Author Archives: Matt Rudkin

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.

Jamie Wood: O No!

Jamie Wood’s comedic tribute to the work of Yoko Ono re-enacts a series of her most famous ‘pieces’, interspersed with his reflections on romantic love expressed through his own odd, poetic happenings. From the outset he exudes an air of playful generosity, staring deeply into one person’s eyes and telling them, ‘I love how thoughtful you are,’ and another, ‘I love the pattern on your shirt.’ It’s a kind of live art clown show, referencing avant garde art history while remaining highly accessible, and his warmth and silliness win the audience over into participating in all manner of eccentric ‘actions’.

A miniature field of woolly sheep coalesce into two clouds, which volunteers ‘puppeteer’ as approaching lovers, while another runs excitedly around with a gym ball representing the sun. He sprays a mist of water beneath the clouds, then shines a torch on a cd of John and Yoko’s last album together, which reflects the multiple colours of the rainbow onto the backdrop. The poetic inventiveness of the scene induces audible ‘Ah!’s from the audience and has them beaming in appreciation.

Early on he reads out a manifesto for the creation of O No! including the dedication to ‘challenge the boundary between Art and Life’, and that there should be ‘no cynicism’. From the tie-dye backdrop to his mystical incantations and playful dancing, a clear tint of spoofing runs throughout, but his beard is real and so, apparently, is his desire for us all to love each other more. This ambiguous play between sincerity and silliness ensures the show is consistently engaging. ‘Are you allowing yourself to be touched by art?’ he asks in a tone that planted a giggle inside me that just kept growing.

Given the amount of interaction, every performance is bound to be different, making this palpably a live experience in which he asks the audience to take the risk of trusting him. On this occasion it included a quite beautiful conversation about love, with a volunteer, conducted from inside a very large bag. In another moment we all hold hands then very slowly let go, noticing the last moment of contact; the humour of his delivery enables us to actually contemplate the poignancy of the experience. At the end there is a delightful John Cage-inspired orchestral recital featuring many volunteers playing various sound-making objects, and we leave warmed by the communal experience.

Overall, it’s a poetic collage that provides a touching celebration of the endeavour to nurture loving relationships, laced through with a playful humour; perfect as an oasis in the midst of a hectic festival, and a genuinely different experience.

Knuckle and Joint: The Black Hoods Cabaret

If you do go along to see this show during the fringe, be sure to get there early and grab a front row seat. On my visit, the show virtually sold out and I found myself sat on the back row with a distinctly obscured view; and this with only three rows of seats in front of me. Also, be prepared to calibrate your expectations in accordance with the £5 ticket price. On my first day at the Fringe I was lucky enough to witness two finely crafted performances, clearly created through many hours of dedicated attention by highly skilled artists. This show reminded me that the Edinburgh Fringe is an open access festival featuring performers and shows at various stages of development.

The Black Hoods Cabaret features two performers in black hoods manipulating various puppets through several sketches, which are sometimes loosely connected. It has an anarchic feel, and features crudely constructed puppets fashioned from cardboard and foam. They have youth and apparent enthusiasm on their side, but the gulf in quality between this and the pieces I saw the day before was very wide indeed. This has nothing to do with budget and everything with attention to detail and dedication to their craft. Knuckle and Joint seem to have gone for the idea of a crazy, chaotic, haphazard cabaret, but the danger with playing the part of being inept is that you’d better do it very well.

The dance at the beginning did not fill me with confidence, being neither particularly well done, nor funny. There follows a scene featuring a ‘fat’ lady singing badly whilst balanced within a hoop. She has some kind of difficulties and reappears as a Pac-Man head chasing a giant cookie. This sad character reappears throughout the show, in different guises, speaking in the same screechy mumbling voice. A second recurring character is a bunraku figure whose construction and manipulation is more engaging, yet still falling short of a professional level. He appears to burgle an object from a museum, and then has an engaging chase sequence and a karate fight with unseen opponents. There is a compère character who tells some very unsophisticated jokes, and a giant drug addict athlete (a giant version of the burglar perhaps?) who quite awkwardly attempts to engage the audience in vocal participation, and a large dog figure that is quite appealing.

In general, I imagine this show could have been thrown together in a few days, and doesn’t function as a positive advert for the company’s abilities. I should think they would be well served by focusing on the construction and manipulation of the puppets, to create the illusion of independent life and not even necessarily try to be that funny. Most of the scenes show the beginnings of promising ideas, but they are just too slow and indulgent, and require a lot more work on the time-consuming aspects of the craft of puppetry and/or comedy. Again, this review should be read in the knowledge that the reviewer had a very poor line of sight, and it is true that the show did arouse some chuckling from some in the audience – and it may improve throughout the run.

Theatre Klinika Lalek: The Biggest Marionette Circus in the World

This show certainly does feature some big marionettes: a virtually life-sized Giraffe, an Elephant, and a Lion. The Elephant is actually slightly under life-size and the Lion slightly over, which caused me some inclination to quibble, but they are big and impressive nonetheless. Indeed, the whole visual aspect of the show is well conceived with the lighting design working well to augment the spectacle.

We are greeted as we enter by miniature versions of these giant puppets, and then about eight circus-looking types enter the space, taking up positions behind the mighty beasts. Two clownish characters in oversize top hats that cover their eyes then perform a slapstick routine in which they try to find each other, with some missing and bumping-into. This is perhaps only actually funny to the very small children, whom it soon becomes apparent the show is pitched towards. The clowns fight over a giant key, that is later used to wind up the animals (or one of them at least), but initially to bring life our Ringmaster.

This is an engaging character, who develops an effective rapport with the audience. He calls out the mini versions of the large marionettes we met earlier, who perform some circus routines. The manipulation is effective enough, but when they create an ‘animal tower’, it really irks me that Elephant should so clearly lose contact with his colleagues and cannot possibly be imagined to be physically supported! Throughout the show the puppet manipulation is functional rather than impressive, with the giant marionettes very often floating several inches above the ground.

War Horse this is not, and there’s little danger of believing for one minute that these creatures are alive. This is hard to do when the puppets are this large, but also when they aren’t engaged in any emotionally-motivated actions. The creatures perform circus tricks, but they do not feature in any kind of narrative. The Giraffe vaguely dances about and sings, but there’s no opportunity for us to imagine how she might feel about that. There are glimpses of hunger and aggression in the Lion, but no developments that cause a change to that very basic mood, so no emotional journey

There is a nicely played Circus Strongman, whose act is amusingly interrupted by a giant butterfly, giving a satisfying twist. Then a Lion Tamer in a full mask engages with the mighty Lion marionette, whose jaws make a satisfying snapping sound, and then a shoal of giant fish swim through the space. Again, this is visually impressive but lacks narrative dynamic or development. They swim about for 5 minutes and then go because, as the Ringmaster tells us, ‘Playtime must end.’

This educational vein resurfaces at different points throughout the show, but I’m not sure how effective it will be as a learning experience. The Ringmaster tells us that ‘love is good’ and that we must eat our vegetables if we want to join the circus. This incitement to positivity reaches a crescendo at the end when he invites us all to dance, declaiming the slogans of ‘Pure Happiness, Joy, Love’ and ‘Peace’ in the ‘Circus with no violence.’ Very few of the five year olds are sufficiently inspired to dance, let alone their parents, and the sentiment seems tacked on. There simply has been virtually nothing within the narrative or action that has anything to do with these positive sentiments, and I wonder if this theatrical experience might have planted the seeds of cynicism within the developing minds of some of young children present.

My general impression is that much time has been spent on the impressive visual elements, and considerably less on any narrative or, indeed, action. Too many sections are drawn out for longer than the material needs, and feel like time-filling. The Ringmaster makes an admirable stab at taking us on a journey, but the script could have been written the day before. Still, the many young children in the audience seemed to be engaged, but this is not a family show in the sense that it will appeal to all ages.

The Last Great Hunt: Bruce

Created and performed by Tim Watts and Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd, part of Perth-based collective The Last Great Hunt, this show follows the award-winning and much-travelled, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik. Utilising fewer props and effects than that show, Bruce features two performers using a roughly-hewn block of foam and a pair of white gloves to deliver a fast-paced and dynamic tale of love, loss, and space travel. This one puppet figure is manipulated to quickly transform into a variety of characters, wonderfully voiced by Tim, whilst Wyatt performs the hands and provides atmospheric sounds such creaking doors and gun shots. What might have been enjoyable enough as a vehicle for the puppetry and mime skills on display is rendered more completely absorbing by the finely crafted plot, full of clever flashes backwards and forwards.

The opening scene shows an astronaut preparing for re-entry and a return to his pregnant astrophysicist girlfriend, who is also his communications link down at mission control. A flashing red light signals imminent catastrophe, and the stress of the situation sends the girlfriend into labour. Much of the rest of the piece shows the events that precede this point in the narrative, after which it veers off along a wholly unexpected path, which I won’t spoil the surprise of. Much of the humour comes from the frequent signalling to the audience of how the various plot points are imminently to be achieved, and the piece is pitched and paced such that it is always one step ahead of the audience, cleverly anticipating our comprehension. The first minute of action put a smile on my face that stayed there for the duration, and frequently broke out into happy laughter at the show’s ingenuity and wit.

In style, there seems something quite characteristically Australian about the production. It’s clearly been very cleverly and painstakingly put together, but these skills aren’t ‘shown off’ so to speak. Rather, the makers’ effort is translated into the ease of our enjoyment, and the humour is similarly jocular and warm rather than self-consciously ‘clever’ or acerbic. The fast-paced scenes are augmented by quick changes to the soundscape and lighting, giving the narrative structure a cinematic quality. The tricks and techniques always serve the narrative, which is so well-constructed it’s not hard to imagine it being actually made into a live-action movie.

It may not provide insights into the nature of the human condition, but it does deliver a wholly entertaining performance full of charm, wit, and invention, and as close to a sure-fire Fringe hit as may be theatrically possible. It’s difficult to imagine that there can be many people who wouldn’t emerge feeling thoroughly pleased to have to seen it.

Christopher Green: Tina C – Herstory

Framed as a book launch for the second instalment of her autobiography, this show features readings that trace the latter half of Tina C’s life, interspersed with ‘hits’ from her illustrious career as a country singer. The character is now so well developed that the portrayal seems effortless, and I can easily imagine chancing upon a Tina C concert played straight, and just thinking it was a rather good country singer, singing some pretty good songs… from a distance. But this is comedy and Tina is an invented character that functions to satirise the self-absorption of celebrities, and spoof country music genre.

Tina is so glad to be back in ‘Scotchland’ (‘Is it a country or a territory?), to share her personal journey ‘from girl to woman to brand to ideology’. Some of the humour is chuckle-inducing crudity, such as the song title No Dick’s as Hard as My Life, but there are also some wonderfully imagined back-stories. And because the character is so convincing, with no discernible trace of the performer showing through, it is easy to imagine that this is just a person recounting events from her life, off the cuff. But, of course, it is written fiction; a finely crafted imagining of Tina’s life, peppered with clever wordplay and witticisms that make the whole performance kind of deceptively clever. I’m not sure if there really is a book, but based on the extracts performed I’d buy one.

She has a song called If You Can’t Live Without Me, How Come You Weren’t Dead When We Met? and an intricate and ultimately hilarious explanation of why the song about her foray into politics was entitled Tick My Box rather than Punch My Hole. Alongside the well-made gags, there are subtle references to the act of pretence, such as her offhand observation of how weird it seemed that a bearded drag artist won the Eurovision song context. Any aspiring drag artistes (or actors for that matter) would certainly learn much from the attention to detail, the depth of the characterisation and also the affection for the character. For all her self-centred ignorance, Tina C comes across as a likeable character whose attempts at self-expression can be strangely moving. At the end there is one song that seems free of jokes, when Christopher Green allows Tina the opportunity to be entirely herself, and as with all the musical numbers, it is well composed and finely sung.

I first saw Tina C in an evening show at the Spiegeltent, which seemed a perfect fit of entertainer and venue. This year s/he is located up two flights of stairs in a satellite venue that takes a bit more effort to discover, but hopefully the crowds will make the trip because this is an accomplished artist who deserves a full house.

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