London agenda for Tuesday 28 August 2012

1. Listen to some sensual, dark-edged and drop-dead cool songs by Camille O’Sullivan [Run Riot]

2. Ask what is a Legitimate Enhancement in Sport? [Ian Visits]

3. See From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism at the Royal Academy [Tired of London]

4. Hear Whitest Boy Alive // DENA at The Coronet [London in Stereo]

Here's the trailer for Cockneys vs Zombies. Has it really come to this?

Cockneys vs Zombies is out on Friday.

The idea is “imagine Sean of the Dead crossed with 28 Days Later”. Zombie films are the genre that just won’t die.

Also note that Cockney has now lost its original connection to real human beings and become a marketing term denoting sweary, gun-wielding-yet-sentimental caricatures.

Having said that, I’m basing all this on the trailer and the early reviews aren’t terrible, so if you like this sort of thing you might like this sort of thing.

Here’s the trailer.

See also:

East London pubs with grisly histories
Do we need to talk about East London’s drinking problem
East London is England’s unhappiest place to live, says unscientific promotional survey
Pramaggedon: the end times begin at Westfield Stratford

Weather, portents and milestones for the week ahead. The moon waxes, blackberries are ripe

Weather

In the week of 27-31 Aug 2012, the mornings will be nondescript, and best avoided entirely. After lunch, we should expect regular variations on the theme of sun and rain, which will grant the week a pleasing meteorological unity even while the days appear fickle and inconstant. Viz:

• Monday – Rain in the afternoon.
• Tuesday – Sun in the afternoon.
• Wednesday – Rain and sun in the afternoon.
• Thursday – Sun and rain in the afternoon.
• Friday – Nondescript.

The full BBC weather forecast is here.

Portents

On Friday a full moon will rise. Folk tradition once held that to stare too long at the full moon caused lunacy. This belief was eroded by centuries of scientific progress which perhaps reached its symbolic apex when Neil Armstrong became the first earthling to set foot on the moon in 1969. Despite prolonged exposure to the lunar surface, he displayed no signs of erraticism in later life. He died this past weekend. As you catch sight of Friday’s rising moon, do raise a glass to the memory of this fine man.

Milestones

Monday is the August Bank Holiday. This innovation in worker’s welfare was initiated in the 1870s by John Lubbock, who was also one of the great figures of Victorian archaeology, a champion of evolution who carried Darwin’s coffin, and the inventor of the words Neolithic and Palaeolithic. The story goes that he desired bank holidays so that workers would have the opportunity to play and watch a bit of cricket. So as you enjoy this bank holiday free from the toils of accustomed labour, do raise a glass to the memory of this fine man.

Seasonal notes

Late August is a good time of year to pick and eat London’s wild blackberries, their drupelets now empurpled by the still-strong summer sun. Here are some ideas about how to do that.

Fringe, The Conclusioning

Gap Year
Chloe Ward is a dyslexic northern actress. As if that isn’t enough, she’s decided to put on a Fringe show detailing the most embarrassing moments in her life to complete strangers. What do they do to people up north to make them such gluttons?

Gap Year doesn’t appear to have anything to do with taking a break between school and uni to travel the world. Unless she’s taken a year off from the daily grind of work to create and tour this sketch show. Fairly fast-paced, this is Fringe as Orson Welles would have attempted for his first time round, throwing absolutely every strand of half-boiled spaghetti in the pot at the wall. There’s sketches, short films, shadow theatre, animation and a multi-instrumental-video-looping-one-woman-orchestra. Ward is clearly extremely talented and very funny. However. And it’s a big, frustrated however. The direction in this show is… Mad. There’s is no structure whatsoever, no flow, no continuity and no editing. Every idea in Chloe’s whirling head has been thrown at the audience. She is a talented clown let loose without an outside eye to tell her when something works and something doesn’t. The show makes every first-time-show mistake possible. So while there are many, many flashes of brilliance, nothing holds together and I want to strangle her. Also, the catastrophes she reveals don’t seem too terrible. There are a few instances when she stands outside the show to comment about herself and in these moments she becomes more engaging and real.

When this show is (hopefully) retuned and remounted I think it will be brilliant. Until then this feels like a retrospective of ten years worth of unseen shows.

Leisa Rea: Bastard Legs and Other Shows I Haven’t Written
Leisa Rea is a Londoner with ADD. While it’s almost always a bad idea to compare two shows at a Fringe, in this one case it might be useful. Unlike Gap Year, a sketch show by the dyslexic Chloe Ward, Bastard Legs and Other Shows I Haven’t Written works precisely because Rea’s mind is all over the place. Rea admits she has no act, merely a heap of bits that she pushes around and arranges as she remembers they exist. Using powerpoint projection and a real pizza delivery-boys she creates an angry surrealism that still manages to convey warmth and a love for her audience. However much she claims to be an asshole and a dick.

I have to be honest and admit I am a big fan of Rea. While I might have enjoyed past shows more, Bastard Legs still strikes me as a gorgeous mess of mixed stupidity and wandering genius. It’s incredibly uneven (though this is, it must be said, the first outing for most of the material) but it still works because Rea’s ironclad confidence hold it together. The night I saw it the crowd was a quiet one, which affected the show. That was the one thing she wasn’t expecting. But even a subdued and rambling Leisa Rea is still one of the most solid shows you’ll see at a Fringe.

Survive!
Missy dreams of becoming a dancer and moves from Sherwood to London expecting streets of gold and ruby dancing slippers. Ha! That plan always works out well!

I have to admit, I am not an expert on dance. I can watch a dance piece and comment on its grace, or precision, but I don’t know the language of dance, the history of style that an expert can use to interpret what works and what doesn’t. At a pinch I would say that the choreography of Survive! is very much influenced by American dance movies, especially the stuff seen in films featuring gritty, urban dance-offs and small town steel welders who just wanna dance. The dancing is muscular, repeating itself in phrases, creating a sort of physical punctuation to help tell the story. Does that even make sense? Let’s say it does and move on. Punchy, funky, hip-hoppy with a touch of ballet and a slap of tap dancing.

What I liked most about the show was that it served as a showcase for a number of different kinds of artists. As well as each dancer’s character having their own style there was an excellent Rap artist, or Lyricist as he prefers, Turan Webb, and a singer/songwriter Simi Khanna. Chloe Packer (last seen in this Fringe’s Familiaris) carries the narration for the show, and dancers Michelle Spencer, Marta Valverde, Veena Parmar (who also choreographed) and Francesca Tebbutt (also from Familiaris) each get to fling their limbs around with panache.

The only part of the show that didn’t work for me was the projection of photography onto the stage wall. Images taken from around Camden contributed nothing to the show. They didn’t tie into the story (except that Missy lives in the area) and weren’t particularly interesting except to document the colourful quirks of local life.

Fringe Reviews The Penultimate Batch

Making Faces: Calm and Collected
Once upon a time we didn’t get stressed, we just shrugged at our favourite idol and stroked the soft, silky fur of the sabre-toothed tiger gnawing on us. Now we need silly, tuneless songs to cope. Making Faces are three happy idiots determined to help by providing those songs and throwing themselves into a wide assortment of odd props and box-headed/radiation-suited/rollerskatified dangers. We’ll call them Smiley-scruffy, Blondie-beardy and Blondier-Non-Beardy.

Calm and Collected hits its marks slightly less than half the time, and not always solidly. However, when they get it right (with Beardy acting as the glue holding things together, Blondie Beardy getting to be the weirdo with the best lines and Non-Beardy-Blondie quietly wriggling and grinning and stealing scenes) they can be very funny indeed. Their visual gags work best, but best of all is when something goes wrong and they have to figure their way out of a technical disaster. Rather than hope the next time I see them that everything goes completely wrong, maybe they will have more material that works.

The Overcoat
A wind so cold it wears icicles whips round onion-domed St. Petersburg and straight through the thin coat of Akaky Akakievich. Tired of freezing and being the butt of his coworkers’ sneers Akaky works day and night to raise the princely sum of 80 rubles for a luxurious new overcoat. His landlady, who secretly adores him, make a great sacrifice to secure him the advance needed to pay the ruthless tailor. The day it arrives his fortunes swing, and he turns his back on the only thing in his life of true value, love.

Le Mot Juste dishes up a simple and elegant version of the Overcoat with three spring-loaded performers and an equally flexible set. Sometimes the show seem a little clunky, as though the stage of the Camden People’s Theatre is a couple feet too small, or they were cut cruelly short of one day’s rehearsal. Most of the time, however, they flow effortlessly through their story. Scenes such as the Hunting of the Cat for Akakievich’s fur-lined collar are suitably huge, hilarious grotesques and could grace any stage in the world. So, a lovely show from three charming performers- though I’m a little worried about the guy playing Akaky. He really does seem a little fragile and in need of thicker soup!

Listen
There is a strange division between types of theatre in London. Perhaps in Britain as a whole. There are the large shows, the Westend musicals and media-hyped, award-winning extravanganzas with casts chock-full of knights and dames. And… “The Fringe”. Everything else. Not the shows occurring during a Fringe Festival, but anything which doesn’t take place on a jutting proscenium stage. Elsewhere these shows would be referred to as “small scale” theatre, but even that doesn’t really describe them. Because small shows with smaller budgets still attempt huge themes, bold visions, radical techniques. In fact, sometimes it seems they are the only ones that do.

Listen, from Miller Theatre Productions, is a gentle, lyrical play that movingly explores in dips and daubs the life of a man. Not a heroic figure, struggling against overwhelming odds. Just a normal guy trying to raise a son and grow old, flirting goodnaturedly with his nurse, whiling away his last days without his cheeky wife. It’s not linear, frequently flashing back and forth through characters’ lives, nor always clear. It’s impressionistic at times, moving now into dance, now mime-show, guitar solo, kitchen sink dramedy. Sometimes naturalistic and funny, sometimes fractured and lost. With excellent performances, a jumbled yet touching and believable script, Listen is something you don’t see much in theatre anymore, or in life. Genuine tenderness for a dad. Sweet.

London agenda for Thursday 23 August

1. Take in the panorama of London’s skyline from a Hot Tub on Netil House [Run RIot]

2. Hear rare groove from the early days in the 70s through to the golden era of hip & rnb at Get Busy [Don’t Panic]

3. Find out who practised the dark arts for the Olympics at Did the Magic Work? [Ian Visits]

4. Listen to Chalk Talk // Her Parents // Ten Speed Bicycle at The Black Heart [London in Stereo]

5. Seek out Bernardo O’Higgins [Tired of London]

Watch good value Don Giovanni (scary) and Hansel and Gretel (scary in places) operas in Fulham this week

Co-opera co (who we featured here) this week peform their summer season of Don Giovanni and Hansel and Gretel at the John McIntosh theatre, starting tonight. Details here it’s £20 or so.

Rà-àkõ-st by Lindstrøm

Norwegian producer Lindstrøm has announced plans for his second LP this year. Smalhans will be released November 6 through the brilliantly named Smalltown Supersound. It follows the release of Six Cups of Rebel back in February. Download album taster Rà-àkõ-st, mixed by Todd Terje, below.

Sketch: Dr Richard Barnett's Sick City Project for @wellcometrust. Death in a thousand steps

Dr Richard Barnett, as poised and as charming an academic as ever donned a shabby brown jacket, pauses in a side street off the Strand, hangs his sunglasses on the front of his shirt, and begins a tale of blood, booze and screaming agony.

“…he gave Pepys a bottle of brandy to drink, partly to numb the pain and partly to make him insensible and tractable. He tied him to a table naked and face up, and inserted a long metal rod through his penis and into his bladder…”

The he in Barnett’s sentence is not, as more adventurous readers might suppose, a 17th century bdsm master with a taste for urethral play. Pepys was nobody’s bitch. The he was a surgeon who was permitted to insert his rod into Pepys’ penis, and his pliers into Pepys’ perineum, in order to remove an “exquisitely painful” bladder stone.

The Wellcome Collection possess an image which nicely illustrates Dr Barnett’s account. It includes a hidden bonus game of spot the ball(s).

“Exquisitely painful” is Dr Barnett’s phrase, and he relishes delivering it during a two-hour guided walk around Holborn and up to St Pauls, in the area the branders would like me to call Midtown. Well I’ll brand them first. Unlike the branders, the Doc has a nice line in euphonic phrases: the “tender mercies of the surgeons”, the “thrill-seeking demi-monde”. Add the fact that London is as full of medical history as pustule is of pus, and this attempt to engage the people with the sick and the dead of London’s past can hardly fail.

The Doctor is a tallish man with more tan on his shoes than on his skin. On a hot day in late July, at a temperature which would have had the flies flitting round Pepys wounds and sweat flowing freely down the surgeon’s brow, he is coolness itself, alternating black-rimmed glasses with a snazzy pair of shades which, when not in use, hang with fashionable abandon from the front of his shirt. As the eyewear alternates, he turns from bespectacled academic to suave Riviera gent in the flick of a wrist. After the transformation, only the sheaf of well-thumbed papers hanging scruffily out of his back pocket give away his true calling – this is an academic alright.

Dr Barnett possesses the timeless English affability which is rarely found these days outside universities, the theatre, and the upper reaches of the medical profession. Indeed he started out wanting to be a pathologist, and studied medicine for two years before switching to history with a medical slant. He has taught at Cambridge and at UCL, has a book called Medical London – City of Diseases, City of Cures and his walks round the city are now conducted under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust. For them he leads the Sick City Project, a bloody interrogation of death, gore and human decay.

The walks can be enjoyed with the man himself, or navigated yourself via a smartphone, a pair of headphones and the fascinating website, where recordings of his fine phraseology, along with maps of the walk routes, are intuitively arranged.

It’s good stuff. Give the pustule a squeeze. You know you want to.