Dickie Beau: Blackouts – Twilight of the Idols

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting! Dickie Beau has a formidable reputation as a cabaret and nouvelle drag artiste, but in recent years has also created full-length theatre works. Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols ‘conjures the spirits of celebrated Hollywood icons’ and ‘channels the ghosts of his childhood idols’ – but that’s not the unexpected element. It’s the form that surprised me.

For the show – or the first half of it, at any rate – is a classic piece of physical/visual/total theatre. Precise physical performance that references traditional mime, evoking the early white-face work of Lindsay Kemp; an interesting casting of objects with dramaturgical significance (an ancient reel-to-reel tape machine; a black shiny rotary-dial telephone) allowed to sit, lit beautifully, on stage for us to relate to as characters in the story; the performance space veiled by a thin gauze on which words and images are projected, creating a multi-layered onstage world.

This first half mostly concerns itself with Marilyn Monroe, and a recording of her last ever interview in spring 1962 – just days before she died – with Richard Meryman for LIFE magazine. But here’s the really exciting twist – included in the show is not only the verbatim recordings of Marilyn’s voice, but also an interview with the interviewer, Meryman, reflecting on the process, on the content of the interview, on the writing and editing decisions (the piece was published as a first-person monologue), and on the star’s death.

We are thus presented with an intricate theatrical web that invites all sorts of reflections on the nature of truth, artifice, disclosure, and exposure. Whose story is this? Is it Marilyn’s, is it Meryman’s, is it the media’s, is it Dickie Beau’s? It’s all of the above. Beau’s relationship to it all is complex and multi-layered, readily mixing fantasy and reality (whatever that might be), deliberately playing on notions of mediation and interpretation. He lip-synchs both Marilyn and Meryman’s words as we stare at the cumbersome tape machine. With Beau as the medium, she tells us she wants to study and be taken seriously; he tells us that he turned up at her Hollywood home without even knowing how to work the machine, and that she was tired and listless and trying to wriggle out of the interview, until a trip to the bathroom for a ‘liver shot’ that revived her miraculously. Mostly, Dickie Beau is in his neutral ‘mime’ outfit, but in one short and beautifully enacted scene, he dons a blonde wig and a white satin dress and stands before us, recreating the iconic Marilyn skirt-blowing moment that we all know and love.

The second half of the show similarly works with the recorded voice of an idol. In this case, it is Judy Garland’s dictaphone notes for a memoir that was never written. This section of the show in fact came first, having evolved from a 10-minute cabaret/short theatre piece that Dickie Beau has performed for a number of years. It’s clever, and ultra camp. ‘Judy’ is dressed head-to-toe in blood red – plaits, a flouncy skirt, striped socks, and ruby red shoes that sparkle and glitter under the lights. Wielding a knife, she’s a kind of hybrid horror-film mix of Dorothy and a reversed-out (red rather than green) Wicked Witch – sitting, standing, tottering on those red shoes as she mutters about looking out for her little girl Liza, and how she hates always playing ‘herself’ – she badly needs time off from being Judy Garland. Lacking the multiplicity of layers of the first half of the show, being a far more direct portrayal of a drag character, this section is entertaining but nothing like as exciting or thought-provoking as the earlier part.

But skill wins out. Despite not being quite as enchanted by the latter part of the show, I’m bowled over by Beau’s skill – his ‘Judy’ is undoubtably a brilliant characterisation. But for me the heart of the work is the Meryman interview, and the way that this is so cleverly unpicked and moulded into Beau’s reflection on his relationship to the Monroe myth. It is interesting to see that Dickie Beau, in his programme notes, dedicates the show to Richard Meryman, who died in February 2015.

Blackouts is not quite the perfect piece of theatre it could have been, but it is a highly commendable show, expertly performed, and a delight to witness.

Wattle & Daub: The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak

When a show opens with its title character being dumped on the autopsy slab, it’s a fair bet that things aren’t going to end well. But Wattle & Daub’s brown-aproned sextet of performers – musicians, singers, puppeteers – are determined to have a good time along the way.

They take on the apparently true tale of Tarrare, a French eighteenth-century circus freak who eats constantly (and eats everything and, really, anything) but can never be satisfied, and is recruited to the army to carry secret messages (by swallowing and regurgitating them), before ending his days in a vain search for a cure in an institution.

Tarrare is a grey-faced, falsetto-voiced, legless, lip-synch puppet figure with wondrously innocent staring eyes. There’s a rich array of other puppet characters as well: a pair of conjoined twins, just one of whom is madly in love with Tarrare; monstrous glove-puppet torturers; gigantic looming authority figures. There are some wonderful stage images along the way, and some witty and ingenious bits of puppet business.

Tom Poster’s music feels much closer to musical theatre territory than opera – it’s built around a set of songs, and there’s a lot of rich insistent melody, familiar harmony, and a fair bit of pastiching of various genres; the libretto is very given to witty rhymes. Musically, it’s all sumptuously performed on violin (Justin Wilman) and piano (An-Ting Chang) with occasional percussion touches, a combination that the rich texture of the score makes feel much fuller than it has any right to.

Although the puppetry is clever, detailed, and effective, the puppetry logics are not quite fully worked out, which is sometimes distracting. Of the two performers who are primarily puppeteers, Aya Nakamura works rigorously at a conventional neutral-puppeteer distance, while Tobi Poster spends much of the time looking over his puppet’s shoulder, quite literally open-mouthed in apparent horror at the puppet’s actions. The two performers who are primarily singers, Daniel Harlock and Michael Longden, work mostly standing well away from, but focused on, the figures they’re voicing – I found this hard to take to at first, often finding my own focus splitting between voice and action (and it certainly makes the lip-syncing puppeteer’s job visibly tougher), but just as it settled, the rules changed and the singers were also puppeteering (sometimes characters they were also voicing, sometimes not). There are beautiful moments of interaction between puppets and their operators; there are neat bits where a puppet character is represented by a popping-up head, or shares an arm with its puppeteer; there are nice moments where performers connect directly with the audience. But pleasing as they are these tend to feel opportunistic, solving immediate staging challenges, and there’s a niggling lack of consistent dramaturgical intention.

But the biggest stumbling block perhaps is the unceasingly sophomoric tone – there’s barely a moment that doesn’t have visual or verbal grotesquerie (sometimes full-on gross-out comedy) thrust upon it, and the gag (in more than one sense) is never resisted. Even where the music (with how much sincerity is hard to judge) is reaching for the heartstrings, the stage action is relentlessly undermining it with knowing humour. The show is, undeniably, loads of fun. But untempered with the pathos that these kinds of puppets are so very capable of (think of the work of Faulty Optic, who frequently worked in an ostensibly similar visual world but whose puppets always identifiably yearned and suffered), this means that we never really emotionally connect with Tarrare, let alone any of his freakish friends and accomplices (the well-meaning doctor comes closest, although his big number about curing the incurable is, again, too given to wit) and so when, in the very final bars, we seem finally to be asked to care, it is far too late.

Rouge 28: Kwaidan

‘Hello? Is anybody home?’ says the woman as she enters the space, furnished with 1970s dresser, television set, and table. A large dark mirror above the dresser, and wardrobe doors, are significant hints of secrets to be revealed, and a screened area turns out to be a small bedroom, with Japanese paper screens behind.

Immediately a series of images appear. Who is the small girl that suddenly appears in the bed? Why does the woman see another face in the mirror? Who is the mystery face in the television screen? What is the dark secret lurking in this woman’s past?

The word Kwaidan is Japanese for ghost story and there is a great build up of tension, suspense, and looming horror in this cleverly designed two-hander. The audience is kept on the edge of their seats, never quite knowing what is going to happen and which of the cleverly rigged and performed image effects is going to appear next. Full size puppets, shadows, video, and effects are used to play the various characters in the story. Highly directed lighting, with plenty of use of blackout, plays with audience perception. The music used in the piece keeps the tension nicely building and there are one or two ‘jump scares’ that make sure the audience doesn’t get to relax in their seats.

Without giving away any spoilers, the plot hangs together well, and the hints of bloodshed are well timed. Aya Nakamura plays the central character and does a great job, often having to play more than one character onstage at the same time. The effects and shadows are performed by Mohsen Nouri. Both Aya and Mohsen are excellent puppeteers and it shows as they both operate various characters throughout the piece.

It’s early days for this piece of theatre directed by Paul Piris and levels of finesse are still being discovered to bring out fully the psychological journey of the main character and the full impact of the climactic scene. However Rouge 28 have created something of a classic in the puppetry mystery horror genre.

Kwaidan will be in the SUSPENSE Festival in London on 5–7 November 2015

Little Angel Youth Theatre: The Jabberwocky

Despite being a show performed by young people, this is a production presented within the main programme of the SUSPENSE adult puppetry festival and is in a sense a triple-distilled piece of theatre. It has been inspired by Steve Tiplady’s production for the Little Angel last year, but this itself was already a radical reworking of the version he created ten years earlier.

Always about a moment in childhood where parental protectiveness is necessarily rejected, in 2004 The Jabberwocky was a kind of epic sprawling quest. In 2014 the same fundamental narrative and characters delivered a tighter, richer, more dreamlike piece – with text memorably excised save the words of Carroll’s poem itself – one with a strong sense that the self-transformation engendered by the young protagonist leaving home, seeking out, and conquering the Jabberwock is as much an inner as an outer one.

The Little Angel Youth Theatre’s version, directed by Oliver Hymans, was made in response to this production and is now remounted for the theatre’s current Festival. It is clearly built around the same essential form of the later Little Angel show, and several of the puppet characters met on the journey are recognisable in essence. The action though is all their own; the young people have in a sense answered the peculiar devising challenges of the show based on a piece of nonsense verse for themselves, using their own materials and properties. The set – a collection of boards that can are rearranged to many purposes – and the puppets are their own, also, built very simply but still filled with life.

Indeed the puppetry throughout is of top quality, as might be expected form young people learning theatre-making in this building, and Hymans repeatedly makes a pleasing virtue of the fact that he has a much larger cast than any puppetry director could generally hope for by putting together excellent ensemble puppetry sequences. There’s a particularly memorable one where a creature is formed of a group of separate different-sized orange balls that swirl and reform in a range of configurations. It is also expertly and beautifully lit by Jason Vakharia, making the most of the Little Angel’s very puppet-friendly rig.

If there are quibbles, one is common both in youth theatre and devising more widely, and is the rather overly episodic nature of the piece; another (again familiar in young performers) – that rather accentuates the first – is the tendency to drop performance focus before episodes are quite over.

But the Little Angel should be proud of having what is clearly a committed group of skilled young performers, and of confidently programming them on an equal footing with the other companies in their flagship festival of puppetry for adults.

Karen Finley: Ribbon Gate | Written in Sand

Karen Finley! Karen Finley smeared in chocolate. Karen Finley performing unspeakable practices and unnatural acts live on stage. Karen Finley getting banned – from art galleries, from rock venues, from public toilets. From public toilets – oh yes! I’ve never seen her live, but have admired her from afar for years. Well, I would wouldn’t I? She’s my generation – a child of the 1950s who came of age in the 1970s, embracing punk, porn and performance art with gusto, one of a number of women artists (see also Annie Sprinkle and Penny Arcade and Cosey Fanny Tutti) re-evaluating sex and flying the flag for freedom and liberation and…

And then came AIDS. It started as a rumour, towards the end of the 1970s. There were people on the scene getting sick, getting colds that went to flu and then to pneumonia, knocked over like skittles, blown about like feathers from a discarded boa. Maybe it was something to do with taking poppers or, er… who knew what. The rumours were whispered in the toilets at Danceteria (New York) and Heaven (London) as a new decade came in.

As the 1980s unfolded, we found out what it was – although there was so much fear and prejudice and mistrust it was often hard to get to the facts. People died, lots of people died. People were scared, very scared. Children who had HIV-positive relatives were asked to leave their schools. When Lady Di pointedly took off her gloves on a hospital visit and held the hand of a man with AIDS, it made the front page of the papers – a game-changing moment.

Karen Finley’s installation Ribbon Gate (sited at the Barbican, which is also the venue for her SPILL Festival show, Written in Sand) honours the many deaths from AIDS over the past 30 years, using the idea, popular in South American Catholic churches, of tying a ribbon to a metal gate in commemoration. We are invited to honour the life and mark the death from AIDS of someone we’ve known and loved. I choose Derek Jarman. As I tie my (yellow) ribbon on to the gate, incongruously placed in the middle of a busy and overlit walkway, mayhem erupts all around me. It’s a protest, demanding a living wage for the Barbican cleaners. There is chanting and shouting and banners waived. Ribbon Gate sits stoically in the middle of it all. Derek would have been amused, I think.

I look for an usher to find out what space the show is in. I start to ask the way. Are you going to see Hamlet, the usher asks enthusiastically. No. I find my own way to the Pit.

In Written in Sand, Karen Finley keeps it live, responding to the moment, reflecting on how she’s feeling, asking how we’re doing. She references both the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet happening above us, and the pro-cleaners fair wages protest. In fact, she gets us to applaud the cleaners, and the technicians, and the SPILL Festival producers, and the ushers and….

The atmosphere is relaxed. Less Dead Kennedys than late-night jazz lounge. There’s even a man playing a flute, for goodness sake. So yes, it’s a gig, kind of. A spoken word with music event. Music that is mostly mellow and laid-back. That flute, and piano, and bells, and synthy strings coaxed from a laptop, and gentle percussive backbeats, all conjured up by talented multi-instrumentalist Paul Nebenzahl. We get a mash-up of writings from Finley that include legendary texts like Hello Mother:

‘Hello Mother / Your son is dying. You knew – no, don’t hang up’ and then ‘Hello emergency room / Don’t bother helping someone sick. Don’t bother helping someone dying. He’s / a leper. He’s going to die anyway.’

The music might be mostly mellow, but the vocal delivery is intense and vibrant and shrill and angry, and the words are sharp, thrown like knives out into the auditorium. Time hasn’t healed. Finley tosses her hair and spits her frustration, a fiery ball of passion. Many of the songs/poems/texts (call them what you will) display the frustration and impotence of those left behind. It’s time to honour the dead, to name them. John. Howie. David. Thomas. Her grief is palpable, decades on, as she tells us of phone calls almost-made to dead friends in the middle of the night; of exasperation at the ‘positive attitude’ of a dear friend who is dying; of the sorrow of the woman nursing her dying daughter: ‘No granddaughters for me…’ sighs the mother. This song reminds us that AIDS, like Ebola, like other devastating plagues, is not confined to one demographic. It kills whoever it finds, wherever it finds them. That we lived for decades without prevention or cure, seeing our friends falling and dying in droves, is extraordinary. It was brutal.

In between songs, she sits in an armchair, sideways on to us, the audience, facing Paul Nebenzahl’s piano. She muses on all sorts of things. Freddy Mercury’s tackle. Judy Garland at the London Palladium. Rainbow candles weighing down her luggage. The Crying Game. Boy George. Her Rolodex and all the names and addresses it once contained. Do we remember the Rolodex, she asks. She explains what it is for younger audience members – a kind of Ferris Wheel with little cards attached, is how she puts it. It’s clever, this Rolodex moment, because it shows us what different times the 1980s were. A time when people hid their razors and toothbrushes when you came to visit in case they got – contaminated. A time when hospital workers wouldn’t touch patients with HIV/AIDS without wearing rubber gloves. A time when it was only just about legal to be gay, as long as you didn’t actively promote a gay lifestyle (whatever that might be). But if you were in a long-term relationship and your partner got ill, you had no rights, you wouldn’t be let onto the hospital ward, and when the time came, they’d get sent home not into your arms but to their family of origin to die. To a family that had perhaps previously rejected them, abandoned them. She takes the mic for another classic, He’s Going Home:

‘He’s going home to drapes and homemade wine. To a room of cowboys and / fire engines and twin beds. No one to share your bed ever again.’

Sometimes she sits and listens to Paul Nebenzahl play. All the music used is composed by, or was originally performed by, people who have died of AIDS. He plays a slowed-sown version of the B52’s Rock Lobster, describing it as ‘like an Elizabethan ballad’. Occasionally she starts a song, and gives up, sitting down. ‘I can’t do it right now’ she says. She needs to breathe a bit, to drink some water, to start again. Always the liveness of the moment is acknowledged, and she wants to stay true to how she is feeling and being at this time, in this place. On numerous occasions, she asks for the house lights to be raised, so she can look at us, and talk to people directly. At one point, she invites some of us up to ‘twinkle’ with her, to join her in dancing round the chair and the lines of sand, and the candles.

Whilst ranting against the injustice of these too-early deaths from AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, she also acknowledges what we all know. That we will all be dead one day. Do I die at the end of the movie, she asks. Yes, yes you do. I do. We all do. It’s October 31st – All Hallow’s Eve. It’s a timely reminder of our mortality. We go out into the night.

So what do you think, someone asks out in the lobby. Think? I can’t think. I can just feel. I feel jettisoned back in time, to a time that was harsh and unforgiving and full of angst, yet life-affirming too, full of music and film (Derek!), and performance. We survived. We lived to tell the tale. We rode out Reagan and Thatcher, ridiculed them with street theatre and industrial music and queer cabaret and…

I force myself to think, to be the critic I’m here to be. I’m not that fussed about some of the music, especially disliking synthesised cello. Some of the spaces between songs/poems are a bit long and unfocused. But actually – who cares. Who gives a…

This evening is not about thinking. This evening is about passion, and commemoration. About words that cut through ideas to reach feelings. About remembering, and honouring. About telling stories to those who were there, and to those who weren’t. About never forgetting their names. About lighting the candle, and holding the space. About tying the yellow ribbon around the old oak tree. Or around the metal gate. Lest we forget. Amen.

Ribbon Gate and Written in Sand were presented at the Barbican as part of SPILL Festival 2015. See www.spillfestival.com

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