Author Archives: Richard Lavery

About Richard Lavery

Richard is an Irish theatre director working in original and experimental writing and the artistic director of Accidental Theatre.

The Room in the Elephant

A story can be as individual as a person’s home and The Room in the Elephantis an individual’s story about his home and the stories it’s inspired. The first co-production between Òran Mór’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint and Tobacco Factory Theatre, Tom Wainwright’s new play is inspired by graffiti artist Banksy painting THIS LOOKS A BIT LIKE AN ELEPHANT on the side of a formerly abandoned water tank in Los Angeles, turning it immediately into a priceless work of art. The twist is that a man, Tachowa Covington, was living in the water tank, and on 3 March 2011 a legal company called Mint Currency claimed ownership of it and took it away, making the man homeless.

This one-man show, performed by Gary Beadle, tracks the enigmatic story of Covington and how the loss of his water tank home has affected him. The play is at first an exploration of the disparity between the haves and have-nots, taking us through Covington’s story of a lost life and how he found refuge in the water tank that became his home. The simple staging sees Covington, accompanied by a shopping trolley and B, his toy mouse friend, talking to a camcorder on a tripod, telling his story to YouTube the way he wants to tell it. ‘It’s the truth, but events may have changed!’ Covington takes us through the conversion of the water tank into a living space: the installation of a small TV to watch movies on (lots of movies), drapes, a desk – all the trappings of a home that we already know has been taken away. In this way the piece cleverly creates immediate sympathy, tying us to Covington and causing us to side with him against the faceless corporation that seized his home for their own profit.

Beadle brilliantly creates a wide-eyed and unsettled Covington, an engaging and layered character that quickly establishes a rapport with the audience through his lovable eccentricity. Wainwright’s play relies upon the physically distinct performance that Beadle creates: without it the piece would lose its veracity and the connection the audience feels with Covington would weaken. At the beginning Covington exclusively addresses the camera and the performance has a focused intensity to it, the camera acting as another character and giving Covington a reason to talk.

As the play opens out beyond the camera it loses this clarity of focus, meandering between themes of dispossession and the impact that art has upon its subjects. The audience gains a connection to Covington as he addresses them more directly, as if they are the camera, but the script loses its edge as new ideas are introduced. Covington accuses artists of using him for story material, accuses Banksy for potentially knowing what harm his graffiti would cause, and accuses Wainwright for exploiting his story in creating the very play we’re watching. He asks what rights do artists have to disrupt people’s lives, even in the smallest of ways – ways that the artist can never predict. These intriguing ideas are touched on but leave a slightly confused impression as to what direction the play is taking. This confusion can reflect Covington’s own confused and tangential mind, but makes the middle of the play feel slightly lost and unfocused as the larger ideas of homelessness, dispossession, art, and vampiric storytelling all wrestle for Covington’s and our attention.

Òran Mór and A Play, a Pie and a Pint are a regular duo in Scotland, and commission more new plays than anywhere else in the UK, with 37 turned out in a year. With The Room in the Elephant they and the Tobacco Factory Theatre have produced a funny and touching production, with a particularly strong one-man performance. Beadle’s portrayal of Covington is a joy to watch, and his incomplete ramblings and light-hearted comments on losing his unique home are tinged with a deep sadness as he smiles through the tragedy of his repeated homelessness and the loss of the friend and refuge that was the water tank that looks a bit like an elephant.

Shams: Thin Ice

Part of the Escalator East to Edinburgh programme, Shams’ Thin Ice is, on the one hand, an adventure story detailing a mission of Arctic exploration and scientific discovery, and, on the other, the story of a romantic love triangle. Set in May 1940, Thin Ice flows effortlessly between the past and the present, moving from the discovery of the frozen corpse of scientist Daniel to the days following his arrival in England as an Austrian immigrant.

Focusing on the intertwined relationships between Daniel and the production’s two other characters, Laura and Richard, the story takes us from the discovery of Daniel’s body in Greenland back to the beginnings of a relationship between him and Laura. The story drip feeds information by moving from present to past, allowing the audience to slowly gain an overall picture of what is happening. It’s a simple and effective way of keeping the story interesting – facts are uncovered piece by piece, shifting our understanding of previous events. What is particularly deft in this production is its movement between these two periods: the transitions are exact and often beautifully executed, allowing the production to flow and the pace to remain unbroken.

The theme of exploration is an undercurrent to a lot of Shams’ work, with last year’s Total Theatre Award nominee Reykjavik and 2002’s Sleeping Beautiesbeing good examples of this. It’s a theme that Thin Ice captures in a simple but effective set design that gives the feeling of an isolated cabin stranded in the frozen tundra of the Greenland wastes. This feeling of isolation is a constant companion throughout the production and gives the play its distinctive style. Through stark lighting design and clever performances Thin Ice makes you feel the cold of the Arctic world, matching it with the fraught and icy relationships of its three protagonists.

www.shams.org.uk

Sue MacLaine: Still Life: An Audience with Henrietta Moraes

A brilliant piece of new writing reinforced by a distinctive setting, Still Life: An Audience with Henrietta Moraes has the small and intimate audience take part in a life drawing class, confronted from the beginning by an exposed and vulnerable Henrietta Moraes (performed excellently by Sue MacLaine) as she talks us through the eccentricities of her life and strikes various poses for us to draw.

Henrietta Moraes was a model and muse to Francis Bacon and a queen of Soho’s artistic life in the 1950s. Her life was divided between the excesses of drugs and alcohol in her youth and the sobriety of her later years (learn about all the types of addiction treatment programs she underwent). After a strict upbringing by her grandmother and a partial education she spent time at a secretarial college and thought of becoming an actress. In reality she became a model in several London art schools and at one point had an unsuccessful career as a cat burglar and spent time in Holloway Prison.

Performed in Whitespace Gallery, Sue MacLaine’s site-specific piece uses the gallery itself as a setting for the performance, with the exposed blank walls leaving no hiding place. Everything is exposed as MacLaine disrobes and adopts a series of one-minute long positions for the audience to get used to drawing and comfortably adopt the format of the performance. A gentle yet confronting piece, Still Life expertly weaves together the contradictions of Henrietta’s life through the juxtaposition of the language of the performance and the silence of the moments of drawing.

With a subtle and powerful script, MacLaine takes us through periods in Henrietta’s life, moving from a carefree and often brash character to an exposed, isolated and tender person. MacLaine exposes both herself and Henrietta onstage in a very touching way. You feel for the character as her isolation and loneliness weigh upon her after the vast range of experiences she’s encountered in earlier life. The exploitation you feel she has been through is enhanced by the stark nakedness of the actor onstage. The sections of speech mark a fragile journey through Henrietta’s life whilst the drawing sections create a valuable opportunity to think and feel.

Plays often leave no time to think during them and it was refreshingly different to have moments of pause in the production to stop, draw and develop thoughts and ideas inspired by the performance – moments of stillness in which to draw or think about the last piece of performance and what it inspired. Cunningly the drawing tips proffered before some poses are often poignant reflections that guide your thoughts.

MacLaine is a theatre artist based in Brighton whose work starts with her own written texts. Still Life began when she read Henrietta’s obituary in the Guardian: after then reading her autobiography, she was intrigued by the relationship between the artist and the model. This thought still lies at the heart of Still Life, where MacLaine is both our artist and model. The duel representation of these two figures onstage allows her to both reflect and comment upon Henrietta’s life as one that was fully lived, and on the cost that often comes with such living.

www.suemaclaine.com

Communicado Theatre Company: Tam O’Shanter

A co-production with Horsecross Arts and Assembly Festival, Communicado Theatre Company’s Tam O’Shanter is a musical telling of the famous Robert Burns poem that details a drunken night of fun, laughter, martial strife and debauched supernatural encounters. A vibrant and physical production created and directed by Gerry Mulgrew, Communicado’s work keeps Burn’s poem as its core but also weaves in other themes.

The rhythm of the dialogue and text is beautifully constructed and integrated into the show; it beats away at its heart, in the early stages helping to control and pace the production, and at the end building the story to its frantic conclusion. The language can be slightly thick for a non-Scottish ear, but its beauty and emotion remained clear throughout, and the production soon settles into a rhythm that is only broken at those moments when it shifts brilliantly into a more modern – if tangential – take on Tam’s marriage.

With Tam O’Shanter, Communicado create a dynamic and layered story from the outset, depicting through music and dance the everyday lives of the poem’s characters. Establishing a world of humour and supernatural wonder, the brilliant ensemble of impressive Scottish actors performs with precision and vibrancy. The characterisations are what give the production its distinctiveness and draw the audience into Tam’s world.

The meta-theatrical structure helps give the production a multilayered effect: as the performers move in and out of the story they are able to comment on the narrative at the same time as they live it, their characterisations always working to ground us in whichever world we’re in. With over twenty songs packed into an hour-and-a-half production, the musical sections at times do become repetitive and somewhat redundant to the storytelling – but this happens rarely, and more often the songs are exciting and perfectly constructed set pieces that shine with playful energy. A unique and brilliantly executed mix of live music and theatre, Tam O’Shanter remains, throughout, a truly Scottish story.

www.communicadotheatre.co.uk

Molly Naylor and the Middle Ones: My Robot Heart

Devised by performer Molly Naylor, supported by real-life band The Middle Ones, and inspired by Japanese experiments with robots, My Robot Heart is a simple storytelling play. Beautifully engaging, it looks at love through three interlocking stories centred upon an impending wedding, with all of the characters multi-roled by Naylor herself with the help of a few props and some simple staging choices. Naylor, self-presenting with a cheeky smile, starts by telling the story of the story, outlining her own ‘real’ connection to the material. Drawn from two inspirations, an unexplainable breakup and an internet story about Kenji the robot who was programmed to love, our storyteller is investigating love in the best way she knows how, through storytelling.

The interlocking stories are woven together extremely well, flowing from character and situation easily, and always perfectly – sweetly punctuated by The Middle Ones’ folkish acoustic vocals and music. Each story takes us somewhere unique but is always connected to Naylor’s investigation of love, as each character encounters an individual dramatic crisis in their relationships with others. The performance particularly shines in the gorgeous touches of detail that come through the writing of character, often funny and well-observed: from agonising over the appropriate waiting time before leaving someone’s house after running over their dog, to recognising Viennetta is the perfect treat after avoiding a surprise camping trip. Naylor’s performance is exemplary, and it has to be for you to really engage with the stories. Though it’s said early on that The Middle Ones are not performers, they too perform and join in brilliantly, creating some of the funniest moments in the performance and underpinning the most touching ones with gentleness.

Naylor’s first solo show, Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You, debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010, but this is her first show working with The Middle Ones live, having used only their recorded work in previous performances. The Middle Ones, originally from Norwich, are now based in Bristol and Manchester and this is their first collaboration within theatre.

Having The Middle Ones on stage is a strong choice as their presence affords some welcome breaks in rhythm and moments of complicity that boost the energy for this extended monologue. A touching play, My Robot Heart isn’t based in fact but in love; it’s not a scientific investigation but love never is scientific, not really.