Home Live Art: At Home – A 21st Century Salon

The view through the window is stripes: pavement, road, pavement, road, pavement, beach, sea. It’s a stratified, multi-directional landscape that is flat and vertical, close and distant that both flattens and extends space.

We are encouraged by our Salon host, Anton Lemski (aka Richard Layzell) to spend time during our visit considering the space between things, the views and the architecture as well as the performance and installation on show. ‘Question your teaspoons,’ he declares, quoting Georges Perec, having first arranged us in height order for an introductory welcome. We are to feel at home here, enjoy the house, take our time, not worry about the appointments on our engagement-cards, we’ll be fine.

Curated by Home Live Art, the Salon finds perfect accommodation in Angel House, a distinguished Regency townhouse in Hove, newly restored to opulent glory. What seems like a rather large group for this adventure distributes itself easily through the rooms to make discoveries, watch set pieces, talk and wonder.

A group of thirty gather in the Morning Room for Seth Kriebel’s The Memory of Bricks. It’s a distillation of the interactive journey pieces he has been making in recent years, a key one being A House Repeated, for Battersea Arts Centre’s post-fire. This new version conjures hidden secrets and fantasy rooms in the mind, as participants choose an imaginary path through Angel House. Seth and co-host Zoe Bouras show considerable skill and patience in gently guiding our journey, the audience here is more risk-averse than the young things of Clapham. It is cleverly constructed work, delivered calmly and enabling everyone to take part without pressure. Seth and Zoe take time out to describe to each other fantastical rooms in poetic prose, and end by taking the lead themselves, hot-seating almost, to bring the story to a pleasing close. Perhaps the Morning Room worked against us journeying together as a group, as Seth had encouraged us to do; we might have had even more adventures.

We find togetherness in the Best Bedroom, where the Boy Stitchers are holding court. There are embroidered cartoonish panels dotted about, the shredded remains of 19^th century Colorado farmers’ shirts (Wranglers as it happens) hanging limply in a wardrobe, a guide to knitting stitches on the wall and a green jumper whose moth-holes are being repaired in blue wool. We can sew if we want to; there are tempting silk threads on the low table. Trevor Pitt, resplendent in Fair Isle vest made by his mother, convenes a conversation by knitter Tom of Holland, illustrative embroiderer Stewart Easton, who turned to this medium when his drawn line became too perfect, and denim restorer Luke Deverall. These are slow crafts and the chat is quiet and interesting; men with beards and integrity, concerned with history and the process of making, rather than fashion per se. A pair of de-constructed gloves called Anna Karenina sit on a bedside table; Dorian Gray is downstairs, and Lady Chatterley, being man-handled by Mellors, appropriately hewn in rough twine, is on a table in the hall. Literature, yarn and abstract art weave together in Tom of Holland’s knitted series The Reading Gloves. In today’s ‘buy it cheap and throw it away’ culture we should all be encouraged to make and to mend, carefully and slowly.

But there’s an almighty banging in the Laundry Room disrupting our peace. Through a peep-hole, we see a sepia room, a sofa, a man in underwear. He seems to be wearing a gas mask. He is coming towards us, mask off, eating cake, look out! Thump. The door visibly shakes causing the viewer to leap backwards. We know it’s a film and a fiction but still we jump. Me And The Machine’s Europe’s Living Celebration is described as a kinetic sculpture about belonging, safety and paranoia. It certainly evokes the latter, but you can’t help wanting to watch it over again.

As we stroll through the house, we become more relaxed with fellow participants, more able to stop and talk, look out of windows, sip a glass of something, take a chair. If we need anything, there are staff dressed in black with signifying bright red blooms to ask. One such leads us into the Best Bathroom and pushes the button for Jonny Fluffypunk’s musical intro. The poet, storyteller and self-proclaimed armchair revolutionary tells us about growing up in Bucks where his dad had dominion over a train set in the attic, and reads a poem from his collection The Sustainable Nihilists’ Handbook. He is part Ivor Cutler, part Billy Childish but totally himself, with a sharp wit, impressive breadth of knowledge (there’s a photo of Nestor Makhno, commander of an independent anarchist army in Ukraine, on the mantelpiece) and flamboyant delivery. Viewed through the glass chamber of the very elaborate free-standing shower, I can’t quite see if Jonny’s eyes are on us or the ceiling, but he doesn’t seem the type to avoid making contact. As a grand finale he turns on the taps so we can admire the shower’s variety of spurtings.

After this energising interlude, we repair to the calm of the Regency Room, where Sarah Nicolls is playing extracts from her show Body Clock on her swinging grand piano. The composition is reflective, melodic, delicate and twisty as glass balls twang the strings and hidden microphones amplify knocks. She plays us out, but not before Anton gives a final address, mixing a potted history of the building with a reflection on our time in it; ‘Here we are. Nice to stay. More people like you coming later. Not like you. You are the ones.’

His encouragement, to be ourselves and be ‘seekers’ (thanks Ken Campbell), frames the whole experience. This genteel, elegant live art experience, where the curation, presentation, attention to detail and management of people has made the two hours hugely enjoyable, and is a perfect fit for Brighton Festival’s theme of ‘home’ this year.

Photo by Peter Chrisp

Old Saw: Meadow

Packed into the Warren’s smallest studio are signs of organic life. A tree’s branches reach up toward the rig and from the floor wild grasses are sprouting. It’s a relief to enter this world as we pile in from the busy playground of the Warren’s ambitious, astroturfed Edinburgh-style courtyard. The carefully crafted set whose materials do seem drawn from nature, the sighs of the wind and birdsong, seem to conjure up breathing space amongst this hubbub. The young audience (the show is for children aged from just three) are immediately entranced.

Meadow is the antithesis of the sort of children’s theatre that rushes towards its audience, singing, juggling, crying out for audience participation. Like a wild animal, it requires your gentle attention, unfolding its treasures shyly and quietly. With a rustle of grasses, the first creatures reveal themselves. They are not here to tell us a story; we are seemingly peeking into their everyday lives. One by one we meet a flock of delicate butterflies who dance in the dusk; a pair of frisky rabbits; a family of foxes exploring their world; a majestic owl who soars across the landscape and other, more mysterious creatures. There are enough touches of the figurative (a pack of giggling haggis-type animals) and silliness (a rabbit who, cartoon-like, nearly slips as he tries to impress, his feet pedalling the air) to sustain the young audience through what is rather abstract storytelling. Or perhaps I’m not giving them enough credit: it’s been newsworthy of late that children are too divorced from their environment, that we are raising a generation of children whose main connection to the natural world is through a screen, but the young audience here seemed to respond to the ‘animals’ instinctively, revelling in working out the actions and motivation of the emerging menagerie.

The puppets all are crafted from the material that makes up their world: dried grasses; broken branches; rusted old bits of farm equipment – which feels like a clear and lovely metaphor for the interweaving of the environment and those animals which make it their home. There’s a backstory, I learn afterwards, of a post-apocalyptic future where the meadow itself remembers and recreates the creatures who lived in it from the materials left behind. This is powerfully poignant but completely opaque in the performance and frankly unnecessary: there is wonder enough in seeing the creatures brought to life and returning to the inanimate – the sense of an elegy for a lost or disappearing world is already there in the show’s form.

The animation is first rate: Old Saw have assembled a stellar cast of puppeteers for this tour whose careful, detailed puppetry is vital in bringing these occasionally abstract creatures to breathing, believable, and compelling life. Their work duets with a haunting score by folk musician Paul Mosley which develops theme and atmosphere for each animal. Soon the tiny theatre is alive with glowing, swooping, leaping, loving, and curious creatures: it is a truly magical experience whose theatricality is managed with a deft touch. The small space isn’t able to actually magic itself bigger, of course, and there are some sequences that are curtailed by the crowded wings and low rig. The show would also benefit from a steeper rake. But touring puppetry has its own very specific demands and this is the nature of Fringe – the show’s overall heart shines through. Take your kids, sit at the front if you can, and enjoy an enchanting puppetry safari.

Silencio Blanco: Chiflón: The Silence of the Coal

It begins with a death. The small, fragile-looking, pale figure is working underground, in a tunnel supported by wonky struts and lit by tiny lamps. He hammers, he shovels. There are drips and echoes, sounds of other work going on unseen around him, and then there is a louder sound. He is alarmed. One of his puppeteers stands, and pours a basketful of debris from above. He tries to run, but there is no escape. He falls, and is crushed. He struggles and then he is still. Silently, gently, his puppeteers withdraw their control rods from his white-paper body.

Puppets do death very well.

Chiflón: The Silence of the Coal is framed by underground deaths, between which we also see into the above-ground lives of the miners and their families. The show, brought to the Brighton Festival by Chilean puppetry company Silencio Blanco, is based on the story of a 19th-century miner, but intentionally pulls on memories of more recent disasters.

It is entirely performed by small paper-based white figurative rod puppets, operated tabletop/bunraku style by a team of black-clad hooded puppeteers. There is no text, indeed in the publicity the show is repeatedly described as ‘silent’ – but (leaving for the moment the constant soundtrack) the puppets do, in fact, speak: we see their conversations, their attitudes and gestures of speech, both delivered and heard. This is no less real speech than their actions are real actions. The main mode of performance, in fact, is a kind of puppet naturalism: all movement is very human-like – nothing here of the wild or transformative or scale-changing possibilities of the form. When it works, this method is effective – it’s like magical translation, and we understand their conversations. If ever you lose the thread, though (as I did in one section with the miner’s wife and – I’m guessing – their daughter) you are properly lost, and easily disengaged: there isn’t a strong metaphorical or visual language to read; you’re just watching a conversation, an interaction, that you don’t understand.

The puppeteers, although dressed in blacks and hoods, are not ‘invisible’ entirely: they interact functionally with the puppets, fetching objects, turning lights on and off in their world, and, touchingly, withdraw their operating rods at the points of death; there’s a hint of their presence as fates, as anima, but this is never explicit or overplayed.

The soundtrack is mostly built of simple sounds (birds, water, footsteps) and functions to situate us – it shifts between interior, exterior, and underground, and between night and day. There are just a couple of moments where extradiegetic melodic sound intrudes – at the ending, and the other is the piece’s singular moment of fantastical imagery, when the women’s laundry expands to fill the stage. It’s a relief, this scene, although only a small stretch from the other stage-pictures and languages: it is a breath of something bigger than the very constricted world of the miners.

And this constriction and limitation feels honest but is dramatically a bit suffocating. The puppeteers are exceptionally skilled and work seamlessly together to keep the figures alive, to give every flicker and gesture accurately, but it feels as though they’re working from an overly-restricted palette, and sometimes at great length. Through a commitment to truthfulness the show becomes too austere to connect fully with the audience. It also struggles to reach across the relatively large and wide space of the Dome Studio – I was about halfway back, but at the end of a row; I struggled to keep focus and follow the detail of the puppets – I felt I was about as far away from them as I could have managed. Being at the side meant I missed several moments, and the downstage-centre finale was obscured almost entirely by set, puppeteers and audience.

Although it is great to see an international puppetry company featured in the Brighton Festival, and always intriguing for puppet fans to see work of this level, this was possibly not the best introduction to theatrical puppetry for a general audience.

Port in Air: Hardly Still Walking, Not Yet Flying

Four women want to reach the sublime and they’ll try anything to get there: happy-clappy songs, fractured didactic arguments, and chair balancing. Theirs is both a philosophical journey, taking in Burke and Nietzsche, and a theatrical one, involving every possible performance style and form in its exhaustive quest for the mountain top. They puncture the action with a meta-refrain of ‘This isn’t working, let’s try something else!’

What looks and feels like a piece grown from a devising workshop, is in fact written and directed by University of Cologne Lecturer Richard Aczel. He questions, ‘How, in an age that wobbles between apocalyptic pathos and brain-dead boredom, can we still hit the dizzy heights of the sublime?’ but the text and staging lack the necessary focus to engage us fully. ‘We’ve hit the end of irony!’ an actor exclaims, before I’d had chance to register any irony at all.

A dizzying, choppy piece then, with shifts of tone and content that make you question what you are seeing. Perhaps that’s the point, but the Port in Air troupe struggles to communicate such complex ideas through this frenetic mix of movement, text, songs, and games. The four young women work hard and with commitment; they have a great deal of physical action to get through. A set built from white chairs is constantly rearranged – it’s effective but over played – whilst the lighting design is well above usual Fringe standards. The main singer’s pretty voice weaves songs through the show providing welcome moments of reflection.

Because the actors don’t own the material, the performances are occasionally uneasy and at odds with their on-stage personalities. When the text slips into German, it becomes more fluid and words are allowed to settle. As an ensemble there is a disparity in the quality of performance and some text delivery is tonally uninteresting. When three hunky men take the stage (audience shills) it only adds to the confusion; their performances seem to spring from another play altogether. I’m all for ambition on stage and in literature, and the writer and company are certainly going for it full blast, but despite some strong stage pictures, and two engaging performers, there are too few rewards.

As it was, this audience member left the show still at base camp, nowhere near the mountain.

Dead Centre: Chekhov’s First Play

A bourgeois rollercoaster of classical criticism, existentialist musing, and liberal destruction of the past, speckled with interjections of the true life of acting, money, and debt – what good is a Chekhov play nowadays? In Ireland, to be more specific? Who are these nobodies moaning about their mansions?

Chekhov was a key exponent of naturalist theatre, dedicated to capturing real life and placing it on the stage. This is a staging of his first play, which it seems has had so many drafts all the good characters have been cut and all the important backstories or subplots have been slashed, leaving us with a shell-like play of some people outside a big house. This at least is what we are told by the director, who speaks to us through headphones throughout the play.

Before the Old Vic’s beautiful red curtains are drawn, the director tests our headphones are working. He explains he was worried that we would miss all the references and themes, so will be providing a director’s commentary. This is met by chuckles from the theatre: the idea that the classics are drenched with signifiers you could easily miss, that expert commentary is positively necessary for us to fully grasp these over-studied pieces of culture, is a familiar one.

When they open at last, the curtains reveal an absolutely stunning image of a grand house, banquet table and the back of a stately woman looking at her own property. Property, the director tells us, is a major theme in Chekhov’s work.

The commentary is funny. The director becomes frustrated when the actors pronounce names wrong, miss out whole pages, overplay or underplay. He starts to literally speak over them, their speeches muted and his voice taking over, talking and talking about why this play is important and what it means. It’s interestingly annoying. It makes me aware of how much the classics are talked about and how their worth is validated by this talk, but what about the actual play? How does it make anybody feel? How does it make the actors feel?

Meanwhile, the play’s narrative is building up to the arrival of the lead character, Platonov. The characters are all obsessed with Platonov – it’s clear that he is a real somebody.

And then, everything shifts, and the shift is really welcomed. I can’t even recall the order of the following events, such is the explosive whirlwind of images that break the play wide open, slicing it through, bending and burning. The performers start to shed their characters, they fall into performances of who they really are: making adverts, crippled by debt, abandoned by age, sick and dying. They are nobodies, they feel like nobodies and they want to be taken away. This is communicated through a series of theatrical images, which appear chaotically and hauntingly. A pregnant woman lies on a table, blue liquid seeping from her belly, while the sound of the ocean plays into our ears.

I am dizzied by the experience. There is a violence to it. A gun is shown in the first act, and so it must be shot in the second. Likewise, the foreboding was there, that this was all going to shatter to pieces, from the beginning. To be honest, once it started, I wanted more. I wanted a total obliteration of that beautiful mansion house.

I am left considering what it feels like for a poor actor to put on that costume and pretend to be wealthy, a property owner, moaning and crying and eventually dying. I am left thinking about plays that have nothing of the living in them. The living that is messy, unknown, unknowing, and doesn’t own anything.

A theatre piece about theatre, Chekhov’s First Play goes a little too far in one way and not far enough in another. By this I mean, it is too committed to metanarratives and not totally committed to what can really happen when real life walks into a naturalist play. However, slick, surprising, and visually epic, Chekhov’s First Play serves Mayfest’s ambitious and important goal of bringing the large scale to contemporary theatre, presenting Bristol with a memorable show that is really letting rip with big props, big sets, and key issues.

Total Theatre