With a pair of Timed Admissions in hand, Pawn paid a visit to the Royal Academy of Art, in Piccadilly. These two shows — Lucian Freud: The Self Portraits; and Antony Gormly — couldn’t be more different from each other. The former looking, preeminently, inward, the latter outward. But also, in scale; the Freud intimate and close, the Gormly huge and expansive. This post addresses Freud, the next Gormly.
The focus of Lucian Freud: The Self Portraits is on fifty portraits made by the painter during a nearly 70-year career. From the first flat work from 1940, through to the last piece, completed in 2002 (he died in 2011), we see a wide range of works, from drawing to the thick impasto Freud is so well known for. In many cases, through supporting material — sketches, etc. — we see multiple versions of the same piece, whether studies or aborted attempts. Some of the latter are nearly blank canvases, with just an outcropping of paint on an otherwise incomplete background of sketch marks.
Hotel Bedroom, 1954Sketch for Hotel Bedroom, 1954 (forgive reflections)
While there are fifty pieces in this exhibition, not all are strictly self portraits. Pieces have been included, such as Freddy Standing, 200-2001 and, from the same period, Flora with Blue Toenails, Freud’s own inclusion in the works is limited to his feet, perhaps, or some other reflection in a well placed mirror. Were it not for this being pointed out to us, we may well wonder why these pieces are in this show.
At fifty pieces this is an impressive show, especially as so many of them had to be scouted from private collections. But these represent just a small sample of the self portraits Freud made over the course of so many years. Most, alas, were destroyed.
While several of the pieces are familiar and widely known, as previously mentioned, several are held in private collections, so are less often exhibited. Here’s a few more snaps, mostly of these lesser seen works…
An earlier version of Reflection with Two Choldren (Self Portrait), 1985, we see an intention to depict himself with his hand on his hip, not resting on his waist, as it ultimately ended up (below) Reflection with Two Choldren (Self Portrait), 1985
I don’t accept the information that I get when I look at myself and that’s where the trouble starts.
Lucian Freud
In this final series, including some of the last self portraits completed (which are preserved) we can see Freud’s acute reckoning with his own aging. (Note: Apologies for the crooked angles, but it was very crowded, and hard to get a good shot sometimes)
That’s all for Freud. More on Gormly in the next post…
I like my sex like I like my Brexit; hard and fast.
Street saying around Britain
My sex is like Brexit; glacial and unresolved.
Reality around Britain
The whole point of the schedule of Pawn’s current visit to London was to be here for the (latest) deadline of the UK’s execution of its Article 50 withdrawal declaration; Brexit. Brexit deadlines have figured in most of the last several such trips, ever since Pawn’s June/July 2016 visit, during which the ill-fated Brexit vote itself occurred, to such disastrous results. As with previous such deadlines, however, this one, too, has passed without resolution.
I shan’t go delving into the latest hubbub; there’s news channels and such for that. Suffice to say that politicians have learnt there are, in fact, limits to their powers. As for the whole Brexit topic, let’s leave it at this: British divorce from the EU is a worse policy decision than George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, but the ultimate effect upon the UK will be more like Bush’s policy’s effect upon Iraq than like its effect upon the USA. While it’s easy to see the Brexit vote as nothing more than the clear expression of the people’s will (it was a referendum, after all) it’s closer to the Bush’s fiasco than that. Bush lied to his own government, his own people, and to the governments and people of US allies in order to win his way. Brexiteers did the same.
Okay, so what does one do when the Brexit ball is kicked down the road? One goes to look at art, that’s what. So on Brexit-o-ween, Pawn proceeded down to Bankside, burrough of Southwark, and Tate Modern. Current shows include Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life, and what I’ve been referring to as a bafflingly comprehensive retrospective of Nam June Paik, the pioneering video artist. The former is big, bold, audience pleasing, and, due to massive phone-weilding crowds, unsatisfying. The latter is smaller, in the scale of its individual pieces, if not its scope, and, blessedly, less cluttered with the zombified masses of people mesmerized by the image in their phone rather than by the actual art in front of them.
One thinks Paik would have preferred it this way, and, for all I know, Eliasson would too?
Pawn witnessed the Paik first, and then the Eliasson, so here’s some snaps of each, in that order. But first, in the spirit of a day “…not spent, but well used up…” (in the words of Gilbert and George) in the pursuit of art, let’s start with a piece of simple graffiti found along the Shoreditch High Street, by Boxpark
The face, dummy, not the scrawl!
Now the Paik…
TV Buddha, 1974TV Garden, 1974-77Exposition of Music: Electronic Television exhibition poster, 1963Robot family, father & motherRichard Nixon television address, on a timer, first one image is distorted, then the other.One Candle, (Candle Projection) 1989Sistine Chapel 1993, shown for the first time since inclusion in German pavilion of the Venice Biennale of that year.
Ed Ruscha has adorned the Artists Rooms, and here’s his 2017 rumination on the US flag:
Ed Ruscha 2017
And now the one photo I took from the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, In Real Life. This exhibit was so totally clogged with people staring into their phone’s camera screens, that it was almost impossible to navigate the space, let alone enjoy any of the artwork. Also contributing to the claustrophobic effect of that was the fact that the hall was crawling with school children. Involving kids in the arts from a young age is to be applauded, but in this case there was far less supervision than required, and kids were slamming into artworks, slapping them (and each other) and careering about the galleries.
So this one photo I took? It’s of Din Blind Passager (your blind passenger) 2010, realized here in a long hallway, running almost the entire length of one of the exhibit hall’s walls. This hallway, narrow enough that one can reach out and touch both walls, has air- and light-lock rooms on each end, is filled with incredibly dense theatrical fog, and illuminated for almost its entire length in a vivid amber colour. Near the far end of the tunnel, the lighting changes to a very bluish white. One can generally only see about 18″ in front of oneself. Pawn took this single photo within this hall, of the unknown woman walking ahead of me:
And, of course, no visit to Tate Modern would be complete without whatever the hell they’ve decided to put in the Turbine Hall. Here it is Kara Walker’s turn. And this completes our tour…
We interrupt this regularly scheduled holiday for some work.
Pawn scheduled these holidays last spring, prior to taking a new job. Then, during the summer, discovered that a conference, who’s topic is quite important for this new job, would be ongoing in Lyon, France, right smack dab in the middle of said pre-scheduled vacation. Being a good team player, Pawn offered to break his break and journey off to the conference.
A Eurostar trip to Paris Gare du Nord ensued, followed by a quick stumble across town to Gare de Lyon, and from there to Lyon, via the TGV high-speed train. These trains run full out at about 300 Kph, so make pretty good time. All in all, however, it’s still over five hours of travel, not including the connections.
The conference was good, weather was damp and in the low 60s to lower 50s F, which wasn’t too pleasant. I didn’t get to really enjoy much of Lyon, as my cold came raging back, along with aches & pains, stuffy head, coughing, sore throat; the whole shebang. But I did get to spend some time wandering about.
As written to friends, and lightly redacted, here’s a few contemporaneous accounts:
In any event, when I packed to come down here for the conference, I tried to edit a bit, and only bring what I absolutely needed for the three days here. I’ve got the London flat for the duration, so I didn’t have to schlep everything here. I have more power adapters than I need, since I now have dedicated UK versions of power supplies for my phone & computer. I typically only need maybe one other adapter, and, since I suffer from sleep apnea, I also carry a flexible-plug power cord for the APAP machine I use to sleep with.
Well, and this is the first time this has happened in 20 years, I somehow managed to edit out the European-plug adapter for the APAP machine. Oops! Of course I arrived after 5pm on Sunday, so no shops open to sell me the proper cord. A mostly sleepless night ensues. The other end of this cord is a standard IEC-320-C7; a two-prong thingy. So after my early conference sessions, I search online, looking for a shop nearby that might have one. Finally alighting on the search term “electronique” I find a smattering of locations. One of them is Tedd Connexion, and I go for a nice walk through the Lyon business district to get there.
Well, Tedd Connexion has some fancy-schmancy audio gear in the windows, including Onkyo receiver with IMAX decoder(!), some stranger-than-B&O speakers, Sonos gear, etc. I wander in and start browsing whilst the salesman finishes a hushed-tone conversation with a client. I find the cable I’m looking for, as well as several other power and other cords. The boxes all have two, three, and four digit labels on them, but no € symbol, so I assume these are SKU numbers.
Finally the salesman finishes with his client, and turns his attention to me. I explain my lack of command of French, and in his own broken English (who am I to complain?) we converse. I show him the plug-end I am looking for, and he shakes his head. “Non, we do not have this cable.” “But I see one right here,” I correct him. “Ah, yes, but this is a, how you say, Powerful cable; very powerful.” “By ‘powerful’ I assume you mean ‘expensive’,” I retort, noticing the tag which reads “269.” “Yes, powerful; expensive.”
Ha! He directs me to an electrical goods shop down the street, which is closed (only two hours open on Mondays) so I search online again, walk another mile, and find a shop with exactly what I want. A 1 metre cord for €3.90! I didn’t have exact change, but the sales clerk was happy to take the close approximation I did have. Now I can go take a nap, and catch up on the night’s sleep I missed.
And another, the next day:
…since this visit to Lyon was mostly just added on to the London trip, I didn’t really put much effort into it. I booked everything in a flurry, months ago, when it was decided that I’d attend this conference, and then it was out of sight…
So I’ve just got my bad-movie French — please, thank you, excuse me, etc. — and had made zero plans to do anything outside of the conference. Now part of that is that the conference does actually have evening events, until 9pm most nights. But I’m not one for that “networking” stuff, so I don’t bother attending those, by and large. Also, with this cold and the sleepless Sunday night, I’ve not really felt like hanging out with people. Add to that my self consciousness about my lack of preparation, language wise, and I’m mostly just staying in, watching Peaky Blinders.
I did try watching French telly, but an awful lot of it is dubbed American shows & films! Sacre bleu!!
Today I went to the very first Keynote address, which was actually a “fireside chat” with Linus Torvald (inventor of Linux), which was good, and then came back to the flat. There weren’t really any other sessions of interest to me. (Tomorrow I have a pretty full day, so I don’t feel too bad about this.) Instead I did some work which I wasn’t able to get done prior to leaving, so when I return, I’ll have a softer landing. Then I went for a long stroll, found an actual French bistro for a late lunch — Affaire Du 6 — where I had a lovely prix fixe meal with an entree of quiche aux moules with a small salad, and a plat of poulet du creme with potatoes. It was all soooo gooood. I didn’t have wine with it, you know me, but the waitress brought me a small glass of Liquoer de Mandarine with the check. Total cost? €18, or $19.99. Bravo!
So there’s my French interlude. Yesterday, Wednesday, I returned on the late train (arrived St. Pancras 21:30) following my 15:00 session. It was a good conference, a poor effort to enjoy Lyon by Pawn and now it’s in the past, and I can at least say that I’ve been to France, and that the best damn croissants I have ever eaten may be found in Lyon, in the little boulangerie downstairs from my flat.
This is a bit of a Catch Up post, in that the events described herein occurred Saturday last, but I am only just now getting around to writing them down.
Saturday was a full day for Pawn with a matinee of Shuck ‘n’ Jive, at Soho Theatre, in Soho, and an evening performance of Dirty Crusty, at The Yard, in Hackney Wick. And it actually turns out to be a pretty good double bill.
Shuck ‘n’ Jive is a piece by Cassiopeia Berkeley-Agyepong and Simone Ibbett-Brown, about two young black women named Cassi & Simone, played by Tanisha Spring and Olivia Onyehara, respectively. Directed by Lakesha Arie-Angelo, the two performers are on a single set, between two risers of seating, on a long, narrow stage. At each end of the stage are set walls, studded with props which will be used during the show, as well as a pair of video screens which grant us visibility into the character’s text messages.
The plot is simple enough; Cassi & Simone are frustrated in their intersectional lot in life. They are black in a white-dominated society, and they are women in a male dominated society. Not only that, but they are artists in a society which doesn’t deem that too important, providing a third axis to their intersectionality. We are voyeurs on the wall of their auditions, which inevitably devolve, at least in their minds, from Ophelia’s soliloquys into minstrel show rags.
They’re fed up, and they’re not going to take it any more! So, in Howard Beal meets Mickey Rooney, they’re going to put on a show, and most of the rest of out show is watching Cassi & Simone plan how to put together their ground-breaking new show about black women artists putting on a show for unappreciative white producers, and audiences.
So, how well does it work? Pretty good, if you ask me. There’s a little preachiness now and then, but the diverse audience at this Soho matinee seemed appreciative of even that. One of the show’s best bits, which pops up now and then, is a Game Show divertissement called Fine When We’re Friends in which a racial- or gender-insensitive or ignorant phrase is read aloud, and contestants must identify whether this would be generally acceptable, acceptable from a friend, or not acceptable at all. Overall there’s a very optimistic aire to this piece, well performed by the high energy duo of Spring & Onyehara, who’s bubbly energy and, at times, wide-eyed enthusiasm, infects the viewer.
So is this a minstrel show itself? Perhaps, but one with a point, and acid point.
Next up was Claire Barron’s Dirty Crusty at The Yard. I mention the playwright before the title as Ms Barron has earned top billing, with her earlier successes, Dance Nation, You Got Older, I’ll Never Love Again, and Baby Screams Miracle. Barron’s work has won her Obie awards, Pulitzer nods, Drama Circle nominations, etc. Girl got game.
This production, directed by The Yard’s founder and Artistic Director, Jay Miller, stars Akiya Henry as Jeanie, an aimless thirty-something, Douggie McMeekin as Victor, Jeanie’s neighbour and old friend, and Abiona Omonua as Synda, a dancer and instructor at a local youth club.
Photo by Maurizio Martorana
Plot? There is no real high mission on this tale of a woman finding herself in the middle of her life (in her eyes, she’s pretty young if you ask me) and feeling as though she’s just been drifting sideways, with no forward movement. She doesn’t really like her friends; lives like a slob; wants sex but not love; and feels like she’s getting out of life exactly what she’s putting into it; Nothing.
After skipping out on a party, she runs into Victor on the way home. Not having seen each other in some time, they realize they’re now neighbours. It’s not really giving too much away to reveal that they quickly decide that they want to fuck a lot, but not get too attached. Yeah, right. We all know how that goes. Meanwhile, Jeanie stumbles across Synda practicing her ballet steps through the windows of the kids club. They strike up a discussion and soon Synda is teaching Jeanie rudimentary dance, and considering her for a role in a small performance piece.
So these three people, in various combinations, bounce off of each other and impinge upon each other’s dreams and fears. That Jeanie and Synda are both black is, perhaps, totally ancillary to the story, but having just seen Shuck ‘n’ Jive, perhaps Pawn was sensitized to this fact. Victor is white, yet there is no real racial tension implied or expressed. Perhaps just colour-blind casting at it’s best?
I shan’t go in to much more depth. This is a somewhat aimless play. until it very much isn’t, but to reveal the ways and means of that would be to reveal too much. I liked this show, a lot. The performances were top notch across the board. Henry, as Jeanie, has perhaps the heaviest lift of all, as aimlessness can be so hard to portray, but she does so with viscious passivity. Omonua is somewhat a cypher as Synda, but comes into her own later in the show. McMeekin deserves special note for his affable willingness to do whatever is required of him by this script, and his director’s whims, and to do so gamely.
Shuck ‘n’ Jive closed its run at Soho Theatre following Saturday evening’s performance. Dirty Crusty having only just opened last Thursday, runs through 30 November at The Yard, Queen’s Yard, Hackney Wick, E9 5EN; Box Office Line is 0333 320 2896.
Last evening took pawn to The Bunker theatre, Southwark St., for a mini-festival of new, short, works, October-fest Pint Sized. This annual event solicits submissions from playwrights, puts them before a jury, and ultimately a handful of pieces — five this year — to be presented, in whole or in part, on stage.
Preceding the jurying process are a series of workshops and mentoring for the writers, to try to bring people along, grant them confidence, and overcome obstacles. It’s a great idea, and it works surprisingly well. This year over 1500 new works were submitted, and winnowed down to five for the week-long series of showcase performances.
Quoting from Bunker’s website:
The winning plays are:
Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz by Nathan Queeley-Dennis directed by Robert Awosusi Nathaniel is getting ready for a date and takes us through the various local barbers where he can get the best haircut for his special night. A funny and heart-warming one-man show about Black British life in Birmingham.
How To Kill Your Mother by Georgia Green directed by Emma Baggott A subversive and irreverent dark comedy about a daughter helping her mother get through her terminal leukemia – and all the methods one takes to cope.
work.txt by Nathan Ellis directed by Andy McNamee An immersive, experimental piece where the audience tells the story. Through projections and captions, the audience explores the gig economy and how the concept of ‘work’ is changing.
All Aboard! At Termination Station by Lilly Burton dramaturgy by Tatty Hennessy A raucous and powerful one-woman piece exploring the effects of abortion. Using audience interaction, music and surrealism, Lilly tells the story of how she deals with this episode in her life.
This Kind of Air by Vera Ion directed by Nastazja Somers Anna is suffering from anxiety. Which isn’t helped by the arrival of her mother, with a human dog on a leash. A funny and powerful account of family relations and immigrant life in the UK.
Excerpted from https://www.bunkertheatre.com/whats-on/pint-sized-october-fest-2/about 26 October 2019 @11:04AM BST
Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz is a monologue about the primacy of a man’s relationship with his barber, with a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour about dating and family relationships thrown in. This sweet piece is friendly & jocular, and Simeon Blake-Hall was as sweet-hearted as the script. A lovely bon-mot to start off the evening.
How To Kill Your Mother is a tight two-hander dealing with a woman facing lukemia, Miriam, touchingly played by Caroline Wildi, and the daughter trying to help her, Layla, played with equal tenderness by Talia Pick. The conceit here is that mother has asked daughter to help her end her life, and this provides the vehicle by which mother & daughter can have frank, and not so frank, discussions on the topic they both desperately wish would just go away.
Wildi’s portrayal of a mother gradually losing her grip on her faculties is quite moving, as is Pick’s case of a daughter gradually losing her mother. While at times skating near predicable, the script keeps us engaged and keeps our hearts in our throats. Only an excerpt, pawn wonders where else the larger piece could go?
work.txt is almost impossible to discuss in the same column as the other pieces, and was far-and-away pawn’s favourite in this package. Nathan Ellis, with dramturgy by Andy McNamee, has given us a script, projected upon an upstage screen. The piece begins with a prompt printed on the screen, “A member of the audience reads the following aloud:”
There being no immediate reaction from the assembled audience, Pawn himself read aloud the words on the screen. My seatmate seemed somewhat shocked to hear her neighbour doing this, but this first creen was soon followed by many more, calling on us all (The audience…) or certain groups, (Those making more than £30,000 per year) or perhaps a person with a special quality (Member of audience with a loud voice).
The piece “explores the gig economy, financial instability and automation” according to an early draft detailed at The Yard’s webite, here. The early draft was presented at The Yard during their Live Draft programme, earlier this month. A trailer, which gives the viewer a sense of how this works, is available on that site.
While at times verging on tedious, in whole this piece was a rousing success, drawing the audience in, inspiring waves of laughter and flurries of giggles. One hopes that this is just the beginning of such inspired original new works from Ellis.
All Aboard! At Termination Station is a true one-woman-show, well crafted and bravely performed by Lilly Burton. The topic is abortion, and it’s dealt with soberly and not, dipping into dance, spoken word, song and outrage, in roughly equal measure. This is a deeply personal show, and as such gets uncomfortable at times. One suspects that the performer’s family was in attendance, seated in a row of chairs along stage right, which only contributed to the sense of unease one felt at times.
Lastly, This Kind of Air wrapped up the evening with ruminations on citizenship and belonging, on family ties and bizarre undertakings. Dramatically, this is probably the tightest piece of the programme, but it felt somehow hollow to Pawn, not really landing its pathos.
All in all, this was a great night of theatre and held my attention for all of its 2:15 running time. Gaps between the pieces were filled by house musicians — Royce Cronin, Laura Evelyn, and Joe Hardy — who’s contributions kept the audience engaged throughout the scene changes needed to support such a diverse group of performances. Oh, and speaking of diverse, this was a diverse evening, from the cast balance of gender, age & (somewhat) race, as well as the writers themselves.
With so many of London’s small theatres so aggressively promoting writing workshops, and the next crop of young writers, one can only imagine a great future full of diverse voices on London’s stages. In addition to Bunker, and the afore-mentioned Yard, add Pleasance (both Islington and Edinburg), New Diorama, The Hope… the list goes on.
Here’s some more snaps, mostly from Pawn’s birthday.
From an exhibit at the V&A Museum of ChildhoodFrom an exhibit at the V&A Museum of ChildhoodV&A Museum of ChildhoodV&A Museum of ChildhoodV&A Museum of ChildhoodV&A Museum of ChildhoodV&A Museum of ChildhoodV&A Museum of Childhood
Following the visit to Museum of Childhood, Pawn reprised a stroll up Cambridge Heath to Vyner Street, first taken a decade ago. Where once there were scads of art galleries and artist studios, now evidence exists of just a couple of each.
Artist studio on Vyner St. The door was open, and a friend of the artist, at work with a sanding block, invited me in.A sign of the times, from Vyner St.Creative graffiti along the roadway,
Last evening took Pawn and friend Miss R to dinner and a show, at Barbican. The show, as shown below, was works by composer Steve Reich, and a film, to a score by Reich, by Gerhardt Richter.
The first piece, Runner, was compelling and classic Reich. Richter’s film, with Reich’s score, was dense yet dreamy. It was like William Morris wallpaper was having illicit sex with an Egyptian scarab & a flapper’s beaded dress, in the eye of a kaleidoscope. You know what I mean. Like a huge oriental rug which just couldn’t decide how it should look, so keeps trying on new ones. Like that.
Yesterday I saw a fox and a squirrel in Museum Gardens, abutting my housing estate. Seeing as the “Museum” referred to in that name is the V&A Museum of Childhood, it only seems right to then tell this tale as Mister Fox and Mister Squirrel, so here goes.
Mister Squirrel in happier times
Mister Squirrel and Mister Fox lived in Museum Gardens, near the Bethnal Green tube station and Buddhist retreat. (Those are separate places, by the way.) One day, Mister Fox was hungry, and Mister Squirrel was bragging about how many nuts he had stashed away for the long winter months soon upon them. So Mister Fox killed Mister Squirrel, and dragged his lifeless corpse off into the briar to eat without the prying eyes of onlookers.
Here are a few snaps from the first couple days of the trip, in no particular order.
Juliette is experiencing a bit of a revival. A new musical, Juliette, has recently opened on the West End. Here, Juliette and some workmen strike simpatico pose 21/10/19
The show Pre-Raphaelite Sisters just opened at National Portrait Gallery. These are from my Monday visit.
Sophie Gray, 1857, by Sir J. E. MillaisChristina Georgina Rosetti in a Tantrum, 1862, by Dante Gabrielle RosettiNight SleepPortable paint box, circa 1850From Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels
A show Pawn loves to see is the annual Koestler Arts show of art by British inmates, domestic and abroad. This year’s edition, Another Me, was great. Here’s just a few snaps:
“Angie” by Ali, HM Prison Long Lartin“Innocent Man” by Eddy, HM Prison Glenochil“Seated Woman” by Eddy, HM Prison Glenochil
The space formerly occupied by the Hayward Gallery’s pop-up for time-based media, Infinite Mix, is now a multi-purpose exhibit and event space, known of as The StoRE X, sponsored by The Vinyl Factory. Here’s a few from their current installation presentation, Transformer.
“New Era,” 2018 Doug AitkenFrom “Blindly Touching The Flood,” 2019, Harley Weir & George Rouy
In April, X & Pawn attended Grief Is A Thing With Feathers at Barbican; Enda Walsh’s theatrical adaptation of Max Porter’s novel. In that production, Cillian Murphy plays a husband, and father of two young boys, as he tries to cope with the loss of his partner. It is through the intervention of, and his eventual transformation into, Crow, a force of denial and liberation, that his grief is made tangible, and ultimately…
Ultimately what? There often are no happy endings with grieving. No tidy wrapping up and stowing away of these large, powerful, emotions uncorked by the loss of a loved one. Grief Is A Thing With Feathers didn’t try to offer us one. Neither, tonight, did Meet Me At Dawn, the new Zinnie Harris piece presented by DOT Theatre and Arcola.
It’s hard to write about a show like Meet Me… without feeling as if one is giving away too much of the plot. I will tell you this much; at its core, it’s a play about grief.
Pawnfirst reported on Arcola over a decade ago, with The Living Unknown Soldier, a rumination on a different sort of loss; loss of self, of identity, but also the desperation of grief. Whilst familiar with small playhouses, studio work and the like, it was a handful of productions seen on that long-ago trip which fed the fire of my affection for Off-, and Off-Off- productions — be they off of Broadway of off of the West End. Another show that trip, Thin Toes, at Pleasance, prompted this comment:
Sitting in the small performance space with only about twenty or thirty other people, the theatre in the round presentation meant that we all were within feet of these actors and yet they neither dialed down their performances nor acknowledged the audience in whose laps they were nearly sitting. In such an environment it is easy to detect small flaws that a more typical theatre setting might disguise.
Arcola’s Studio 1 is not so small a space, but preserves the intimacy of the performance. And, in this case at least, some of the most fraught scenes of Meet Me… came down on top of my front row seat, with gale force and profound affect.
Again, one feels constrained not to reveal too much of the plot, but I can tell you that this production, starring Jessica Hardwick as Helen and Marianne Oldham as Robyn, is a deft two hander, expertly directed by Murat Daltaban, which will drag you into the heart and soul of grief, and do so almost without warning. One moment you share these two lady’s prosaic, if troubled, concerns about the fallout from a boating accident — is one concussed? which direction will get them off of this sand bar and back home? — and the next you feel you have gone into the drink with them and are fighting to get back to the surface, gasping for air.
Grief is a place, a place where the rules are not the same
Robyn in Meet Me At Dawn, by Zinnie Harris
Recent months have been particularly harsh ones in Pawn’s circle of friends, and no small amount of grief is bound up inside this fragile carapace. Meet Me… broke that wide open. Thankfully a tissue (a Kleenex® brand “Mansize” tissue, mind you) was close at hand, but no effort was made to conceal the tears or near-sobs which ensued. Thankfully, at just an hour in length, the release was over soon enough. But in a good way.
Two people on a small stage, before an audience, can be a fraught enough situation all on its own. There were few props populating this island upon which our protagonists are marooned. A single table and chair; that’s all. A blank wall upstage is lit in changing colours, shifting with mood, and at times overwhelming the front lights. The lighting, by Cem Yilmazer, bore silent witness to the action on stage, never too much, always in compliment. Likewise, O?uz Kaplangi’s score slips by, just beneath consciousness, but propelling us forward.
But it is this lovely, aching, moving script by Harris (How To Hold Your Breath, Royal Court; Further than the Furthest Thing, National Theatre; Rhinoceros, Edinburgh Lyceum) which drives this piece. That, and the incredible performances of Ms Hardwick and Ms Oldham. A particularly sharp scene, deep into the denouement, brought an intense confrontation between griever and grieved right up to my seat, and nearly reduced me to a blubbering mass. Only the pure shock of the outburst prevented that meltdown, but, ultimately, that Mansize Kleenex was put to the test.
After the bows, the house lights came up, and a woman sitting a few feet from me leaned in and, with a kind hand on my shoulder, inquired, “Are you alright?”
After re-reading this, it’s clear I wrote too much about myself and not enough about the play. It is most important that you see that it wasn’t just that I was thin skinned to the subject matter; it’s that the play does such a good job of bringing us inside of Robyn’s grief. I would have been reduced to sobs regardless of my own recent losses. This play is just that effective, like a fortune teller or cheap medium, of persuading us that it knows how we feel, and we do know how she feels.
Meet Me At Dawn in performances at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, London E8 3DL, through 9 November 2019. Tickets at the website. #MeetMeAtDawn @arcolatheatre
In 1995 I was employed in exhibit development at Discovery World, a museum of science, economics and technology. My job led to my involvement in several vastly different technologies and scientific fields, from hydraulics and lasers to electricity and health. One particularly interesting piece of technology with which I became involved was a “Haptic” interface, called “The Phantom.” Haptic, from the Greek, means touch, and the Phantom was intended to provide the user with virtual sense of touch via a single finger tip.
It looked much like a miniature architect’s lamp, an arm with several degrees of freedom, terminating in a thimble-like cup at the end, which, in turn, was attached to an armature governed by priceless little motors and sensors. The entire design intended to allow the user to move their finger as freely in space as any of their other digits, until they encountered a virtual obstacle. This might be something as simple as a simulated piece of paper, or sandpaper, or perhaps something more complex, a billiard ball, or banana, a wrist, or a wrist with a pulse.
Via the thimble, the controlling computer system could convey texture, viscosity, pressure, vibrations, movement — the entire range of things we can feel with our fingers, albeit not heat nor cold nor the pin-prick of pain. But one might pluck an invisible guitar string, and feel its harmonics, or palpate the back of a virtual patient.
My group were unsure just what we would have the device simulate, nor how we would allow a visiting public to interact with it, given the inherent fragility of the device (and the largely reckless tendencies of the public). But as this was very new technology, having just been invented a year earlier by an MIT grad student, there was a scholarly conference about it, held near MIT, in suburban Boston, and I was to attend. In fact, when I received my conference credentials I was pleasantly bemused to see that I was credited, on MIT stationary, as Doctor Nic Bernstein. Doctor indeed!
Upon arrival at the conference assembly I was greeted by a curious assortment of engineers, scientists, investigators, doctors, physicists. Oh, and a three-star General from the US Army; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same people who invented the Internet. Other than myself, and a geologist from Australia, everyone else there was, in some way or another, in the pocket of this General, something I pointed out during our plenary introductions. At the next meal break, said General sought me out as a dining companion. How, he needed to know, was I not also on his payroll?
There were several obvious implementations of the Phantom being discussed, such as a medical school using them, along with surgical dummies, to help physicians learn proper technique for administering epidermal injections & draws.
The Australian geologist was working with seismic stimulators to probe for deeply buried oil & gas deposits. This being done by amassing the vast amounts of three dimensional data produced by seismic stimulation — essentially carefully calibrated “shakers” attached by outrigger arms to long, low trucks, like massive insects, which would slowly advance along a grid work, shake the ground a bit, raise, advance some more, lower, shake, etc. Once a full grid had been worked, and the data assembled into a three dimensional model, the investigator would probe through the data, feeling his or her way along veins of ore or into voids filled with gas or oil; each substance represented with a different virtual viscosity.
During a field trip to the labs of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industry corporation, a friendly scientist showed me the system they were developing to help orthopaedists feel their way around (“appreciate” in the parlance) the knee joint of a prospective surgical subject, prior to wielding an actual knife.
Here’s how it was done. The patient would receive a scan — PET, CAT, MRI, whichever technology would best image the tissues involved — and the data would be loaded into a computer model. Rather than the pixels (Picture Elements) we think of from the two dimensional world of television or video, or printing, this data were rendered into Voxels, Volumetric Elements. In addition to the X, Y, & Z coordinates of a datum, there was also information on the density of the matter, rendered to the “viewer” as viscosity or resistance. A doctor could thus feel around the back side of a kneecap, for example, to appreciate the condition of the soft tissues there (if any remained), such as cartilage or muscle, each rendered in a different haptic manner.
It was fascinating. This was 1995 remember, long before these sort of things were depicted as routine in movies and on telly.
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