Civilian Theatre

To keep your voice while all around you are losing theirs…

Dumbstruck – Fine Chisel @ Battersea Arts Centre, until 19 July

You really would have to be a rather hard-hearted soul to dislike Fine Chisel, the theatre company behind Dumbstruck; under Tom Spencer’s artistic directorship they create effortlessly charming work that belies the graft needed to generate such lightness of touch. Dumbstruck may not be without flaws but it is rarely far from raising a smile when the talented cast of five – switching fluidly between roles that require them to be multi-instrumentalists, singers, dancers and actors – are in full flow.

Fine Chisel settled on an intriguing premise – that of the loneliest whale in the world – and crafted a multi-stranded story around it. It is a good starting point for such a musically-inflected company as whales are indelibly linked in the imagination with the slightly dreamy idea of the whale song. They communicate through a form of music and are a natural fit for a company like Fine Chisel, who often seem closer to integrating theatre into their music than music into their theatre.

Dumbstruck has a lovely opening, with instruments played in unexpected ways to create a sense of the oceanic wild and the strangely alien sounds of the whale. It is an engaging start and as the play widens its focus into the Alaskan wilderness and Ted’s research station it shows huge promise as an aural existential fantasy; an ode to isolation, conducted through music, seen through man and through the great unknowable, unseen presence of the whale.

However as it opens out to reveal Ted’s journey and introduces the figures of Fiona and Mal, who both wrestle with their own increasing sense of loss, it is unable to sustain its focus on this initial premise. At times the production seems to suffer from a lack of confidence in itself; it lacks stillness and has a forced busyness as it flits from idea to idea with little time to settle. The performers are talented enough, in particular Robin McLoughlin’s Ted and Holly Beasley-Garrigan’s Fiona, that you wish they would slow down and allow their presence to wash over the audience.

Underpinning it all is the music and here Fine Chisel can do no wrong. The sound is gorgeous throughout, from the lovingly created ocean-scape to the finely rendered pastiches of 1960’s pop and folk, whilst even the
transition scenes are underscored by a wonderfully jazzy sound that seems to channel the finger-snapping funk of Charlie Mingus.

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For madeleine read fishball

Wot? No Fish!! – Battersea Arts Centre, until the 19 July 2014 (Tickets)

It has taken Wot? No Fish!! a while to reach the Battersea Arts Centre. After spending two years in development, it premiered at last year’s Edinburgh Festival before working its way through the regional theatre circuit then finally arriving in London just as Edinburgh begins for this year’s crop of hopefuls.

Except this isn’t quite true. The story we are told pre-dates all of this by the best part of ninety years, and the show was already there just waiting to be found. For Danny Braverman has pieced together, drawing on his own family history, a far more tender and moving story than could ever be realistically crafted in fiction: the life of an East End Jewish shoemaker and his family told through the weekly sketches he gave to his wife on the back of his wage packet.

It may be told with all the simplicity of a fairy-tale but the magic is created in the natural complexity of the lives of real people. It is a story of a family who may not have encountered witches, dragons and quests but instead must confront argumentative sisters, the threat of war and a move from the East End to Golders Green.

This is the story of Celie and Ab Soloman and we hear about their lives through Braverman whilst seeing it brought to a vivid reality through Ab’s miniaturist cartoons; it is less a play and more an illustrated aural biography. Braverman has made a wise decision to not perform the story because he has realised that all the drama exists in the pictures; he recognises his role is to explain, to be our guide through the lives of others.

The production has a few touches that hint to its past life at Edinburgh, perhaps some will find the slightly whimsical delivery irritating and the attempts to engage the audience a little heavy-handed but this is just part of the charm of a production that is constantly reinforcing a sense of community and of shared stories.

As Proust starts with a madeleine so Braverman starts with fishballs. And if you didn’t already know you were entering the close knit world of east end Jewish families then the references to gefilte fish and chrain prove something of a clue. It is the memory of this snack that accompany him on a trip through hospital and it is the recurring motif that Braverman returns in order to continue unravelling the lives of Celie and Ab over time.

Braverman acts as a curator of the work. The care with which he has unpicked and ordered the events is staggering. There are over 3000 works in total and we are shown a carefully woven selection to build a richly textured picture of two lives that we never knew existed before walking into the room. By the end of the journey (inevitably it must end and like all human journeys it can only end in one final destination) we feel we know them as well we know our own relatives.

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The war poets find their voice with The Tiger Lillies

Micro-review: A Dream Turned Sour – The Tiger Lillies @ Battersea Arts Centre

It remains questionable whether A Dream Turned Sour can be considered as theatre but since it acts as one of the closing shows of the 2014 LIFT Festival, and has otherwise been ignored by the massed ranks of music critics who are clearly more enamoured by the potential for a dream collaboration between Dolly and Metallica at Glastonbury than in writing about this warped, reimagining of the celebrated poetry of the first world war, it is up to Civilian Theatre to share its thoughts.

To those not experienced in The Tiger Lillies it is a forbidding opening – ‘Death’ repeated over and over in a gravelly, atonal voice that oppressively (and impressively) fills the great space of the Battersea Arts Centre main hall. It is the start of a performance (and with The Tiger Lillies it most certainly is a performance) by a band at complete ease with what they do – and so they should be having successfully mined the furrow of alternative cabaret for over two decades.

Their strange mix of Kurt Weill-esque cabaret, gypsy, gothic humour, and operating in a register that veers between the rasp of Tom Waits and a startling falsetto underpinned by a ferocious operatic power is quite unlike anyone else. It is certainly hard to imagine another band undercutting the reflexive conservative styling that we tend to put on the work of the war poets with quite such vigour and zeal.

The Tiger Lillies have reclaimed the bitterness and the hatred, the terror and the contempt for the generals back home, that often gets lost amongst the plaudits and the GCSE-syllabus analysis. There is a black humour in their renderings of ‘Rendezvous With Death’ and ‘God How I Hate You’ that forces you to go back to the original readings to realise the horror that the lines contain.

Others, like Wilfred Owen’s ‘Nothing Ever Happens’, sound so at ease in their new home it is hard to imagine them in any other way. However the disgust never goes away and the venom builds to such a furious, glorious crescendo of disgust at those most famous lines ‘Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori’ that the audience must nearly cower at the assault.

Despite the most curious style of delivery, there is great articulacy in the delivery by frontman, Martyn Jacques. Each poem has been carefully thought through to maximise the impact through presentation and the words are never lost despite the cacophony of noise coming from the three piece.

Fans of The Tiger Lillies can be assured they have not dampened their natural tendencies as a sop to the serious subject matter, and fans of the war poets can be assured that the poems have been treated with the care and intelligence the power of the writing deserves.

Listen to Dulce et Decorum Est by The Tiger Lillies

More about The Tiger Lillies

More about Lift Festival 2014

Bafflingly brilliant Adler & Gibb presents a conceptual challenge

Adler & Gibb – Royal Court, until 05 July 2014 (tickets)

There is no way, easy or otherwise, to describe Tim Crouch’s latest play, Adler & Gibb, so that it makes sense to the reader. Despite seeing more than 100 plays over the last three years I cannot recall another production that feels so elusive that I am left suggesting that the only way to understand it is to experience it. As a play it is defiantly high-concept, deliberately infuriating and fully aware of the challenge it makes of its audience. Having roundly trashed Mr Burns for pretty much identical reasons it suddenly becomes apparent how fine the margins between success and failure really are.

Not only is it difficult to describe, it is hard even to talk about it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like the most appallingly self-indulgent piece of pretentious, beard-stroking metropolitan claptrap. If it sounds to readers that I damning Adler & Gibb with this review then I can only echo Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony eulogy and the dubious claim that he comes ‘[… ] to bury Caesar, not to praise him’.

Tim Crouch does not tend to make plays with easy answers. In Adler & Gibb he has made a play without easy questions. Like a magician he lays subtle clues with one hand – a neat reference to the Maine lion that gives a hint to the identity of the actor – whilst at the same time misdirecting with the other – the changing story behind the napkin.

Yet the crucial factor is that despite arriving at the interval with a general sense of befuddlement and feeling close to displeasure at the opaqueness of the first half, Crouch has still built an atmosphere of trust; that this a play worth persisting with. It has an intangible quality that nags away at the back of the mind that you are on cusp of something quite special, and that if does fail then at least it will fail spectacularly.

To start with a description; Adler & Gibb is about a conceptual artist, her relationship with Gibb, their retreat from the world and what happened after. Or Adler & Gibb is about a student looking for scholarship funding through a study of Adler and Gibb. Or Adler & Gibb is about an actor who used to be a student who is making a film about Adler and Gibb. Or Adler & Gibb is about an actor playing Adler who meets Gibb, who tells us the story of Adler and Gibb. Or it is about different mediums of art, the tones they employ and how it affects the narratives they tell and the stories heard by the audience. Or it is about all of this and none of this.

To start at the beginning; the play opens with a presentation from a student about Adler and Gibb. She is eager, passionate and delightfully gauche; instantly recognisable as someone who has been inspired but lacks the articulacy and the knowledge to present her views as we might expect. She tells us the story of Adler and Gibb but through it is digressive, fractured and jarringly myopic.

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Love, (near) death, fake weddings, singing and Albanians – Cosi fan Tutte has it all

Cosi fan Tutte – Popup Opera @ The Whip, Mayfair – Playing at selected venues this summer

Earlier this year Civilian Theatre found itself in the stifling surroundings of Eat, Pray, Love Drink, Shop & Do to see Popup Opera perform Le Docteur Miracle; a marvellous little piece that lingered in the memory more for the quality of singing and the near brute-force goodwill on display than for a venue so cloyingly twee that a Zooey Deschanel guest appearance didn’t seem out of the question.

A similar proposition in the height of summer did leave cause for concern but this was almost immediately offset by The Whip; a period cocktail bar that may be painfully on-trend but at least it is dedicated to rehabilitating that forgotten classic – the Mint Julep; a more appropriately summery concoction it would be hard to think of.

Julep in one hand, Mozart programme in the other. It is easy to begin to feel like being part of a world long left behind. The limited seating and period furniture gives the event even more of the sensation of being part of an audience invited to an Edwardian stately home for a summer party rather than to a room above a pub in Mayfair.

It is this tongue-in-cheek nod to refined gentility that Popup Opera are so good at selling. Even Harry Percival’s avuncular presence before and after the show comes across as a charmingly pleasant Hooray Henry hypeman.

One of the more appealing things elements of a Popup Opera show is their inventiveness towards setting. They clearly recognise the constraints of the limited space and the need for a touring production to be highly adaptable, and there is a wonderful malleability that is carried across in a very carefully managed shonkyness to proceedings. This is testament to the quality of Darren Royston’s direction and the skill of a cast forced to combine the ability to perform Mozart’s score with a sense for comic timing and knack for audience management. It is a far more demanding performance than it may first appear.

Not being remotely qualified to comment on the technical quality of the singing, I can only say that a layman only requires two things from opera; to enjoy the singing and to understand what is going on. The cast are excellent on both counts. From the start you feel that you are in safe hands, with particular standout performances from Adam Torrance (Ferrando), Eve Daniell (Fiordiligi) and Clementine Lovell as the scene-stealing Despina.

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A two and three quarter hour play based on a 20 minute cartoon – that sounds like a great id…D’oh.

Mr Burns – Almeida Theatre, until 26 July 2014

Regular visitors to the blog will have noticed that Civilian Theatre is often as, if not more, interested in exploring what leads a director to stage a production in the style they have chosen or why a playwright has written the
play they have, than in the quality of acting or the production itself.

As such the idea of Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns is appealing. The available synopsis suggests that we are going to witness an exploration of these very topics, an insight into how myths arise and the form that mythic creations arising out of our modern cultural legacy may take. Just as Homer would have drawn on the collective memory passed down through generations of oral story-tellers to leave us with the Iliad and the Odyssey; with its world containing the larger-than-life figures of Achilles and Ajax, Paris and Hector, Washburn promises to delve into how a very different Homer will be built into the mythos of a future civilisation.

T Mr Burns_10 his is really interesting stuff, and the concept of three standalone acts that appear to echo the cultural development of storytelling is intriguing. The cast begins around a campfire – an updated version of those first ancient people telling each other stories round a fire, repeating them so often that they become fixed as an early truth. The second act, seven years later, has seen them morph into travelling players, spreading knowledge and culture across a divided and disparate society, before the third act, 75 years later, sees the performance fully embedded in the prevailing culture, taking on aspects of religious tradition, characters becoming symbols of good and evil, with Mr Burns emerging as a figure within modern folklore; a demonic embodiment of the dangers of nuclear power and its destructive influence.

It is the kind of play that signifies its intent early, and the signs that title each act may as well have written on them that this is a ‘big play’ tackling ‘big themes’. We know it is important because it is two and three quarter hours long and contains two intervals. Only big important plays get to have two intervals.

It is definitely an opinion-splitter and will almost certainly be championed by the kind of metropolitan hipster who carries around a well-thumbed but mainly unread copy of Infinite Jest and idolizes Douglas Copeland. For everyone else I fear it will prove to be a remarkably unentertaining evening; for it is quite a feat to develop a production that has so many interesting ideas, inspired costumes and high-concept set-pieces that returns so few engaging moments.

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