Category Archives: Theatre

A Valentine’s Day Wedding Dress

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Happy Valentine’s Day – 2014 This afternoon finds Pawn in a pensive mood, somewhat contemplative, and rather content. Killing some time with friends R & L in a DC hotel, before the shuttle to Dulles International Airport comes along at 5:35. Rebecca Holderness premiers her latest directorial success, The Wedding Dress by Nelson Rodrigues, at Spooky Action Theatre, here in The District, in the basement stage of the oldest Universalist congregation in the country, on the corner of 16th & S NW.

Visual from Wedding Dress

Visual from Wedding Dress

Pawn & G were lucky enough to get to see the final dress/tech rehearsal on Wednesday night, and had this to say:

This is a beautiful and special piece of work, one of which they can be quite proud. The realization on stage of such a difficult piece of writing is itself an achievement, but to do so with such depth, soul, wit and humor is truly a gift. A gift from them, each, to us. Thanks! I don’t mean to be all drippy here, but really, this was a lovely, visually stunning, engaging, and moving experience. This being a dress, we have no program, and so cannot cite specific performers by name, but that’s hardly necessary here. The ensemble worked so well together, the blocking and stage pictures constantly brought us to see the whole. This was brilliant. Add to this wonderful ensemble the contributions of each of the technical creatives — video, audio, lighting, costumes and set — and I was left with one indelible reaction once it was over: It was orchestral. When the production staff asked me where it was set, I answered honestly, “In a dream.” I am not given to such praise lightly, but Holderness, et alia earned it. Surely as the cast inhabit this world over the next four weeks they will grow with it and in it and find ever more nuance not just in the words of the script, on the page, but in the interpretation of that difficult model of life for which Rodrigues has provided a scaffold in text, you have imbued with the dressing of truth and thus made real.

Rodrigues (1912-80), the most gifted of Brazilian playwrights, penned this piece, Vestido de Noiva in Portuguese, in 1943. It was hailed at the time as a extraordinary work with its use of vernacular dialogue and its explorations into the psychological states of the lead characters. He was a journalist and fabulist, whose joy of scandal, and scandal sheets, is reflected in this work. Holderness and her team play liberally with this motif, as teams of scribes and camera men regularly appear on scene to document what’s happening, or to cause it. They dangle at the ends of telephone umbilical cords linking them with copy desks back at their competing journals. This is a compelling component of the production, and leads us to weigh the rest of the action as we would any other scandal-sheet melieu.

An actor's feet on stage

The newsman is ready to strike

If you find yourself in our nation’s capitol city between now and March 9, 2014, please go take a look. You won’t regret it.

What’s next for Pawn you ask?  A red-eye from Dulles to Heathrow, and a fortnight in London, which side trips to Manchester and ???  Stay tuned!

Art and Dreaming

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After a morning jaunt up to the northern tip of the island to visit old friends and grab a bite to eat, your intrepid travelers repair to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue to take in the latest shows. On display are George Bellows, Matisse – In Search of True Painting, Extravagant Inventions – The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens and Faking It – Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop.

42 Kids - George Bellows (1907)

42 Kids - George Bellows (1907)

My favorite has to be the Bellows. His work is so American in its nature, so egalitarian, accessible, visceral, genuine. This retrospective is satisfying and complete feeling, but at 120 paintings, not too excessive. From the first, 42 Kids (1907), showing the children of immigrants swimming in the East River, to the final portraits painted before his early death, this collection shows the work of George Wesley Bellows (1881 – 1925) in its fullness. A member of the “Ashcan School” of American Realist painters, and associated with Robert Henri’s “The Eight,” Bellows expressed his leftist, populist leanings in his work, which often focused on the impoverished immigrant population of New York.

Stag At Sharkeys - George Bellows (1909)

Stag At Sharkeys - George Bellows (1909)

He is perhaps best known for his boxing paintings, including the seminal work, Stag At Sharkeys (1909), as well as Both Members Of This Club (1909) and Dempsey And Firpo (1924 – painted for Look Magazine), but Bellows also painted broadly of the scenery and characters of New York — from fishermen and dock workers to the excavation of Pennsylvania Station — and portraits of family, friends and patrons.

New York - George Bellows (1911)

New York - George Bellows (1911)

Matisse, on the other hand, never went in much for realism, but sought in abstraction and impression the truest representations of his subjects, be they people, plants or still life. In this exhibit, especially, Matisse’s explorations and experimentation with different representational forms is put before us at once. We see as he studies a subject, and tries different approaches to find the best, or some best, way to depict it. At times we may see 4 or 5 studies of the same subject, abstract, boldly impressionistic, even realistic. I have seen so many Matisse exhibitions at this point — starting with the exhaustive (and exhausting) MoMA retrospective from 1991 (440 pieces) that there is little of his work which I haven’t seen at least several times, but here, at least, we are told a different story about how he settled on the path he did. Well curated, to say the least.

Still Life with Purro I - Henri Matisse (1904)

Still Life with Purro I - Henri Matisse (1904)

Still Life with Purro II - Henri Matisse (1904-5)

Still Life with Purro II - Henri Matisse (1904-5)

The furniture of the Roentgen’s is peculiar and certainly of its time. For roughly 60 years, from 1742 in to the beginning of the 19th century, the cabinet making firm of Abraham Roentgen and his son David turned out some of the most ingenious, extravagant and beautiful desks, curious, tables and clocks. A hallmark of their work, in addition to expert joinery and unbelievable inlays, was clever mechanisms. Hidden cubbies, secret lockers, counter-balanced mechanical systems are everywhere. A desk becomes a backgammon table becomes a chess board becomes a card table. A roll top desk has dozens of secret places to store everything from papers to inks and pens. A touch of a hidden button or turn of a key reveals an entire raft of drawers and lined compartments. Astonishing!

Roentgen writing desk

Roentgen writing desk

Finally, the Pre-Photoshop days of trick photography are amply explored in Faking It. I didn’t find much new in this exhibit, but it was well laid out and accompanied by some informative text. Nowhere near as exciting as the Bellows though!

Now down to TKTS and some half-price tickets for the evening’s entertainment. Armed with a choice of three shows, we ended up with Peter And The Starcatcher at the Books Atkinson. Closing January 20th, we are glad we got into this 2011 Tony Award winner. The play, by Rick Elice, is based upon a novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, and seeks to be a prequel to the Peter Pan stories. It is a raucous production, deeply rooted in Vaudeville, and with frequent direct-to-the-audience mugging and exposition. Where to start?

Proscenium Arch by Donyale Werle

Proscenium Arch by Donyale Werle

The proscenium arch would be a good place. Before curtain, we are delighted with the elaborate assemblage upon the arch, kitchen implements and other ephemera make mermaids and all sort of curlicue and decoration. The set seems to be a dock, or is it a vessel? Once the action commences we quickly get the gist of the story: Lord Aster and his daughter Molly are to set sail on a pair of ships to spirit star dust safely away, but something goes wrong. They are separated and after a failed attempt at piracy, the star dust is set adrift with an enslaved stow away. Too much action ensues to explain it here, and you can always read the book if you’re interested, but the point of the whole enterprise is that these enslaved boys wind up as the Lost Boys, the island they all wash up on ends up as Neverland and all of the various people and events necessary to set up the Peter Pan story are more or less in place by the end of two acts.

Peter And The Starcatcher

Peter And The Starcatcher

But getting there is the fun part. The set is inventive, flexible and fun. The lighting effective, the costuming a lark. The performances are all so energized, you’d swear these folks are having the time of their lives, and it shows! After intermission we are treated to a very bawdy Vaudeville-esque song and dance performance featuring the entire cast in drag, which is just a delight!

Post-Interval song and dance

Post-Interval song and dance

Finally too the 1 down to the Village to pop into the Kettle Of Fish on Sheridan Square and a visit with the proprietors, Patrick and Adrian.  I’ve been a fan of the Kettle ever since a Green Bay Packers game back in 2001, during a visit to the city, sent me in search of a place to watch.  Patrick is a old Milwaukean, having worked selling hardware at the old Oriental Hardware Store before leaving for New York, some 30+ years ago, and the Kettle is now known far and wide as the place to watch the Packers when you’re in New York.  I watched part of the Packers’ wild-card playoff game here last Saturday, and now Patrick and Adrian invite me back to sit at the “Round Table” for the upcoming game against the San Francisco 49ers.  I’ll be there!

Wednesday Catchup

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Wow, falling behind here. Let’s catch up then, shall we?

Wednesday we enjoyed a matinée of The Other Place at Manhattan Theater Club. This taut drama by Sharr White stars Laurie Metcalf (Rosanne) as a powerful drug company executive and former scientist who is relating to us a story from a business trip a while back. Utilizing a combination of flash backs and flash forwards, the script builds a complicated framework within which the complete story eventually is fit.

We soon learn, however, that we cannot be sure just how much of what this woman tells us we can believe. She is cagey about her name, for example, when talking with a doctor in one of the many threads of the tale. She accuses her husband of adultery, but is he really guilty? She claims he is divorcing her, but he tells us otherwise. She has long, fraught, phone calls with an estranged daughter, but does she really?

It would be giving away too much to tell more about the basis of these uncertainties, but suffice to say that the play, which opened to fairly good notices the next night, paints a daunting and frightening picture of what can happen to our inner, and outer, worlds when our minds get away from us.

Cudos to the design staff. The set, by Eugene Lee & Edward Pierce, is an elaborate semi-cylinder of window frames, with embedded lighting elements, which matches the elaborate framework of the story telling to a tee. Lighting by Justin Townsend compliments the set nicely, and serves to establish the many different settings required by the script, all within the single set. But it is the costuming by David Zinn which really does the most with the least to move the story along. Within Zinn’s single costume, Ms Metcalf transforms from a high level business woman, with impeccable style, to a forlorn mother, lost in this world and losing everything. By the simple removal of a jacket here, stockings there, or the addition of a shapeless sweater, we see many different sides to this one, complex, woman.

Daniel Stern as the lonely and left behind husband, who must struggle against his wife’s constant anger and accusations, turns in a mostly muted, but moving and frustrated performance. When he erupts in sobs 2/3rds of the way in, we are moved to do the same. Zoe Perry (Ms Metcalf’s real life daughter) ably dispatches the three roles she is tasked with.

A heavy matinée, to say the least!

That evening took us to the Joyce for some dance, part of the Focus Dance 2013 program. We saw a program with Camille A. Brown & Dancers, and Brian Brooks Moving Company. Ms. Brown’s group performed Been There, Done That, City Of Rain and The Real Cool. The latter, a sole piece featuring Ms Brown, was a lovely piece, often using small front-mounted pin-spots to project large expressive shadows of her onto the rear cyclorama.

Mr. Brooks’ company used a very physical dance form to explore movement in some new ways, in I’m Going To Explode, Descent and, with Wendy Whelan, Fall Falls. I was especially moved by Descent, a dance in three movements. In the first, dancers dragged partners, literally, across the stage and maneuvered them about as if dolls, at times — all while lit from the sides by horizontal wedges of light.

The second movement presents us with a stage lit only from 6 feet up. The dancers enter the stage from left or right, putting lacy fabric aloft with the breeze from wood fans they wave upwards. It was like watching well choreographed jelly fish dancing! So lovely, so lyric, so fresh! Each dancer would cross from left to right, or right to left, their focus upward on their fabric, and the fabric would twirl and bob in the drafts.

The program closed with a duet by Mr. Brooks and Ms. Whelan, part of her series Restless Creature, which explored the interaction of bodies and the shifting of the planes of horizon and plateau, their bodies sometimes climbing the floor or walking on the air. Hard to explain, but lovely to behold.

Art Dawdle and Odets Overwrought

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visite ii, 2009 - Ann Hamilton

visite ii, 2009 - Ann Hamilton

Tuesday, already?!?

Galleries open on Tuesdays in Chelsea, even if the museums don’t.  So, off we go to the West End of 24th – 25th streets to check some out.  Ann Hamilton has a small show up at gemini g.e.l. which surveys her work from 2000 – 2012.  Held in conjunction with The Event Of A Thread, this show focuses mostly on a few portfolio of lithographs and collage, as well as some textile work.  Quite nice, and well priced, too.

Around the corner at Kent Fine Art we find the absolutely trippy exhibit, Paul Laffoley’s The Boston Visionary Cell.  Up through March 9th, this exhibit is like a walk in the mind of an obsessive lunatic.  Here we are immersed in fantasy and whimsy, time travel and immortality, aliens and philosophers, mythologies and psychotropics.  Much homage is granted here to the wild thinkers and dreamers of times gone by, specifically along the edges of most of the canvases we see “Homage to Nickolai Tesla…” sorts of inscriptions.

Paul Laffoley - Kali Yuga

Paul Laffoley - Kali Yuga

A video runs in a continuous loop with an episode of some Hard Copy style show touting the time travel acumen of Laffoley, and promising the truth behind Little Richard’s claims.  I feel sorry for the gallery staff.

Along the street we popped in on many other shows, such as a large Ed Ruscha show at Gagosian, which was utter crap in my estimation.  Jeff Muhs The Origin of Nymphs at Lyons Weir was interesting, but unfulfilling.  His gauzy oils of nymphs were a striking presentation, but hollowed out in their core — lacking in any meaning or depth.

Venus of Urbino (after Titian) - Jeff Muhs

Venus of Urbino (after Titian) - Jeff Muhs

These shared the gallery with Rock Center, an incongruously named collection of still life by Melodie Provenzano.  Her work is technically proficient, but I found the subject matter and hyper-realistic rendering to result in paintings that were too twee by half.  Honestly, I thing the original glassware assemblages would be more interesting to see than these paintings of them.  Sorry.

Rock Center - Melodie Provenzano

Rock Center - Melodie Provenzano

Much more, but none of it stuck.

The evening brought us to Broadway for the first time this trip, and a revival of the 1930’s drama, Golden Boy by Clifford Odets.  This production has generated quite the buzz, and there’s already talk of Tony awards and such.  The production, directed by Bartlett Sher, is a design tour-de-force.  Michael Yeargan’s sets, Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Donald Holder’s lights, together, provide us with perhaps the most powerful character in the play.  The sets in particular take us effortlessly from setting to setting with believability and grace.

Yvonne Strahovski as Lorna Moon & Seth Numrich as Joe Bonaparte

Yvonne Strahovski as Lorna Moon & Seth Numrich as Joe Bonaparte

The performances are almost all quite strong.  Yvonne Strahovski (of TVs Chuck) turns in a very even read of Lorna Moon, the troubled “Tramp from Newark” devoted to fight promoter Tom Moody, played with meandering force by Danny Mastogiorgio.  Seth Numrich is Joe Bonaparte, the Golden Boy of the title, who steals Lorna’s heart even as she tries to manipulate his.  Danny Burstein (Boardwalk Empire) as Tokio, Joe’s seasoned trainer, and Tony Shalhoub (Monk) as Joe’s father, and Italian immigrant fruit seller, round out the primary cast.  Aside from some overdone Italian accents and some overwrought costume/stage business, these are all good performances.  Burstein, in particular, brilliantly manages a slow simmer right up until the penultimate scene, and finally reveals a very touching side to his character.

Of the show as a whole, to use and overused phrase, “It is what it is.”  It’s a revival of a piece of work very much of its era.  Analogies within the script with the organized labor movement (in the person of Joe’s older brother Frank, a CIO organizer in the textile industry) is largely lost on today’s crowd.  Were script edits to blame?  Perhaps.  Likewise, the character of Mr. Carp, the appropriately named neighbor who occupies the Bonaparte’s parlor as he quotes (and misquotes) Schopenhauer, Wittgnestein and other dismal philosophers, but who seems to simply vanish somewhere between Acts II and III.

And Now For Something Completely Different

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A Note To Our Readers:

It has come to our attention that some of you think we’re being too “safe” in our entertainment choices. “Pawn: Please, think outside the box. Get off the straight and narrow, the safe choices, and try to sample some of the outré offerings Modern London provides.” reads a typical note.

Okay, your wish is our command. Prepare yourself for the next few reviews of events from Saturday, 25 and Sunday, 26, to see what London really holds in store for the adventurous.

The Paper Cinema, Odyssey

Paper Cinema is a hard concept to express briefly, but let’s give it a try: Paper Cinema are an artist collective who produce original, live, animated performances with live musical accompaniment, utilising paper cuts with inking, shot via video cameras before black backgrounds, digitally composited and projected onto a screen.

The Paper Cinema - Odyssey

For this project, begun almost a year ago, there were two hand animators, three musicians, light and sound technicians. There were a few dozen musical instruments – piano, drums, violin, saw, Makita cordless electric drill, thunder plate – and a few hundred pieces of cut paper, card, etc. Through these tools, with no spoken word at all, they told the classic Homeric tale of Odyssey and did so with such originality, wit, love and passion that we hung on every graceful, carefully choreographed move.

Paper Cinema - James Allen

The show began with a lead animator stepping up to a light table and, putting pen to well and then to paper, drawing for us a guide to the major players in the drama. After this introduction, the real animation began. One cannot do it justice with a verbal description, so please take a look at their website: http://thepapercinema.com/

Paper Cinema's Odyssey at Battersea Arts Centre BAC

We saw a Saturday matinee, with several children as young as 4 in attendance, and the show held their attention for the entire 85 minutes. We thought this was an exceptional show, and would love to find a way to introduce this art to our own, local audiences.

Panta Rei Theatre Collective: Rocinante! Rocinante!

Not edgy enough yet? Okay, bus down to Rye Park Lane and the CLF Art Cafe @Bussey Building where Panta Rei want us to climb inside the minds of some seriously sick folk. Sick in the head, that is, like Don Quixote sick, like Hamlet sick, like wandering OCD scrubbing their hands without end sick. What do they do? The conceive a site-specific work, a promenade piece in which we, the audience, wander mostly un-directed through the performance space, while blinds, sheers or scrims are occasionally drawn to partition off a space.

Panta Rei - Rocinante! Rocinante!

What is the action, it is Don Quixote, with Rocinante, his loyal horse, Sancho Panza, his trusty squire and donkey; but no, it is Gary and Lolly, the gravediggers from Hamlet, given more character here than Shakespeare ever did, but different, also. They are discussing whether or not Dolcinea (rather than Ophelia) deserves a Christian burial, a matter of grave concern to Angustias, the cemetery keeper, who is ever and always rinsing raiment properly to wash the dead.

Don Quixote is cracking up, as he rants in Spanish (sometimes with translation, via Sancho, sometimes not) we are treated to the lushness of his dreams, when they are not overrun by the waking dreams of the other characters. Gary, played by the exceedingly petite Ciara D’Anna in a standout performance of mind over dialect, is madly devoted to Lolly (Anna Zehenbauer), but Lolly wants to die, convinced that her life will be more complete once dead. Gary prevails to convince Lolly, via a burial ceremony (books as soil, what does that tell us) that she has now been buried and passed, and this brings at last some measure of tranquillity to their relationship.

Meanwhile Quixote drifts into a feverish dream wherein Dulcinea, in form of a beautiful, diaphanous jelly fish, appears to him, but always between the two are seven dark, evil jelly fish, blocking their reunion.

That is just a sample of the effect with which Panta Rei has brought off their goal: “Interdisciplinary collaborations beyond the realm of performing arts to explore on a deep level issues and topics that are relevant…”

How successful was this effort? Very, for the most part. Aside from Gary, other stand-out performances belong to Daniel Rejano as Sancho and Almudena Segura as Angustias. The staging is plagued with difficult compromises, mostly due to the exigencies of getting actors and audience in and out of the same spaces at the same time. Little accommodation is made to audience comfort, and this maybe should have been made more clear to ticket purchasers. In the second scene, were are seated on two rows of hay bales, set along the long side of a narrow rectangular space; unfortunately, the action is placed alternatively on one end or the other of this space, rendering those in the front row with stiff necks and good views only of their seat-mate’s scalps.

In reality, tho, these are minor beefs. This was a very ambitious undertaking, and we were moved. The beauty of the Dulcinea dream, with draped umbrellas sculpted into sea creatures was alone worth the price of admission.

Silent Opera: La Bohème

Silent Opera - La Boheme - Emily Ward as Mimi

Still with us? Okay, after a day at Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, we trundled back down to the Old Vic Tunnels this evening for Silent Opera production of Puccini’s La Bohème. We first visited the Tunnels last weekend for Eugene O’Neill’s The Sea Plays, which were staged in “The Screening Room” in the upper levels of the Tunnels’ space. For Silent Opera’s piece, we have to thank a couple of developments of the modern age: Digital archival and frequency hopping, spread spectrum radio.

The former has freed up these spaces, specifically “Archway 236~9, Network Rail, Archival and Storage”, which was no longer required by Network Rail and may now be given over to the drug pushers, anorexic models, tarted up showgirls and waifish writers who make up the dramatis personae of the opera.

The latter? Well, Silent Opera is a “peculiar and eccentric idea to come up with…” writes director Daisy Evans in her notes. “I looked at the world around me, and to the modern day fascination with the iPod. Teams of people plug into a world and walk around with a personal soundcloud. Apply this to opera, and you have a personal filmic sound world that enables you complete freedom within the world of the opera.”

We, the audience, are given high-end wireless headphones, pre-tuned to the proper channel to bring us the original orchestral arrangement produced for this project. The performers wear both wireless microphones and earpieces, allowing both for them to hear the music and for the sound crew to mix their voices in for our listening. The effect is profound.

Silent Opera - La Boheme

We are ushered up to Rudolfo and Marcello’s loft space, strewn with the detritus of bachelor living, but more – this is all specifically made for the production, notebooks are filled with Marcello’s sketches, magazines feature his love, Musetta, computer monitors are filled with Rudolpho’s website designs. Soon enough the performers crash into the space, and the game is afoot. The music wells in our ears and the singers engage. They engage! They are amidst us and are engaged with us. This continues throughout the entire performance, and I won’t belabour all of the details, but the point is this: Here is opera, on a professional level, in a compelling performance, right in the middle of us, and that is different and new.

How successful? Very.

Listen, every one of these shows is sold out, solid! What’s more, they’re all filled with a magical thing; Young People! This is what theatre, opera, arts need; Young People! Habits built in your 20s and 30s, attending live shows, will carry throughout lifetime, and this bodes very well indeed for London and for all of us.

Accent Versus Acting

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We’ve seen two shows in the past two nights featuring British actors wearing Russian accents. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Given the choice, Pawn prefers great acting over great accents. When you’ve got both, well that’s a winner. When you’ve got neither… meh.

Thursday night, Giant Olive Theatre at the Lion and Unicorn Freehouse in Kentish Town, presented John Thompson’s A Russian Play, hailed as best new play and best set design by the Off-Westend association awards. Self-described as “Withnail and I meets Crime and Punishment”, we were easily hooked. What they delivered, however, came up a little short.

The theater itself is of interest. Up on the top floor of this old pub, there’s about 50 seats (half filled for our visit) and no real stage, wings, etc. The set, a pre-revolution Petrograd bedsit designed by Olivia Du Monceau, is a work of art, and eminently functional for this show. There were anachronistic elements, but on a budget one can forgive this.

The action, set in 1916, centres around two men, friends since grammar school, Fyodor and Alexsie. Each has come to Petrograd for a different reason: Fyodor, the starving artist, hopes to write the great Russian novel, if he can only get past the first line, “A man enters a darkened room…”; Alexsie, the revolutionary, loud and boisterous, wants a leading role in the uprising, or at least wants drink like one. They occupy the attic bedsit as two men sharing a cell. There is no money, no food and no fuel. Books are burnt on the sly, by one, and cheese is eaten on the sly by the other. Furniture is sacrificed to the stove.

The dialogue is almost uniformly good, the interactions quite believable, to a point. We felt the direction, by David Salter, sought laughs too cheaply, and sometimes at the expense of otherwise strong scenes. There were other unbelievable moments, such as when a freshly rolled cigarette is discarded by a supposedly impoverished man, or hard-won tea leaves are thrown aside. The dialect work was strong, and it’s no great stretch to believe that these are Russians, just hard sometimes to believe they’re poor.

The performances by Tom Kanji as Fyodor and Dan Percival as Alexsei, are strong, for the most part, but one feels their natural timing may be frustrated by direction. Percival, in the final scene, a tense dramatic moment, seems to teeter uncomfortably between anguish and giggles, but that may have just been us.

Good effort, but not A work. Sorry!  Next up is an unexpected joy.

Friday morning we agonized over theatre listings as we had nothing booked yet for the evening. Every time we found a promising show, it was sold out. Finally we just about gave up, when I thought to check Pleasance Theatre up on Caledonia Road. We booked a couple of tickets for Boris and Sergey’s Puppet Cabaret. Then we hopped the tube up to Archway and wandered aimless through Waterlow Park and Highgate Cemetery.

After cemetery we got a bite in a pub nearby, then wandered down through Highgate and hopped on the 390 to King’s Cross. There we took in the “New Wave Photography” show at St. Pancras Crypt (nothing too special — former Eastern Bloc artists discover PhotoShop excess) and then to the Wellcome Collection for Felicity Powell’s fabulous Charmed Life which combines new original work of hers with a wide range of amulets she curated from the collection. Quite good. Also saw Mexican Miracle Paintings which is not so much my taste, but was still quite interesting.

After a day traipsing round Highgate and Islington, King’s Cross and St. Pans, we shot back up to Caledonia Road and Pleasance for the Puppet Cabaret. Oh my, what a shock and treat that was!! Clearly one of the least known, yet best entertainments in London right now. Just as in 2009 I felt that the Crypt show, Tales of the Electric Forest was the best exhibit up at the time, so I feel that Boris and Sergey is the cream of the crop right now. This was a Master Class in puppetry in disguise. What starts out as a bawdy exercise in audience participation (Puppet Poker Pit) morphs into a broad ranging take on culture, including puppet takes on Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. Faust has his share of the game, too. I cannot even begin to describe it all, and I shouldn’t, but I was beside myself with glee at the wonderful performances.

This is a production of Flabbergast Theatre, and here is their mission statement:

Flabbergast was set up to make uncompromising and exciting physical theatre drawing on the Bunraku style of puppetry and a belief that all Theatre should be engaging and sweaty.

It asks the ultimate commitment mentally vocally and physically from its actors in order to achieve an intensity of performance which is all too often lacking in theatre of the day. It believes that its actors are its single greatest resource and as such endeavours to create theatre through an extensive and collaborative research and development process.

The company hopes to develop existing texts and new devised pieces bringing an innovative and unpretentious approach to its work.

The Bunraku puppets were so simple and yet their movements so true, the artists so dedicated and their ensemble so integrated. OMG!! Still now, the next day, I am still amazed at just how powerful the effect was. Please take a look at their website:

http://www.wix.com/metalchimp/flabbergast

If you’re in London, GO SEE THIS SHOW!

As to Accents and Acting? Well, there is little pretence that Boris and Sergey are really Russian, but you simply don’t care as the intensity of the puppeteers’ performance sweeps you into their world, and you utterly accept their conceit. Given good enough acting – and here it was sublime – an audience can be taken anywhere, and Flabbergast has proved that to us.

In the final scene of this show, a moment of intense drama, each of the six puppeteers are working simple hand puppets (not the Bunraku puppets used throughout the show) and they walk right up to the audience, arms outstretched before them. Their faces, both puppet and puppeteer, are 100% engaged in character and we are 100% engaged in story. This is magic, this is what theatre is for. This was sold as, “Simply the greatest vaudevillian double act ever conceived for the small stage”, but what we got instead was a lesson in what theatre is all about.

The Devil and Mister Punch

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My first taste of performance came as a small child. Growing up, we kids had our own theatre, the Amber Playhouse, a lovely little puppet theatre which my parents had made and outfitted with the usual cast of Punch characters; Mister Punch and Mrs Judy, the Baby, Constable, Alligator and Devil. With these puppets we performed not only various bastardisations of the Mister Punch oeuvre, but also works of our own making, and those based on fairy tales for which we had made or acquired additional puppets.

Samuel Pepys was the first to write down, to log, a reaction to Punch. Writing in his diary in May of 1622, of a visit with Mr Salisbury to Covent Garden, “Thence to see an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants.” This was an Italian marionette company performing Pulcinella (or variously, Punchinello), a piece of commedia dell’arte. This being the 350th anniversary for Punch, then, Julian Crouch and Improbable Theatre have decided to bring him back, albeit with a twist.

A puppet show in The Pit at Barbican is one of the hottest tickets in London right now, a sold-out run, and we think that’s just fine. Having failed to book in advance, we waited just a while on the returns queue before ending up with 6th row centre seats, right behind writer and performer Nick Haverson’s dad, whom we met in lobby over cocktails prior to curtain. “When I got out of school,” said Mr. Haverson, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I got a job and made a life. For our kids, we had two boys, we didn’t want to tell them what to do, but we made sure they got into good schools.” He was proud of his son’s work in theatre, even if the shows are sometimes unfamiliar to him. He certainly could be proud of the show we saw with him last night!

The script for this performance, by a Messr’s Harvey and Hovey, we are told (or shown) was written by a dog at a typewriter. The dog himself claims no authorship, chalking it up as a publicity stunt in subsequent court testimony, but it does have a ring of truth to it, if you ask me. A half dozen piglets add comic relief, before thoroughly getting into the sausage making, as it were. A rag-tag band of musicians on bass, piano, metronome, bells and more serenade us, and the puppets… where to begin.

This is some of the most lovingly done, most graceful puppetry one may ever see. A scene in which Punch negotiates with Mephistopheles has the large puppet of the devil worked by three people, but with such grace and such slow, precise movement that the performers disappear. A hand puppet one moment is life-sized the next, shocking the audience.

The design and production crew all deserve kudos here. Julian Crouch and Jessica Scott’s puppets are exquisite. Marcus Doshi’s lighting design is at once effortless and exact, leading us around the complex set and focusing our attention just where it needs to be. That set, designed by Crouch, along with Rob Thirtle and Mike Kerns, and constructed by Heywood Productions, is a true piece of art. There are panels everywhere through which the puppets appear. The whole piece is a shrine.

The final performance of The Devil and Mister Punch will be Saturday, 25 February. Keep an eye out, however, there are rumours of a tour.

Tis Pity

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While Pawn finds himself most at home with New Work, there is plenty to be admired in a well executed revival or classic. Monday night brings your intrepid travellers to the latter, John Ford’s “Jacobethan” Tis Pity She’s A Whore, revived and restaged by Cheek By Jowl at Barbican’s Silk Street Theater. Ford was a contemporary to Shakespeare, writing in a similar style, albeit seldom in iambic pentameter.

We were most impressed by Cheek By Jowl’s 2009 production of Jean Racine’s Andromaque and so were expecting similar quality. We were not let down. The large cast performed in brilliant ensemble form…

If I may take a moment aside, that is a recurring theme of the best of the shows we’ve taken in, of late – fine ensemble work. This is great to see, and must be encouraged.

The scene opens with Annabella, marvellously played by Lydia Wilson, as a teenage emo girl, walls bedroom covered with Vampire Diaries posters and the like, dancing wildly on her bed, whilst surrounded by her suitors. Her father, Florio, David Collings, is eager to marry her off, and is pushing her to choose.

Lydia Wilson as Annabella

Her brother Giovanni, Jack Gordon, has other plans. He courts his sister, wins her and after a night of passion, virtually abandons her, telling her to choose her husband wisely and always keep this their secret. Bereft, Annabella first tries to simply avoid marriage, but when her father insists, she chooses the nobleman Soranzo, played ably by Jack Hawkins.

Lydia Wilson and Jack Gordon

There is much drama: teenage pregnancy, unrequited love, jilted cougar (Hippolita) and such. Much sturm und drang. As in any good tragedy, by the time its over pretty much everyone is dead.

The single set, designed by Nick Ormerond, which serves this all is Annabella’s teenager’s bedroom; all action comes and goes through this single, simple setting, and is brilliantly managed by Declan Donnellan’s brisk direction. The show is taughtly choreographed and compellingly staged. Wilson’s performance, especially, stands out for its unending, boundless energy.

Not usually one for morality plays, Pawn seems to be finding himself in more and more of them lately. Tonight, as much fun as the immorality was, the morality was much bloodier, and in the end, that was just what the playwright ordered.

Memories Light And Dark

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Saturday brings more visits, this time with A, artist/friend whom Pawn met in 2009 at her stall in Sunday UpMarket up Brick Lane. There, A sells tee shirts, bags and such emblazoned with her whimsical figures and clever words. Since last we met, A has taken up photography in a quite serious way (something she blames on moi) and in correspondence leading up to this visit has asked/offered for Pawn to sit for a portrait. Fright!

Having packed a shirt or two with French cuffs of course means not having packed any cuff-links. Thus a trip back and forth across Lower Marsh street ensues. First to the pawnshop, who carries only gold, thus quite dear, then to menswear shop, which doesn’t have the right thing, sadly, but does have a very nice gent behind the counter. Next to rock shop, which has mad great crystals in the window, and a few pairs of amber links, but too dear for “emergency” use (as pawn broker put it). Lastly to vintage shop, Radio Days which is just the ticket. Pick out a pair of lovely amethyst links, “I’ll wear them home!” Tip of the hat to proprietor Lee for all his help.

Bus up to Stoke Newington and A’s in-home studio. I haven’t seen her since that May of 2009, other than a Skype chat now and then (detest Skype; all that technology to produce a result worse than a century of telephony). She welcomes me with a warm embrace, a lunch of quiche and salad, and hours of conversation. Finally we settled down into the reception lounge, refitted as a studio, with paper drops, massive flash towers and all.

I won’t bore the reader with a full account of the sitting process, but to impart this. A note from A the other day read, “Would you like to sit for a [Photographic] portrait in the style of a painter of your choice? My recent shots are here.”

“I’m quite flummoxed by your portrait offer. I’ve been pondering all night just which artist that would be, and all I can come up with is Francis Bacon. Is that even doable? Colour me perplexed! :(“ I wrote back the next day.

“Do not be flummoxed. It has to be fun and I am quite a beginner. I am happy to try Bacon – maybe we can use a mirror to make parts of your body disappear or look cut off. If this does not work, we could go for a Futurist or even Cubist artist with a similar technique or with Rear Curtain flash technique if i can master my new flash in time.” was her response. Okay then, let’s go.

An hour or so of sitting and flashing and such, and then another hour or so sitting at her kitchen table editing, leads us to this:


Pawn has never sat willingly for a portrait before, but must admit that this entire process was fun, and the result is a better portrait of myself than I have reason to expect. I’m not fond of how I look in photos, but this I like. Well done!

–

Now it’s off to Arcola Theatre and Philip Ridley’s Pitchfork Disney in Studio 1.

Nathan Stewart-Jarret as Cosmo Disney and Mariah Gale as Haley Stray

It’s hard to know where to begin with a tour de force like Pitchfork Disney. The performances were amazing. Chris New, as Presley Stray, one half of the nightmare~and~chocolate addled twins who make up the heart of this tense drama, is an absolute amazement. Starting long before the house lights go down, you’ll find him sitting on stage, picking at imaginary lint, and fidgeting like a heroin addict. If you saw New in Weekend you know what a talented actor he is, but you’ll be wholly unprepared for the depths of character he mines here.

Nathan Stewart-Jarret as Cosmo Disney and Chris New as Presley Stray

The other half of this demented, drugged and lost duo is Mariah Gale as Haley. Her tormented soul is all too real here, leading to her brother’s constant need to protect her, against what all we’re never sure. Both twins are prone to slip into discourse for long soliloquy on real or imagined trials and travails, trips to the shops for chocolate which end with packs of rabid dogs and religious upbraiding; apocalyptic dream worlds which are somehow more comforting than the reality, absent their parents, who are missing why?

Into this tortured maelstrom comes Cosmo Disney, played by Nathan Stewart-Jarret with such graceful movement he rather dances the part. He slithers across the stage, seducing Presley, and us along with him, but with his eyes constantly on the slumbering Haley. Cosmo is an apparition, isn’t he, from Presley’s fevered mind, right? And Pitchfork Cavalier, Cosmo’s driver all done up in full-body latex bondage wear, played almost as Frankenstein’s Monster by Italian actor Steve Guadino, lurches about the final scenes, throwing abject fear before him like he is casting jacks in a children’s game.

I can’t even begin to describe the plot here, nor am I sure I even understand it all. “Curse Arcola for last night’s dreams!” said X upon awakening this morning.

Nods must go to the entire production staff, from the phenomenal direction of Edward Dick to the pitch perfect sets and costumes of Bob Bailey and the exceptional lighting of Malcolm Rippeth. This production team has moulded a fantastic and thoroughly believable space for their actors to perform an out of this world evening.

This is the first show I’ve seen in this new Arcola space, and old artist’s paint factory between Dalston Junction and Dalston Kingshead stations in Hackney. The Reeves Paint factory on Ashwin Street, dating back to 1766, seems to have taken over nicely from the Arcola Street location Arcola were forced to leave after a decade, back in 2010. So far, aside from the fact that every door in the place seemingly must slam, it does just fine.

Moving Things

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Back in 2009, Pawn saw a piece of art which was particularly moving. Days later, he brought friend L back to see it, and she, too, found it moving. Finally, on the last day of the visit, he met up with new friend A, and she convinced him to buy it. Shortly before leaving for the airport, Pawn returned one last time to the Crypt of Saint Pancras Church, and uttered the fateful sentence, “If you can figure out how to ship it to me for a reasonable price, I’ll take it.”

Short Stories in crate

It took several weeks, but the intrepid Claire Palfreyman, maker of said artwork, found a shipper worthy of the task, and Short Stories, Volume 1, was on its way across the Atlantic, safely ensconced in a custom made crate, protected from buffeting. Shortly thereafter it was installed in Pawn’s state-side offices, and he has shared an office with it ever since. Pawn LOVES this piece of art, and is proud to have it in his collection.

Short Stories, Volume One 2009

Also on that last day in London, May of 2009, was fortunate enough to meet Claire, creator of Short Stories and to have a brief chat with her. Upon returning this year, I reached out to see if she would be up for a visit, so that I could see her other work, and chat about art. Yes, and yes, and today that happened.

I hopped the train, first the tube to Paddington and then the Heathrow Connect to Hanwell, where Claire and Charlie, her Parson’s Jack Russell, met me and led me to her home. We chatted over tea in her lovely kitchen while she told me of her current craft projects, built around her We Make Here classes, “Workshops where you meet, eat and create” as her website touts. We discussed her ceramics work, of which Short Stories is but one component, and about how art moves life just as life moves art.

In her studio, Claire shared sketches of work both realised and not, as well as stories of the late, missing partner to Short Stories, and a photo of this poor, ceramic soul. I admired the maquettes of work planned but not (yet) made, and, back in the house, some beautifully realised works.

Some more chat, and a lovely stroll, with Charlie along, back to the station to wait for the train back to London. I treasure making friends abroad. Claire was an artist whose work I bought, but after an afternoon of chat and shared appreciation of the role art can play in our lives, I’d like to think she’s a friend, too.

Friendship, and thing which move us, is also at the heart of tonight’s entertainment, Port Authority, at the Southwark Playhouse Vault. If there is a theme to our shows, last night and tonight, is of hidden vaults, dank and beautiful in their decay. Last night it was Old Vic Tunnels, under Waterloo Station. Tonight it was the vaults under London Bridge Approach. Southwark Playhouse has been using this space for some time, so it is not as “fresh” as OVT, but OMG what an atmosphere!

Port Authority - Southwark Playhouse

The play, by Irish playwright Conor McPherson, is entirely constructed of long soliloquy, a McPherson trademark. It wasn’t that long ago that both X and I saw The Good Thief, presented by Theatre Gigante, with Malcolm Tulip in the sole role, making a 60 minute address to the audience seated around him in the pub, as though he were merely talking to friends and acquaintances. Tonight we watched as Dermot (Ardal O’Hanlon), Joe (John Rogan) and Kevin (Andrew Nolan) each, separately, and with no regard or even awareness for each other, told us of those with whom they were close, loved, idolized or ignored.

Kevin is a young man, telling us of his first attempt to fly the coop, and of the woman he loved, and the woman he shagged, and of the difficulty of maintaining that distinction, all whilst following his mate’s bands and drinking to blinding excess.

Joe is an old man, living in care, who has a secret, well almost a secret, with which he has lived for over 40 years. He knows he is near the end of his allotment, and he knows his God will judge him (He knows), but he has a totem now, a keepsake, which speaks to him of a road not taken.

Dermot is a likeable buffoon, a poor, pitiable man whose life takes an unexpected turn, and then doubles back to leave him just where he was. His life has been full of these types of turns, but he hasn’t even realised it until he finds his head falling, falling into…

Well then, that would be giving it all away, wouldn’t it? No, the text is too good, the acting too real, the space too perfect and the production too effing well done. Go see it yourself!