniously tipped off a table top into a chair and the floor tape is wrenched up with a satisfying rip. Everyone moves in silence fitting seamlessly into a complex pattern. It’s an interval that no-one wants to leave – that’s a tribute indeed.

 

Stopgap Dance Company’s The Enormous Room was presented at Brighton Festival 2018 as part of Caravan, a biennial showcase of England’s independent theatre-makers. 

Jody Kamali: Hotel Yes Please

There’s Barry with his chamois who loves to buff, and Brian in a chicken mask going to the dungeon room. Brenda roams the corridors holding her dead husband’s skull and Gary, a newly-wed petrol-head, keeps saying ‘oil.’

They, together with Barbara Backhander from Uganda (that’ll be me), comprise the guests at Hotel Yes Please, the sort of place you’d avoid if you had any choice of accommodation options.

Jody Kamali is the ruffled, disarming Fernando, allocating our bedrooms and describing the assets at his ‘bad and brakfast’ establishment. There are echoes of Fawlty Towers and Alan Partridge in his Travel Tavern. It’s a simple premise that gives him freedom to mangle form and content with a wonderful combination of control and waywardness.

In a delightfully ramshackle performance, Kamali effortlessly conjures performance from the audience; even the slightly reticent Gary is soon saying ‘oil’ spontaneously.

While the hotel gags, visual and verbal, are good fun, and Jeff the Chef is a beautifully realised character, the show really takes off when Fernando introduces a ‘real’ actor, Steve, who runs the Murder Mystery. Steve tells us he is 37, Bristol based, with a very young baby at home. What’s he doing at a cheap hotel playing a violent third rate detective to five people for little money? Of course we’re all suspects but which one of us has killed the old lady at the kiddie’s party? Perhaps the bra on Gary’s head is a clue. A Darth Vader mask is produced as evidence purely because actor David Prowse comes from Bristol.

The theatrical interweaving of Kamali’s biography with this punchy detective is nicely played and yes, we do wonder why anyone would chose to do this for a living for ten years in a row. But I’m glad he does. As with the previous, less text-based show, Spectacular, Kamali is hugely inventive, warm and engaging. Hotel Yes Please deserves more guests, just watch out for Brian.

 

Photo by Lorna Jane Newman. 

Touretteshero: Not I

‘There are three people on stage. Don’t tell the Beckett Estate. Shit!’

Turns out that Edward Beckett sees the benefit in making uncle Samuel’s work more accessible. Eureka! He allows Jess Thoms, aka Touretteshero, to adapt the work to suit her particular physical and neurological requirements.

Many of Beckett’s characters are disabled. Think of Endgame: Hamm’s parents, confined to dustbins, Hamm himself blind and unable to stand, his servant unable to sit. Or Winnie in Happy Days, buried up to her neck in sand. But it’s Mouth, poor Mouth, just a mouth, who is most trapped. Isolated eight foot above us in a circle of light, uncertain how she came to be here, or of what has passed. Imagine!

Jess Thoms is bold and bloody-minded about a theatre world that for years denied her the freedom to be herself. To move and shout and tic as she does, without feeling she is ruining the show for everyone else. Since making her first show, the joyful autobiographical Backstage In Biscuit Land – ‘biscuit’ being her most frequent tic – she has become a fierce and passionate advocate for disability rights and a rigorous and courageous theatre maker.

Tackling Beckett’s most demanding work is daunting for any actress: a thirteen minute unrelenting stream of consciousness which circles in on itself in short phrases separated by gasps for breath. Jessica Tandy was traumatised by it 1972 (Forum Theater, New York) and more recently Lisa Dwan has described the experience of being strapped into position, unable to move or see, delivering lines at breakneck speed.

Jess introduces her version to us at floor level, the audience sitting on low benches or cushions, and explains how Tourettes affects her performance. She tell us we are free to move about and make any noises we need to make. With her is British Sign Language interpreter Charmaine Wombwell. Pregnant! She’ll be performing the work too, including any unscripted ‘biscuits.’

Darkness. Light on a face above us, LED-lights hidden in a hood illuminate Mouth and a bit of nose. Then she’s off, words spilling out of her, she can’t stop the stream. There has been no love of any kind and now Mouth is coming up to 70. And all the time the buzzing in the skull. Is it some kind of punishment? It’s not hard to see why this piece resonated so strongly with Jess, and why she spent a year learning it, and longer gathering the right team around her to make it happen. Certain lines are so true to Jess’s experience it stops you in your tracks: ‘…and the brain…raving away on its own…trying to make sense of it…or make it stop.’

Bringing out all the poetry and rage of the text, Jess is spellbinding to watch, occasionally bashing at her chest, sometimes unable to hold back the ‘biscuits’ which want to fill the silences. Blimey! Charmaine translates it all in concert with Jess, which splits the focus somewhat as both are fascinating to watch.

A behind-the-scenes film follows, showing how the piece was made, with technical experts and mentors, directors and designers. It’s a fascinating insight into the process, and brilliant to see Rosemary Poutney, one of the first performers of Not I, share her experience with Jess.

To complete the event, we’re invited to talk to our neighbours. Mine happen to be Mr and Mrs Thoms, who seem awestruck by their daughter – and rightly so. After a short Q&A we’re encouraged to make some noise. I’m happy to do so, but feel I would have liked to make more noise at the end of her performance, Bravo! and then to sit with it for a while. It’s great to grasp the opportunity to share your passion for equality and diversity with the audience, but I’d have loved a little longer with Mouth, and time to process the experience. The art says it all.

 

 

Ursula Martinez: Free Admission

She’s not one to do things by halves, so if there’s going to be a stage metaphor, it’s going to be a bloody great big one.

First though, is an introductory preamble, by which Ursula Martinez means to make that important initial impact on an audience, and handover her mobile phone for a selfie to be taken later on. She wants to please us, but we know she is going to be a tease. Her visual impact is immediate: she looks striking in a white trouser suit, an up-do and jewels. Ursula then retreats behind the little proscenium arch theatre on stage and the red curtains open. She pulls on builder’s gloves, wields a trowel, mixes some mortar and starts to work.

She’s going to build, literally build, a wall between herself and the audience.  Will it be the performer’s conceptual fourth wall, or more of a Trump-like defensive structure? Words begin to get thrown down with the cement, whip-crack one-liners and observations that range around gender, religion and politics. Is this wall keeping her in, or us out? How the references pile up!

Ursula Martinez has a knack of combining the personal with the universal in a way that continuously surprises. Perhaps it’s the casual crudeness of the language, where a sentence might quite innocently describe ‘taking it up the shitter’.

As the first layer of bricks is laid, Ursula recounts the jolly playground racism of 1970’s singing games and her family’s idiosyncrasies, mimicking her mother’s thick Spanish accent, all the while slathering on the glue, putting the blocks of her life in place.

In her previous show, My Stories, Your Emails Ursula explored the gap between her idea of herself and those projected on to her via social media. Free Admission is similarly vitriolic about such ‘virtual’ abuse. It’s one of the many things that, during the building the second layer of bricks, seriously pisses her off. Another is people who back out of a conversation saying ‘anyhoo’.

The physical building is as fascinating to watch as the script is to hear – it’s a well-paced combination of movement and text. Properly funny too: ‘Sometimes, I’m convinced my ex-wife used to fake not having orgasms.’ There’s a lightness of tone and a joy in the performance that constantly undercuts the harsh truths of a beautifully written, personal story. And yes she does tease, doing a remarkably fine Jamaican accent when she wants to, not when we want to hear it. Mark Whitelaw’s direction keeps the piece flowing and the inevitability of the construct never becomes dull.

There’s a break for Ursula to come out front to share some statistics about the audience demographic, for example how many of us are likely to be gay (an underestimate as it happens – this is Brighton after all). If this section is little less interesting it must give her arms a welcome rest and it provides some close interaction.

As layer four goes up the material darkens, as if by concealing herself from us she is free to reveal more. We’ve heard about her father’s death in hospital, now comes her mother’s escape from the Spanish Civil War as a three-year-old, heavy with the consequences of a non-understood action. The focus here is on women, the things we’re told (‘black is slimming’) and how our voices are silenced, as hers is now being on stage. She has no truck with religion – it too creates barriers and subjugates people.

The wall is erected and her head peeps through a remaining gap. There’s the suggestion of a puppet theatre in this image, emphasised earlier by the disembodied hand of an off-stage assistant re-fixing her battery pack.

Ursula reaches her hand through the gap, offering us an option that echoes her mother’s stark childhood choice. Do we stay secure in the stalls, or do we break through? It wouldn’t be a ‘Red Hanky Lady’ show without a glimpse of the body, so the selfie is a nude one, and an assistant with a video camera follows a delighted Ursula as she leaves the auditorium and then the building, capering naked into the night air, free at last and quite possibly freezing.