Author Archives: Matt Rudkin

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About Matt Rudkin

Matt Rudkin is a theatre maker and teacher who creates work as Inconvenient Spoof. He has a BA in Creative Arts, an MA in Performance Studies, and studied with Philippe Gaulier (London), and The Actors Space (Spain). He was founder and compere of Edinburgh’s infamous Bongo Club Cabaret, concurrently working as maker and puppeteer with The Edinburgh Puppet Company. He has toured internationally as a street theatre performer with The Incredible Bull Circus, and presented more experimental work at The Green Room, CCA, Whitstable Biennale, ICA, Omsk and Shunt Lounge. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Visual Art at the University of Brighton.

Certain Dark Things Theatre Company: The Girl Who Cannot Die

This physical/musical theatre piece tells the story of the circus sideshow character of the title, and on this occasion was set in the highly appropriate Bosco tent in the Spiegel Gardens (the Bosco is a wooden tent with steeply raked seating, and inside feels very much like a big top).

It is performed in a highly theatrical, Brechtian style with similar aesthetics to the Tiger Lillies / Les Enfants Terribles / Shockheaded Peter. The seven performers appear in whiteface and deliver much of their performance directly to the audience, each in turn narrating aspects of the story. Three of them also play musical instruments at regular intervals throughout. At the start of the show they have signs that describe their role in the sideshow: The Man with 2 Brains’; ‘The Girl Who Sees All’; ‘The Clown’ etc.

The main narration is delivered by a ringmaster character, who gives an engagingly grotesque and expressive performance.  Unfortunately the opening section of his exposition was drowned out, both by the over-enthusiastic trumpeter, and by sound pollution from the bar and streets outside. (Just use radio microphones in noisy venues!)

This meant I was working hard to piece together the plot, which follows the journey of ‘The Girl…’ who we later realise is Snow White after the end of the fairy tale. Towards the end, we realise the sadness of her current situation, which involves being nightly exposed to violent acts to demonstrate her ability to the audience.

Upon reflection, this is an imaginative and inventive idea for retelling the story of Snow White, so it is a particular shame that I got lost early on. It is an energetic and enthusiastic ensemble performance from a young company who seem well-organised and ambitious. The writing and direction are strong and there is enough action and endeavour to ensure boredom is highly unlikely, with moments of puppetry, plenty of song, and some striking visual tableaux.  I did find the style somewhat derivative of other work, and felt that perhaps the narrative was being used to serve the style, rather than the other way around. Also, some of the characters could be given more to do: ‘The Clown’ has some amusing moments, but doesn’t have much of a part to play in the dynamic. Despite these reservations, there was certainly enough talent and energy on display to suggest this young company is headed in a positive direction, and certainly one to watch.

Luke Wright Stay at Home Dandy

Luke Wright: Stay at Home Dandy

Sporting an asymmetric blond coiffure and dressed in frock-coat and waistcoat complete with fob watch, the baby-faced Luke Wright takes to the stage as himself, the New Romantic dandy of the title. Despite this appearance, he is no self-centred aesthete, but a virtuoso wordsmith with a sincere and sensitive social conscience. I had not previously read Wright’s texts, but it certainly works in this live form as performance poetry, the content of the verse brought to life by the animated style of his delivery, full of nuance, passion and humour.

His set takes the form of a satirical take on the conformities of suburbia, mainly comprised of poetic portraits inspired by characters he has met in his domestic surroundings. There are moments of spiky rancour, such as in ‘His little princess gets what his little princess wants’, but also moving tributes to the disenfranchised and inarticulate, as in his tale of Tracey the tollbooth teller.  Through it all, Wright comes across as warm-hearted humanist whose finely observed portraits reveal a deep interest and empathy for people and personal politics.

The patter between poems is also warm and assured, a constant stream of anecdotes and observations. Either he’s a man simply never lost for words, or it’s so very well practiced and prepared it comes across as spontaneous improvisation. In this sense the production has a quality of solid professionalism, lending confidence that we are in safe hands. Overall it is a show full of intelligence, charm and passion and that was clearly much appreciated by a packed audience of apparent devotees.

The Lads in Their Hundreds

Comedie de Picardie: The Lads in Their Hundreds

On the way out of this show I was fortunate enough to meet a French woman who greatly appreciated the talents of the lead actor Tchéky Karyo (star of many films by Luc Bresson, as well as TV show The Missing) – who, she told me, delivered the beautifully written poetry with passion and power.

As advertised, there are aspects of English language, delivered primarily through song by a singer dressed as a soldier (tenor Edmund Hastings), in this music-theatre piece directed by Jean-Luc Revol, which is described as ‘a profound meditation on the trauma of war and the lads in their hundreds who never returned’. However, so much of the production is centred on the recitation in French of WW1 poems that if, like me, you have little comprehension of the language, expect to spend your time primarily pondering the costumes, set and physicality of the main performer, Karyo.

He blinks a lot, I notice, and performs graceful, gesticular swirls of the hands and sways his body in sympathy with the stanzas.  He certainly looks the actorly part in his comfortable black jacket and long, elegant red scarf.  A gauze backdrop is used variously to project images of a worn-torn landscape, and enable the sudden appearance of the English singing soldier. This performer has a fine voice, yet one that seems particularly posh for a regular Tommy, and the musicality of his delivery somehow obscures the words. On occasions the text is accompanied by a pianist, Edward Liddall, and then a violinist (Michael Foyle) arrives to give a beautiful rendition of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. These musical interludes coming as a sweet relief from the words I don’t understand. (There are translations available in the programme, but the font is too small and feint to be read under the dimmed house lights.)

Overall, this clearly is a high quality production, but whether or not it delivers a high quality experience will depend on whether you understand French, or enjoy the frisson of just being in presence of artistic quality. The French woman really was raving about it.

Guruguru

Guruguru: Guruguru

Guruguru

Guruguru is a highly watchable and extremely likeable idiot-clown providing a truly unusual experience. He is both hugely idiotic and just simply huge. The show begins with him calling from behind the curtain for a lost friend called Happiness, and when he emerges in his Uncle Fester/jester outfit there is a collective intake of breath in mild amazement at the dimensions of the man. Like a Frankenstein’s fool with gigantic hands, he makes frequent forays into the audience, dispensing an infectious benevolence and at times encircling several people at once within the bounds of his friendly hugs.

He has a strong accent (possibly Italian), and it was sometimes a struggle to hear every word past the music bleeding in from the bar next door, but the accent and the strange poetry of his musings adds to the absurd effect. He delivers absurdist, existential aphorisms like a happy imbecile accidentally spouting pearls of wisdom, and there is a sense that beneath the idiocy there is a very warm heart and keen philosophical mind. And yet there is no hint of a separation between person and the persona, so thoroughly does he appear to have found his clown.

Brighton Fringe 2015As with the best of Fools, you’re never quite sure if you are laughing at him or with him, but laughing we all are at his heart-warming stupidity. It does become quite, quite mad, and whilst he was pulling the limbs off a doll, and making strange incantations above a copper cauldron, I briefly imagined he was about to kill and cook us all. But by the end of the show we are all sporting broad grins and it does indeed seem we have received some effective, if highly eccentric, instruction on the way to find Happiness.

Jan Martens - VICTOR - Photo by Phile Deprez

Jan Martens and Peter Synaeve: VICTOR

Jan Martens - VICTOR - Photo by Phile Deprez Home Fires - Photo by Ray GibsonThis wordless dance-theatre piece is performed by two males, one appearing to be about 14 years old and the other around 28. It is performed in an empty space under sparse lighting, and explores various forms and insinuations of physical intimacy between the two. At times their actions can be seen as those of brothers, or of a father and son, or as the early expressions of intimacy between lovers. Given the age of the younger performer, this aspect is likely to generate some controversy and yet the action is never suggestive of a sexually abusive relationship, or explicitly erotic. But for the occasional presence of some overtly dramatic moments, such as the older man’s sobbing over the apparent death of the younger, it might alternatively be taken as a purely formal exercise exploring the compositional and aesthetic possibilities between these two bodies. The general style and effect is a choreographic minimalism of gently shifting transformations that play on these ambiguities.

It begins with the typical live art trope of staring at the audience apparently without any intentional expression, as if to say, ‘this is me, just being here, being who I am’. There is a sudden, synchronised intake of breath and then begins a slow-moving duet conducted in silence with the two looking into each other’s eyes from close proximity and mirroring their actions. The intensity of their fixation combined with the slowness of their actions creates an overpowering silence in the space, and I highly advise anyone with a dry, tickly cough to come equipped with a lozenge.

Creeping together on all fours, the performers’ faces move gradually towards the anticipation of a kiss – before interlocked heads transform the action into a pushing competition, reminiscent of fighting stags. Wrestling holds transform into embraces, and caresses into playful slaps, with some sections accompanied by choral music that poeticises the physicality of the male bodies, stripped to the waist to reveal muscle and spine. Most of the show uses a row of low hanging lights that illuminate from directly above, which acts to emphasise this interest in the formal properties of these male bodies. The slowest sections of choreography are accompanied by even slower lighting fades, creating a calming and meditative atmosphere that divests the work from its potential air of paedophilic paranoia (and the post-show discussion confirms this was part of the intention). The constant staring also reads like an exercise in bonding, overcoming the culturally imposed awkwardness at such intimate attention, also suggested by the repeating motif of quick, deep, synchronised intakes of breath that punctuate the show.

Towards the end, a series of banked lights from the back gradually increases the illumination, the brightly lit outlines of their bodies giving the impression of a Renaissance painting. A returning choral cantata adds to this effect and the choreography creates some distinctly Christ-like iconography. It’s a gentle and meditative show, which draws out the cultural baggage of our concerns and misinterpretations over representations of paedophilia and homo-eroticism. It led me to consider again that forms of male intimacy shift across an analogue continuum of shades and effects, rather than being easily and sharply divisible into the sexual or platonic, acceptable or unacceptable. Late in the piece the two hold hands and the gesture can be seen simply: as not necessarily significant of anything other than that it can feel nice to hold another’s hand.