The Wardrobe Ensemble: 1972: The Future of Sex

At my girls’ grammar school, the English class of ’72 found DH Lawrence’s descriptions of ‘fecund loins’ and ‘butting haunches’ both hysterically funny and utterly disgusting. For Penny, a college student in The Wardrobe Ensemble’s hugely enjoyable show, Lady Chatterley is a role model, an emancipated woman who ‘wants it as much as he does.’ But Penny (Helena Middleton), like Lady C, is going to be rudely disappointed when her turn comes – or rather fails to.

1972 is a year on the cusp, adrift from the permissive, free-loving, mini-skirted swinging of the 60s and not quite yet embracing Glam Rock, let alone Punk. We have the Osmond vs Cassidy dilemma, flares and feather cuts, Edward Heath and the IRA. Thank goodness for David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust. He connects all the characters in The Future of Sex, providing a glimpse of hope that something special and exciting might happen in their lives. His is the music and persona that can carry them through their experiments in doing it.

But first, the journey to this awakening, introduced with flamboyant panache and a cry of ‘This is it!’ by Tom England’s exuberant Martin. He’s like Antony Sher’s The History Man, and will later seduce Penny with his poetry.

The set is a row of chairs against a patterned wall, a square of dance floor, and four microphones at the corners. Just off stage, composer and musician Tom Crosely-Thorne provides guitar backing, in loons resplendent with Union Jack inserts.

Characters are introduced, and while they are all archetypes, they have idiosyncrasies enough to make them singular and memorable. Their thoughts and actions are described from outside the performance space – ‘This is Antony. His friends call him Tony’ – making the play unfurl like a novel and assimilation of detail easy. Within minutes we know that Christine (Kerry Lovell) is going to struggle to commit to losing her virginity, that gawky Anna (Jesse Meadows) will fall for the seductive Tessa (Emily Greenslade) and patient Rich (Ben Vardy) won’t get to play in a band.

Storylines overlap and the action is seamless, with beautifully choreographed movement and properly integrated music and songs. As the different relationships begin to unbuckle, the pace increases until clothes are ripped off and, in some unflattering swimmies, the sexually liberated teens dash about until exhausted then lie panting on the floor. How was it for you? If all this sounds hugely jolly, it is, but not at the expense of some more serious contemplation. The women in particular find contradictions in the way they are expected to behave; The Female Eunuch is telling them one thing, Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat another. For Antony ‘he calls himself Anton’ (James Newton) gender is more problematical and he finds solace dressing in his mother’s clothes. Tessa and Anna will meet decades later and be disappointed in each other. Christine’s parents’ loveless marriage will disintegrate. Germaine Greer will upset a generation of feminists. Today’s youth may have different reference points and, in Western Europe, a more permissive society, but the same pressures and concerns about sex remain.

The Wardrobe Ensemble’s work, including previous piece Riot (2011), has been rightly praised and they are certainly one of the most accomplished and original companies I’ve seen for a while. Proving, yet again, the city of Bristol’s key role in the development and support of young performers.

As a flashback to a decade that saw me trying desperately to blow-dry my curls into Farah Fawcett flicks, reading Jackie and riding an orange Chopper, The Future of Sex offers focus and fun. The clothes are just right, the haircuts slightly less so, and, if we never said ‘chill’ or ‘hanging out’, I was still right there, with the Spacehopper, the high-waisters, and the awkward fumblings. A very satisfying hour.

Laura Jane Dean: This Room

A Nation’s Theatre Festival is showcasing an assortment of work from UK-based artists, with an eclectic programme at Battersea Arts Centre ranging from scratch pieces on a ‘pay what you can’ basis to full touring works.

This Room by Kent-based artist Laura Jane Dean sits effectively within BAC’s architecture: a room in the old town hall theatre is stripped almost bare to reveal and pay homage to its own biography. This Room exposes the conversations, questions, decisions, and interactions that occur in a therapy room, usually confidential and unknown to the outside world. Supported by the Wellcome Trust, demystifying and raising awareness of mental health is a current and timely subject for theatre.

This solo piece is text based in the form of a personal lecture. It juxtaposes narratives written in formal language about medical conditions with the acting out of those conditions, the rational versus the emotional. Dean’s performance soon becomes more than a lecture, evolving into a lived experience of anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and how that feels. This is layered with a rational and philosophical questioning and understanding of what is happening both objectively and phenomenologically. The sophisticated awareness in the speech bridges the medical and emotional text. An intense hour unfolds with brief moments of lightness which could be extended to balance the heavy content.

Dean acknowledges the here and now as she smiles and greets us on arrival and takes the audience back and forth between relocating in time and geography to her therapy room and the existing room in BAC where we are referred to as the subject. There is a tension that underlies this piece, a fear or awareness that obsessive compulsive behaviours are pressing, urging, impulses that could manifest at any moment in all of us. These might be the ones described in the lecture, such as worrying that the house will burn down because the oven is left on, or Dean’s personal responses to her pairs of tights for, either repulsed by them or obsessed by thoughts of wringing her neck with them.

The design consists of a square space framed by lines of light along its boundaries, dressed with a table and boxes, a notice board, microphone and chair. The audience seating is arranged along three sides of this space, mirroring the boundary of the light. The space feels sparse and clinical like Dean’s succinct and matter of fact portrayal of her struggle. Eight forms pinned to a notice board and four storage boxes containing envelopes of reports and multiple pairs of tights make visual the notion of categorisation, of putting people into boxes, numbers into charts and charts into statistics, dehumanising the subject at each step. Dean takes the audience through the cognitive behavioural therapy she undertook to combat obsessive compulsive disorder. The space that becomes her therapy room gradually becomes our own as the fourth wall is repeatedly broken and we are encouraged to reflect on our own experiences.

A short interlude between each section sees Dean question the audience against a set of statistics in her hand. Statements about worries or urges are set against the percentage of women and men who experience them. As more men are said to imagine having sex in a public place than women, we giggle and glance at our neighbours to see if their hands are raised in admission as well. This brief promise of humour is starkly contrasted by two brave viewers raising their hand in admission to experiencing the urge to slit their wrists or throat when seeing a sharp knife. It is at this point that the walls of safety built up around us by humour are shattered in one fell swoop. It’s an intimate and frightening moment.

Dean subtly adjusts her text between conversation, narration, and something progressively rhythmic. Not quite a song but more than a monologue, the ‘I want to know things’ poem has an ebb and flow to the voice, a regularity in its repetition and a sense of knowing in its unanswered questions. This section describes what Dean is searching for, her thoughts and feelings while living through her OCD. Matched by a simple chase between suspended yellow bulbs and darkness and a light trickle of piano notes, the subtlety of the work is where it is at its most poignant and strong. Melanie Wilson’s soundscape sets up an interplay between Dean’s thoughts and her live speech which is key to communicating the barriers and tension that develop out of fear.

Timely voiceovers put into words the unsaid, the pressing questions of a once silent voice. This is the voice that Dean could not speak out loud at the time due to social expectations or fear; it is unedited and brutally honest. The repetition of ‘I’ and ‘you’ is exposing and confronting as the subjects of the speech swap between herself and her therapist and I can’t help but feel under the microscope from beginning until leaving the building. The repetition of ‘You are…’ for example, ‘You are petite, you are wearing clothes’, brings the very-absent therapist directly into this room.

Entirely relatable, the piece creates a thoughtful and contemplative space. Dean leaves us in her current state of ‘not knowing if I’m better or if I want to get better’. She doesn’t want it to be easy but it could be easier. We are all heavy, with the world on our shoulders. I have an impulsive need to hug her but she is gone. Maybe it is me who needs the hug.

Lola Arias: Minefield

A group of men stand in a line, each holding a sheet of paper with his name written on it. Lou. David. Ruben. Sukrim. Gabriel. Marcelo.

Lou and David, tall and broad shouldered, look like retired British soldiers, which they are. Royal Marines. They look and sound like ex-Marines, but they are now both PhDs; one a psychologist specialising in war trauma, and one a special needs teacher who is also an expert on the philosophy of colour. Sukrim is much shorter. He’s a Gurkha who was trained in jungle warfare in Brunei, has travelled the world, and was brought over to fight in the Falklands. The Malvinas. Ruben is a survivor of the sinking of the General Belgrano, having spent 41 hours adrift in the South Atlantic on a raft, witnessing death all around him. He is also the founder of the Beatles tribute band Get Back Trio, who have played at The Cavern in Liverpool. Gabriel was a conscript to the Argentine army who fought in the Battle of Wireless Ridge. He became a lawyer, and he also lectures on the Malvinas in Argentinean schools. Marcelo was also a conscript soldier – like the other Argentines, just 19 years old when called to war. He’s shorter and broader than his two countrymen, with a muscly torso. He led a troubled life post-war, although saved himself through sports training, and now takes part in triathlons. He talks of the fear they had of the Gurkhas, who were rumoured to be hacking Argentinians to pieces and eating their ears.

Lou is telling us the story of returning to Buenos Aires, many years after the Falklands War ended, to make this show. He talks about being met at Buenos Aires airport not by an Argentine holding a gun to his head, but by a smiling person holding a piece of paper bearing his name. The rehearsals took longer than the war did, he says, and we chuckle. 74 days, that’s how long the war lasted. He’d been garrisoned on the Falklands, before the war broke out, and he’d been taken prisoner, then later returned there to fight on, and then he’d gone back for the 25-year reunion. But now he was heading to Argentina to work with theatre-maker Lola Arias – who is Argentinean, and was just just 6 years old in 1982 when the Falklands War / Guerra de Las Malvinas (the surtitles studiously switch between the two) took place. But she knew all about it. As we learn in the play, Argentinean children are taught about the Malvinas in school, and learn to sing the March of the Malvinas. It is very much a current political issue. Unlike English schoolchildren, who are taught nothing about the war or the history behind it, or of Argentine’s current position – and let’s face it, is there anybody out there who gives two hoots about the Falklands nowadays?

David has a bit of a penchant for dressing up in ladies’ clothing to entertain his mates. This is subverted very nicely in the play as he morphs into Margaret Thatcher, mouthing recordings of her famous nation-rallying speeches. On the opposite side of the stage – both of these human puppets projected onto the back screen – we see General Galtieri. When Thatcher speaks, the words on the surtitles are in Spanish. When Galtieri speaks, in English. Falklands. Malvinas. War. Guerra. Malvinas. Falklands.

The play on language throughout is beautiful – not only the constant swapping between English and Spanish in live and recorded words, surtitled accordingly, but the added wild card of having a Nepalese Gurkha included. His English is still laboured and delivered with a heavy accent. His foreign-ness, his otherness, is presented to us for what it is, another odd twist in this story of colonialism and disputed territory, in which language, and the naming of things, and the power of words, plays such a key part. Many years after the Falklands conflict, we learn, after a long fight for his rights, Sukrim now has UK citizenship.

It is a very clever piece of theatre. You read the blurb, and you think it’s going to be a verbatim piece: three British servicemen and three Argentines from the armed forces, all of whom are veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas war, are brought together onstage. But Lola Arias is far too clever a theatre-maker for mere verbatim. Yes, there are spoken stories, reminiscences presented straight out to the audience, but in this very theatrical piece of theatre, we also get a loud and traumatic drum solo to signify the sinking of the Belgrano; a full-on heavy metal tirade against war; a mock-TV panel show on the alleged eating of ears; and a version of In the Psychiatrists’s Chair.

The interplay between live stage action, found film, and live-feed video is brilliantly executed, using theatrical techniques that Arias collectively calls ‘re-enactment’. Collages of TV news footage from the UK and from Argentina flip by to illustrate or contrast with stories told verbally; newspaper photos that are re-enacted by the very people in those photos, right here and now, in odd little physical theatre vignettes that have a sorrowful look of children playing war games. The re-enacted speeches of the warmongering leaders, the live rock and roll numbers that punctuate the play…

There’s a great balance between hard to stomach moments, and light and playful moments. The drum solo (by Ruben) is an intense and harrowing moment; but it contrasts with the ironic humour of Ruben’s stories about a rather idiosyncratic grasp of English based only on knowing the words to the Beatle songs that Ringo sings. I am the drummer, so I need to know Ringo’s songs, says Ruben – and demonstrates with a charming version of With A Little Help From My Friends. All of this is typical of the lightness that Arias allows into her work, whilst never shying away from the really dark and nasty things that have to be dealt with.

She’s clever, very clever. She leads us in gently, with everyone in jolly reunion story-telling mode. We get cheery accounts of everyone’s basic biographies, and the bare facts of their war experiences. They are all mates now, it’s all in the past. As the play progresses, the stories of what they actually felt when the really horrible things happened emerge slowly, at a pace we can handle. What it really feels like to kill someone. What it’s like to search a dead body for intelligence. What happens when you come home after war and you suddenly haven’t got a job and end up as an addict in a psychiatric hospital. What it’s like to stand in a pub where everyone is singing your praises, but the only person you can talk to is the World War Two veteran at the bar, because they are the only person who has a clue what you’re going through.

Always, Arias takes care of her audience (as I am sure she takes care of her performers). There is no one onstage other than these six ‘non actors’, who are trusted to carry the play, and do so magnificently. The creation and rehearsal process was long and thorough, and they have worked as a collaborative team to create this extraordinary piece of work. Whatever is needed, they do, these six men who are now one unit, working together on the job. They tell stories of fights and flights, they do press-ups, they operate the live-feed cameras, they dress up, they dress down, they open maps on-camera, they lovingly place a green woollen blanket in shot so that it becomes a mossy landscape, they drag the drum kit on and off, they form a band.

Minefield is not a play about ‘what really happened’ in 1982 in the South Atlantic. It is a play about memory – about what remains years later, about the stories we choose to tell, and about the stories that we discover we have to tell. It is a play about how human beings survive and guard their sanity through continuously interrogating and re-evaluating their memories. It is a wonderful piece of theatre, one that it has been hard to write about, as all I really want to say is: just go and see this, it is brilliant, totally brilliant.

Featured image by Tristram-Kenton

Deborah Pearson: History History History

History History History is a translation of a Hungarian film – the film that was meant to be shown on the day of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, at the cinema which instead become the revolutionary headquarters. Pearson does not simply convert one language into another, but gives us a Hungarian history lesson on the political climate the film was made and released in, and the personal tale of the actor who plays the main character. Thus we encounter a film dubbed, subtitled, and censored: by the Hungarian government, by Deborah’s own humorous rewriting, and the voiceovers of her mother and grandmother.

I look at the back of Deborah’s head gazing up at the cinema screen. I watch her watching it, looking into it, seeking out a clue. She reveals to us that the main character is played by her own grandfather.

She turns so that a light shines on her face as the film continues to play. The audience look for the resemblance between her and the man in the film. I can see it, something about the shape of her jaw, the darkness of her eyes. And in this moment a line is suddenly drawn back through time between her and 1956, when the film was made and the revolution occurred.

Through a short overhead projection demonstration of the political configuration of 1956 in Hungary, we understand that this film is pinned down by political relations between the film industry and a changing government. So much so that the film is made but never released, and the lead actor flees the country with his family. This performance succinctly stamps out the political as personal by detailing the conditions and consequences of revolution and migration on one family.

Deborah’s mother’s voice is played over the film, and we listen to her calmly translate it. I enjoy her accent and the familiarity of her and her daughter’s interactions. It is a charming way to watch a film, and situates me in Deborah’s own childhood: the film a relic for their family. Her grandmother’s voice is also played, her accent is stronger, and I notice a folding of Hungarian into Canadian that can be heard through the voices of these three generations. Her grandmother starts to really get at the heart of the situation: how she was committed to bringing her children up in a free country and how they weren’t actually at the uprising and… well, there was something else, but Deborah censors it. She talks about compassion, and I understand that she is protecting something of her family’s own suffering, that isn’t for our listening pleasure.

The story and the way it gradually opens is intriguing and sensitive, but what I find most interesting is the suggestion of the underwhelming quality of history, as Deborah says; this happened and then that happened and then this happened and then that happened. There is an inevitable chaos and reorganisation in the story told, the story of history and I do already know it. It’s like my own story, with different nationalities, different uprisings and with a movie star.

I am left considering what history is – is it what is written or filmed? Is it the reality or the story that follows? Is it our relatives, or ancestors? The invisible lines that go all the way back through the gunfire and beyond? Deborah Pearson is written into the history of the Hungarian revolution, and in this performance she evolves from a woman with a film into a hidden history present.

Karen Sherrard: A Fête Worse Than Death

A Fête Worse Than Death transports us from sunny seaside Brighton to the annual summer fete in a soggy Welsh village, where proceedings are managed by the formidable village matriarch and there is a special guest appearance from Charlie Dimmock-alike celebrity gardener Esmé de Flange. The fourth wall is nowhere to be seen, and each character turn is bookended by a video or slideshow. Karen Sherrard’s gentle character comedy is best described as a collection of thematically linked stand-up routines. Her broadly drawn women would all be right at home on a BBC sketch show. The entire hour is a nostalgic retreading of harmless, if obvious, British comedy tropes.

Easy laughs are found in the Welsh weather, the literal nature of the annual Tractor Pull, the spectacularly rubbish raffle prizes. Esmé the oversexed daytime TV personality and her closeted husband are an exercise in entendre that is linguistically impressive, but a randy middle-aged woman pawing at random young men because she doesn’t get enough attention from the secretly gay man she is married to isn’t so much a joke as a very dated social trope that I thought we’d evolved beyond.

Sherrard is a likeable performer, her delivery brings to mind Victoria Wood’s cuddly routines and the video/slide show interludes do enhance the running jokes. Especially popular with the audience was a series of astoundingly anatomical-looking photographs of unusual plants. A horticultural Readers’ Wives if you will.

The denouement, the Grand Raffle, brought out an unanticipated competitive side to the audience, with participants taking the brilliantly ridiculous prizes maybe a little too seriously.

A Fête Worse Than Death never really lives up to the promise of its punning title, but it’s a pleasant show built on easy laughs, though the politics could do with updating.

Total Theatre