Author Archives: Tim Jeeves

Massive Attack v Adam Curtis | Photo: James Medcraft

Robert Del Naja and Adam Curtis: Massive Attack v Adam Curtis

Massive Attack v Adam Curtis | Photo: James Medcraft

One of the most anticipated events of this year’s Manchester International Festival, this collaboration between Adam Curtis and Massive Attack brings together the renowned documentary maker with some of the most innovative musicians of the last twenty years.

As is the case with all his films, the research Curtis and his team have undertaken is impressive. In the grandiose industrial space of the Mayfield Depot, eleven massive screens, surrounding the audience on three sides, show two hours of meticulously extracted archive footage. At times, the screens are lit to reveal Massive Attack playing behind the images, shifting the balance of attention between music and video, and generally this works well. As a whole, the night felt like an Adam Curtis film with a Massive Attack soundtrack, which, to be fair, was how it was presented. Nirvana’s ‘Where did you sleep last night?’ played when the narrative turned to Kurt Cobain’s self-annihilation through heroin, and the Archie’s ‘Sugar Sugar’ when the idealism of early 20th century utopias was presented on screen.

The film’s narrative begins in the mid 70s, and through a number of parallel threads explores a shift in the ideology of power that took place on both sides of the iron curtain after the utopian dreams of the early 20th century had dissolved. As Curtis presents it, this shift was towards a belief that the world shouldn’t be changed (since such interference is too dangerous), but instead should be managed through extensive data collection. This data could then be used to predict the future from the activity of the past.

In the light of the Edward Snowden affair, this emphasis on data collection should have felt particularly pertinent, though the relative lack of unfamiliar perspectives in the film – something I have always valued in Curtis’ other work – left me feeling like I was witnessing an argument already heard elsewhere.

Curtis’ storytelling was also perhaps less tight than in some of his other work: the links and parallels between the different threads of the story were either too convoluted to weave into a coherent whole, or perhaps were simply too weak to present a really gripping narrative.

On a more aesthetic level, the editing was, at points, very powerful. An extended montage of people dancing in different eras created a wonderful extra-temporal disco, and the titles that commented on how video brings the dead back to life, singing and dancing for us, were particularly poignant when overlaid on images of the long deceased.

Massive Attack’s soundtrack added a valuable additional layer, with reggae legend Horace Andy and Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins both performing incredible guest vocals, but the preponderance of covers among the songs they played risked reducing the group to a covers band. Admittedly, a very good covers band, and a lot of thought had obviously gone into the selection of the songs so that they could best support the documentary, but with such top grade musicians on the bill the potential for something special to arise from within the collaboration felt somewhat missed.

On some level the night was incredible; the scale of the visuals and the archive footage surrounding the massive crowd, supported by these remarkable musicians as they built a soundscape around it was – at times – awe-inspiring, but looking back something felt lacking. At times the audience seemed confused about whether this was a concert or a film screening, and although small groups of people danced when the music allowed, the majority remained silently standing – hundreds of faces looking up at giant screens, absorbing the sensory support the music provided the video – and together created a visual image eerily reminiscent of the kind of footage I could imagine Curtis would track down.

Going on the critique of television he presented, such passive engagement towards the screen is obviously something that matters to Curtis, and he moved towards negating such passivity with a call to arms in the encore. Whilst Elizabeth Fraser sang a beautiful version of Yanka Dyagileva’s ‘My Sorrow is Light’, text, six-foot-high on the screens around us, informed us that we can make anything happen, that we don’t need to remain passive, that the future is unknowable. Although sections of the crowd shrieked their approval, such calls to revolution felt incongruous. Having just spent two hours watching the masses be manipulated, and seeing how people like Jane Fonda and Donald Trump have imprinted their vision on the world, it was hard to feel inspired by such calls.

In some ways, such contradiction was emblematic of the whole night: did such an exciting collaboration meet its potential or, despite moments to the contrary, did it fall some way short of what was hoped for? I really didn’t want it to be, but sadly the latter feels a more apt description.

 

For more from Manchester International Festival see Total Theatre’s reviews of Inne Goris’ double-bill  for children Once Upon a Story / Long Grass, Tino Sehgal’s installation work This Variation, and Maxine Peake / Sarah Frankcom’s Shelleyan poetry protest The Masque of Anarchy.

David Roche: Catholic Erotica

David Roche: Catholic Erotica

David Roche: Catholic Erotica

Before coming to see David Roche perform, I’d spent a lazy Saturday afternoon watching the Paralympics on television. Nothing too remarkable in that of course, just as in the minutes before the show began there was nothing too unusual in noticing a sign language translator and audio describer (Catholic Erotica is a part of the disability and deaf arts festival DaDaFest after all). Although taken individually these instances might not be especially noteworthy, in the days since I have been struck by the heightened visibility of disability in my day as a whole, a reminder of how far short as a society we typically come in the representation of this group of people.

The show itself was a straightforward comedy routine. David Roche is onstage, talking for an hour or so about his life and the way in which his encounters with sex, masturbation and working in a dildo factory have been complicated not by his marked facial difference (I realised from listening to him just how unpleasant disfigurement is as a description), but rather his upbringing as a Catholic. As Roche quips, he’s an ‘incense survivor’.

The comedy is, at times, funny, irreverent and well delivered; he defends masturbation by highlighting its low carbon footprint, and, when discussing other religions, dismisses the hygienic justification for Jewish circumcision by pointing out that ‘you can also clean your teeth easier if you cut your lips off’. At other points though, particularly when he portrays alternative characters, the performance grows less engaging and the comedy falters a little (his presentation of Jesus as a recovering alcoholic is a typical example).

Commentary on Roche’s face is scarce, until the conclusion of the show at least, yet the audience never get a sense that he is avoiding the subject, just that he has a lot of other things to talk about.

It’s tempting to want to play down the social implications of this performance, to judge the show solely on its comedic merit, to not make a big deal of this man’s face. And should we do that, we are left with a competent comedy routine, slightly faltering at times, but entertaining and heartfelt. Roche is a genuinely funny man – his ad-libbing at the end of the show revealed that. But to ignore this part of the show is to ignore the implications of such increased visibility and is to ignore the small steps that this hour-long show takes towards a social reality that I had a taste of on this particular Saturday. And ignoring that would be a shame; we all need more of these days.

www.davidroche.com

Big Wow: The Art of Falling Apart

Big Wow: The Art of Falling Apart

Big Wow: The Art of Falling Apart

It’s a fact of life that we’re all getting older. Some of us might be getting older than others, but the facts are indisputable. And as we age, and as the life around us changes, sometimes we have to check in and ask ourselves how we’re doing. The question needs to be posed: ‘Is this the life I want to be living?’

In this magnificent exercise in theatre making, Big Wow present us with a character, Callum, who asks himself this exact question, and when confronted with a resounding no, has to negotiate his way towards finding a way out of his less than happy existence.

Although this question lies at the heart of the work, providing a thoughtful root from which the rest of the piece grows, the efforts of the two performers – Matt Rutter and Tim Lynskey – to transform Robert Farquhar’s writing into a fine rollercoastering example of what theatre can be must be emphasised. These are two actors who work hard.

The rest of the theatrics are simple and straightforward – two chairs, some lighting effects, a soundscape from Simon James that supports the action perfectly without superseding it. These all function efficiently and open up the space for the performances to really do the work in creating the world encountered by the audience.

I lost track in my counting, but over thirty characters are represented on the stage throughout the play, often five or six at a time, requiring some virtuosic changes in physicality and voice by the performers. A narrative that also shoots off in all directions further magnifies the rapid-fire changes that bombard those in the auditorium.

Nevertheless, we never stray so far that chaos descends entirely on the stage; a clear throughline remains throughout – Callum’s slow breakdown, a clearly defined progression of locations – but enough narrative offshoots are presented by the passing characters at the work party and in the train station that, as they fleetingly interact with Callum’s journey, a rounded and complete world is constructed.

A special mention must go to Brian, the annoying Irishman with an ability for the occasional astonishing insight that Callum bumps into along the way. In terms of the narrative, he acts as a guide to Callum, moving him along from location to location and offering him poignant advice (at one stage, beautifully enacting Callum’s recently dead father to do so), but his characterisation as a bumbling eccentric is so complete that he is transformed into something much greater than a storytelling device.

The humour is loud, non-stop and impeccably timed, perfectly paced with the occasional moment of sentiment; and all this is thoughtfully underwritten with an astute reflection on what it means to be alive.

Theatrical entertainment at its best.

imitating the dog / Pete Brooks: Hotel Methuselah

imitating the dog / Pete Brooks: Hotel Methuselah

imitating the dog / Pete Brooks: Hotel Methuselah

With its cinematic opening credits and references to film noir, it soon becomes obvious that Hotel Methuselah draws as much from the history of cinema as it does the traditions of theatre. And with its innovative use of projection, such referencing has obviously been put to good use.

The live element of the performance is viewed through a letterbox as wide as the stage, showing the performers only from shoulder to knee, whilst projections are made onto both the front of this screen and the back of the stage area as well. Such a set-up allows for a some wonderful effects; recordings of talking heads are perfectly synchronised with live bodies, backdrops spin, scroll past, and are shown from a multitude of different angles (with the performers moving their bodies to match these changing perspectives), whilst the grainy black and white footage interacts in complex ways with the colours of the live performance, asking us to wonder about the relationship between that which is real in the present and that which now lies in the past.

Time and our relationship to it is central to the narrative as well. Set in a hotel in an unnamed war zone, we see a number of encounters between Harry the night porter and the guests of the hotel. Harry can’t remember anything previous to his current shift however, and so when these encounters are repeated with slight variation, he is unable to recollect anything more than the vaguest of feelings. Threatening undertones are present throughout many of these interactions; sex and violence are never far away, and the tension generated leads to confusion in both Harry and the audience alike.

It’s in this confusion that perhaps one of the chief problems of the show lies: though the audience’s lack of understanding works well by bringing us closer to the perspective of Harry, in the performance’s explorations of time, memory and repetition, there is a sense that something profound is being suggested, but this confusion (along with aspects of the dialogue – which particularly in its description of sexual encounters can veer towards cliché) never allows for an easy way in.

Of course, theatre does not have to be easy, nor should we expect meaning to be clearly presented before us, though in the context of the barrage of theatrical encounters that is the Edinburgh Fringe, Hotel Methuselah suffers from not having enough space to be properly digested.

www.imitatingthedog.co.uk