Theatre

Go see My Ragga Journey - plus a whole bunch more Camden Fringe reviews

Alan Hindle | Tuesday 17 August, 2010 12:30

Photo: My Ragga Journey

Occasionally Ovid
Rape, cannibalism, infanticide, infanticide by cannibalism, fiery car crashes causing mass destruction. Ah, classic poetry! Considered one of the three archpoets of ancient Greece, Ovid should be very stuffy stuff, fit only to be shoved down the throats of schoolchildren and regurgitated for exams. Erisychthon, chopping down the sacred trees of Demeter is thus cursed with a hunger causing him to eat first his daughter and then himself. Phaethon the idiot son of Helios who convinced dad to let him drive the sun across the sky with catastrophic results. King Tereus, who raped his wife’s sister and cut out her tongue to avoid being tattled on. Naturally, the queen retaliated by cooking their child and serving the king a stew. Stuffy. Dry and bones bleaching under the Etruscan sun.

Life is cruel. Nature and human beings are cruel. Works by artists and poets such as Ovid, the Brothers Grimm, Sylvester Stallone examine what we cannot understand, in this world, the next, the mind where both converge, and the violence we invariably seem to employ to control such things. Helen Ainsworth creates puppets with faces like the shriveled apple dolls grandma collected, using only the bad apples. Grotesque, but wielded so gracefully, with a casual brilliance for mime and voices, that not only do they live but are capable of dying. When the body of Phaethon, having crashed the sun, is brought to his mother he is laid with his face upside-down, his mouth agape, staring out at the audience. Only foam and paint, without Ainsworth’s animating hand he truly was dead, and I was touched by the end of this Sunday driver.
Fox Girl Five

Bands that form organically are often tense things, with huge egos bashing each other about inside to create music. Bands slapped together by record labels and held together with a lick of glossy paint and the promise of money are just as fraught. Ego has nothing to do with talent. It’s often argued that if such ‘fake’ bands possessed any real ability they would form naturally. Yet actors audition for plays and films, are guided by directors, recite lines written by authors. Manufactured bands aren’t really music, they’re theatre. In Fox Girl Five, five half-starved, desperate-to-succeed women are corralled by two greedy executives- a third rate Simon Cowell and his assistant, the awkward brother of William Shakespeare, into… well, not quite a sensation. We watch as our heroines, Snotty, Stroppy, Crazy, Sicky and Irish struggle with the success they imagine they soon will have. The music is suitably insipid and at first I couldn’t decide if the play was being ironic in that none of the performers seemed able to sing. But the writing is often very funny, and as the actors relaxed into their roles this became a fun show to watch. There’s about as much depth to it as a pop band, but the performances get better and better, until by the end they can even sing. Some quite beautifully.

The Universal
When a sun implodes it leaves a polka dot so dense it sucks in everything including light. When your lover is suddenly gone it leaves a hole in your life so empty all happiness is drained, leaving you floating in the cold vacuum of your once-shared flat.

Desperate for solace, Ben turns to science. Discussing the Big Bang, the accelerating universe, Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and the infinite number of possible universes he dreams of a place where Laura never left him and they can be happy together.

The science of The Universal is very elementary, illustrated using the good ol’ Pile of Fruit on the Trampoline method of lecturing. Ben is quite endearing, a sort of nervous professor in a bathrobe rather than a don’s gown, with a permanent, sour pucker and floppy mop he has to keep blowing out of his eyes. Where the show works best is when Ben compares universes and relationships. Both the cosmos and his life with Laura exploded from tiny things, formed too fast, created structures that only made “sense” so long as he didn’t look too deep at their underlying form. One interesting point made is that at the Big Bang the universe must have grown at a speed faster than light, because everywhere is the same temperature as everywhere else. Gravity moves faster than light, if “moves” is the right word. The limits of our universe is not defined what we see but by what binds us together. At this moment in the review my hair grows back, golden and shaggy, and I bust into “Age of Aquarius”.

Not entirely a successful show, but worth a pint and natter about afterwards.

The Perfect Party
Phillipa and Phillip, race about shrieking at each other over the details of little five year-old Johnny’s first birthday party. Everything must be perfect! Steadily the party entertainers booked to keep the kiddies from eating each other arrive: A balloon artist completely clueless about the inflated rubber arts, a pompous illegal magician, and a clown more used to parties for old men wanting to be whipped and manacled.

The Perfect Party is a pleasant if typical farce in which keyed-up modern professional types are thrown together to rub their quirks together for comedic sparks. The performances are mostly okay, and the jokes are frequently funny. The premise is a little lazy, but then I noticed from the programme that this is the playwright’s first script and so actually shows pretty solid comedy chops after all. The author, Kaye Conway, also plays Candy Cane, the dominatrix clown. I found myself staring at Candy changing on stage into her non-clown civvies. Her face, slowly emerging from beneath red nose and greasepaint as the layers of her character wore away, was completely different from how I imagined it would be. At that moment she looked up, our startled eyes met, and I realised I was ogling her putting on her trousers. For the rest of the show I focused on watching everybody else.

Dr. Death & the Medi-Evil Medicine Show
In the old days if you felt a bit under the weather you went to your local barber for a hair cut and some blood let out, possibly a good leeching, or have your pee drunk. Modern medical dramas like House almost certainly give precise depictions of how doctors operate, and we can see that things have not changed so much over thousands of years.

In this exceedingly clever kids show, Dr. Death and his power point puppets unroll the whole, bloodied tapestry of medicine’s distinctly dodgy history. Lots of disgusting facts involving poo, pee, pus, plague, maggots and other grand lumps of filth. The kids, frankly, were an afternoon performer’s nightmare, with parents happily giving their little monsters free rein. Death, admittedly, invited some of this upon himself, but he dealt with aplomb. It was extremely unnerving, that huge serrated knife he walks around waving carelessly, but maybe it’s there for those rare occasions when he just breaks down and has to give the children the healthy chopping up they need in order to calm down and stop interrupting.

The animated scientists of antiquity and scenes of educational splatter on the projection screen are reminiscent of Monty Python, making would could have been a dangerously educational lecture into a laugh-filled romp through other people’s misery over the ages.

London Wunderground
On July 7, 2005 three bombs on the Underground and one on a bus in Bloomsbury took 56 lives, injured hundreds, and continue rippling through millions of lives today. That incident is at the heart of London Wunderground, a production by the students of Bird College of Dance, Music and Theatre Performance.

Scenes melt in and out of each other, punctuated by sequences of ‘jungle’- people walking, running, dancing, dragging themselves across random snippets of their lives. Three rough stories link the images and tableaux. A hopelessly enthusiastic American and the Chechnyan tourist she has inadvertently kidnapped go sightseeing; a squiffy homeless woman suffers a series of urban nightmares; the recurring memory of 7/7.

Not every segment works, I think. The Tramp’s Dream, for example. There is plenty of improv going on, so there are always plenty of chances for things to go wrong, and that’s the half the fun. Editing of elements and what devised segments would go into this bubbling stew would have been useful, though. For some reason the bits that work least go on the longest. However, what is rare for a student production like this is that every single one of the performers carries a presence and a degree of control I found impressive. I admit I’d never heard of Bird before, but I’ll certainly look out for them in the future.

My Ragga Journey
This show was on my schedule as filler. I had time left at the end of an evening, and I wanted to see one more before I packed up my critic’s kit (dagger, poison, scroll of dried skin stripped from some poor actor only wanting to entertain and make people happy) to go home. My Ragga Journey is proof you have to go see things at the Fringe that don’t normally fit your tastes.

Sure enough, as the tale of a young white guy who wants to be a Rasta, the early gags for this show consisted of watching Crispin Flintoff singing and dancing awkwardly to booming Ragga music. But Flintoff is not only knowledgeable about this branch of Jamaican Reggae music (which apparently originated in London and named after a black British boxer being declared by his black American opponent a ‘Raggamuffin’) infectiously enthusiastic and funny, he is also courageously unconcerned with making an ass of himself. In doing so he becomes a total hero.

Having come to like Flintoff so much, with the honesty of his affections, the suddenly serious dedication of the show to his lost friend Scooby turned this into the most genuinely emotional show I’ve seen at the Fringe so far.

Mike O’Donovan; Wouldn’t Pick Him Out of the Pound
Comedy is the new speed dating. What used to be the new rock and roll has become a social networking tool. In the small back shed of the Sheephaven Bay pub, which looks fitted out to be a porn film studio, Mike O’Donovan chatted with the several folks in the audience, explaining what an awful person he is. A native Australian, O’Donovan prefers what he sees as the innate stroppiness of the Londoner compared to the real tan, fake smile Ozzies he claims rampage across the outback looking for things to hug. I made the mistake of leaving my notebook out, thinking more people were bound to come in and screen me from the performer. But no. And having little more to his act than getting to know who we were it soon came out I was a reviewer- which is bad enough, but for a comic, with nothing but their own self confidence to support them on stage, it can be crippling.

So I will make this review more of a chat with Mike. Hey Mike. How you hatin’? Good, good. Listen, I think, professionally, you need to hate more. Doing comedy, as you say, is just a way to get to know yourself and you have to face what you find. You have anger? Then show it. Don’t worry so much whether people like you as a hater. Show some passion, otherwise what are you doing this for? The money? If you hate, I don’t know, bendy straws, and I come into your show drinking Mountain Dew through an articulated tube, don’t be afraid to leap upon me and suck my eyeballs out with that damn straw! At an angle! Then pour the Dew over my corpse to dissolve it before the police arrive.

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