London agenda for Wednesday 22 August 2012

1. Watch ‘Restrepo’, a documentary by Tim Hetherington, at the Frontline [Le Cool]

2. Hear Of Monsters and Men at the Electric Ballroom [Don’t Panic]

3. Listen to Dr. Paul Koudounaris on Sicilian Sex Ghosts [Ian Visits]

4. See the extraordinary Charli XCX at the Sebright Arms [London In Stereo]

5. Sit out in the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof garden [Tired of London]

Fringe Reviews Batch # Whatever Comes After ∞

Sarah Campbell: Experiments in Fun
Sarah Campbell, a writer for Have I Got News For You, should take up a new career as a carnie. Before Experiments in Fun began the audience filled out slips of paper detailing their “idea of fun.” Campbell then read the slips and proceeded to guess who wrote what. “I think whoever wrote this one is dyslexic and drunk. Was it… you?” On that one occasion it wasn’t. It was the person sat next to her. Who was dyslexic. And drunk. For me she would have added “Spooked and creeped out.”

But what Sarah Campbell really needs to do is learn to have fun. She’s stressed all the time, unable to watch Happy Feet without fretting over the abusive behaviour of certain penguins, and constantly being mistaken for a teenage boy with emotional problems. For a comic her life is a goldmine. And yet she’s funniest when improvising with the audience.

Admittedly, I had very high expectations for this show. I wasn’t necessarily expecting snappy, newsy satire, but I was hoping for more than stories about getting ID’ed and being bored at music festivals. If I wanted stories about being bored I could have gone to some music festivals and just talked to myself. Campbell is a lovely person, and comics often do Fringe shows for something more personal than just telling jokes and making passing observations. But if your improv is better than your life, it doesn’t take a psychic to suggest which way a happier show lies.

Savage in Limbo
On a slow night in a Brooklyn drinking hole, three barflies circle the room. Denise, Gabriella and April are all 32, grew up in the same neighbourhood, and taken different routes to the same dead end. Hurt, lonely and desperate for change they fight, bond, scheme, fight some more and go on living. Apparently, for these ladies, the only thing worth living for is a man. And not much of a man at that.

Usually when a British production stages a show set in the US the first thing that comes to my mind is “Why not just reset the story here and use your own accents?” But Planktonic Theatre manages to create an utterly believable, living, breathing New York dive, filled with flawless (but deeply flawed) Noo Yawkers. While I was disappointed at several turns in the story, when the three damaged ladies appeared on the verge of taking charge of their existences but instead throw it away to squabble over a penis, that fact is that human beings are dumb. We do dumb things, even when we know we should be smarter. Biology and love is the most seductively destructive of cocktails. In this, Savage in Limbo is a chance for three excellent actresses to prove they can be every bit as stupid as the men dominating every other play out there. Bartender Murk and cock-about-town Tony are good too, but quality bastards are a dime a dozen in the theatre. This is a chance for clueless women to shine. Savage is funny, nicely detailed and rich in misery. An excellent show (with the one gripe being that as the characters get drunker they become increasingly unintelligible). And they provide Cheezies, too.

Nathan Caton: Work in Progress
Nathan Caton is putting together his show for the Edinburgh Fringe next year, Teenage Mutant Ninja Caton, and I think he might almost be there. He does all the usual stuff every other comic seems to do nowadays. At 27 He still lives at home with his mum and his endearing but embarrassingly oversexed new stepdad. He’s a huge fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hence his life’s ambition to become one and the title of his forthcoming show. He’s breezy and charming, chats and riffs with the audience and then tells his life story.

But Caton is maybe playing comedy 3D chess here. Because a) his family tales are genuinely funny, b) his ‘story’ and his ‘riffing’ seem to blend seamlessly with equal hilarity, and c) Caton is actually one of the last crafters of the shaggy dog joke. You don’t even realise a conversation with him is actually part of a theme, is actually leading to a surprise punchline, is actually part of an arc that will lead you back to a previous anecdote/gag and all of it is a carefully constructed story with a point. Well, most of it. There are dips and long boring bits. It’s in progress, after all. On the whole, however, a very solid show already.

London agenda for Tuesday 21 August 2012

1. Celebrate Gustav Klimt’s 150th birthday looking at plinths reinterpreting Klimt’s work in Grosvenor Gardens [Le Cool]

2. View The Company of Wolves and Paperhouse at Scala Beyond [Run Riot]

3. Be creeped bout by Todd Solondz’s Happiness [Don’t Panic]

4. Drink in history with 200 years of public house [Ian Visits]

5.See Tom Stoddart’s Perspectives [Tired of London]

6. Watch Stealing Sheep // Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs at Madame JoJos [London in Stereo]

Do we need to talk about North London's drinking problem?

Islington council may charge bars to stay open after midnight, the BBC reports. This may lead to more expensive drinks in the wee hours, as venues pass on the cost to drinkers. Not that you’ll notice anyway, until the next morning when you find the receipt for that impulsive last round in the bottom of your wallet where you thought a £20 note would be.

According to the council, the money raised from charges would go towards policing and clean up costs. The council says:

“…it has a “very serious late-night drinking problem” with crime, disorder and mess on its streets.”

Councillor Paul Convery went on:

“We went through a phase where we thought, as a borough, that the late night economy was a good thing. We’re now coming to the conclusion that it’s got some very high costs and real problems associated with it”.

And to think that only three weeks ago we were asking whether East London needed an intervention about its drinking problem. The whole city is at it. Shame on us all.

Can you disagree with this policy? It’s surely right for clean up costs to be transferred to the heavily boozed. Getting pissed until 4am is a perfectly reasonable way to pass an evening, but that doesn’t mean it has to be cheap.

BBC London – Islington bars face late-night drinking levy
Snipe – Do we need to talk about East London’s drinking problem?
Snipe – All posts about the demon booze

London agenda for Monday 20 August 2012

1. Visit a secret gallery to view cutting-edge work from up-and-coming creatives [Le Cool]

2. Play chess in a swimming pool, among other things, at the Mind Sports Olympiad [Flavorpill]

3. Get boned [Ian Visits]

4. Find the Ecuadorian Embassy [Tired of London]

5. Listen to the Trembling Bells at The Dalston Victoria [London in Stereo]

Is Boris really going to go Dutch - or has he got his head in the sky?

It’s nearly midnight on a balmy Friday just after the Olympics. A man on a Boris bike wobbles across the junction outside Southwark station, one hand on his bike, the other clasped to his ear around a mobile phone.

He’s barely moving in a straight line, and then his laptop bag falls off onto the road. Cars toot him as he scrambles to pick up his belongings, still with phone clasped to his ear. Is this Boris Johnson’s cycling legacy?

If you’ve been lucky enough to visit our shiny new Olympic velodrome, chances are you didn’t make it there by bike.

While Team GB bask in their success on the track, the death of a cyclist just yards from the Olympic Park during the Games highlighted the risks faced by those out on the roads.

London’s cycle campaigners are sure they’ve got the mayor behind them in their push to make the streets safer – but is he really on board?

If you did try to get to the Olympic Park from the centre of the capital, chances are you’d have to pedal along the A11 for at least some of the way. Boris Johnson’s shiny new Cycle Superhighway 2 was meant to provide a clear ride all the way there.

It proved anything but, as the Barclays Cycle Superhighway story began to encompass tragedy as well as farce.

Two cyclists died in three weeks at the eastern end of CS2, at the Bow roundabout. Suddenly, City Hall’s trumpeting of the superhighways was silenced, as it realised these token blue lanes were, in many locations, anything but super.

The Bow tragedies also amplified complaints from the London Cycling Campaign. Once a fairly docile organisation, the LCC had been pushed into action by its members, who’d already decided it should press for Dutch-style segregated cycle lanes and better junctions in its manifesto for the mayoral election.

LCC members had, quite simply, had enough of being forced into foot-wide gutters because planners put cars first.

The candidates also came under pressure from The Times, which launched its Cities Safe For Cycling campaign after one of its journalists was left in a coma after an accident.

One by one, the main candidates signed up to LCC’s Go Dutch pledge. The last to sign? One Boris Johnson. Will he be as good as his word?

The LCC hopes so. Shortly after May’s election, the mayor announced 50 junctions will now get cycle-friendly revamps.

So far, it’s a start. But since then, the mayor’s mind has been wandering like a drunk banker trying to cross a junction on a Boris bike . He also blurted out at to London Assembly members that Dutch-style schemes would be trialled at Vauxhall Cross and Greenwich.

Except nobody actually knew what he meant by “Greenwich”. Was it the town centre, blighted by a one-way system? Or the vicious roundabout a mile east, where the Woolwich Road meets the Blackwall Tunnel approach, which saw the death of Adrianna Skryzypiec when her bike collided with a lorry in 2010. Or was it somewhere else in the wider borough?

Three months on, nobody, even at City Hall, knows what on earth he was talking about.

Not even the local council knows – but that shows cycle campaigners’ other problem. Many London boroughs, which run most of the capital’s roads, simply don’t care, and don’t have the same level of scrutiny as the mayor.

Asked at the town hall in June if Greenwich Council had bothered asking City Hall what Boris had been talking about, cabinet member Harry Singh admitted it hadn’t.

Pressed further, he said officers would belatedly be in touch with TfL to discuss “the cycle lane”.

It was pretty clear that the borough’s man in charge of cycling hadn’t a clue what he was on about.

Greenwich isn’t the only council without much interest in cycling – far from it. The ill-fated CS2 superhighway stops a mile short of the Olympic Park because Newham Council objected to blue paint on its roads. If the LCC means business, it needs to be pressing the boroughs at their elections in 2014 too.

Back to Boris, and it’s clear his mind’s still wandering. Last week, he told his house rag, the Evening Standard, he was looking at cycle paths alongside railway viaducts – admitting even then it was a “blue sky” proposal and no detailed plans had been drawn up.

But if one indication (reported by Cyclists in The City on Twitter) is true – that the first route will be along the Liverpool Street to Stratford line – then once again it’ll be of limited use to anyone who isn’t commuting between specific points. And it diverts attention from the whole point of the Go Dutch campaign – to make streets safer for everyone, not just give cyclists a fast route into zone one.

The same City boys who use Boris bikes might find a fast route to Liverpool Street useful – but for anyone who wants to get around on normal roads to get to the shops, school, or anywhere else, it’s just going to be a gimmick.

But then, Boris’s successes so far have been in diverting attention from his failings – in building a bike hire scheme instead of making streets safer for cycling, and opening a cable car in place of building any more sensible river crossings.

The mayor once said cycling around the Elephant and Castle was fine “if you kept your wits about you”. London’s cycle campaigners will have to do the same if they want to make sure Boris sticks to his promise.

Fringe Reviews Batch ∞

I keep forgetting to mention this, but I said I would: Self Criticism, a play about two women trapped in a room together waiting for love but quickly going mad, will be playing in Edinburgh at The Vault (Annexe), 21-27 August. A graceful piece which seeps steadily into Gothic nightmare, it’s worth marking down on your telephone book-sized programme as one to see.

Nick Hodder: Insert Comedy Here
Comedy flows over the Edinburgh Fringe like a deluge of blood. Stand up comics rain down like frogs telling rape jokes and lo, a plague of agents and BBC scouts and award ceremonies doth sweep through the make-shift venues of the land.

Nick Hodder wants to be a part of that multitude. Having bought the £900 CD course with supplemental books, though not having listened to it yet, Hodder bumbles through a comedy minefield like a suicidal sapper. Insert Comedy Here isn’t a stand-up show, it’s beautifully sustained satirical sketch tearing apart the identi-kit jesters currently swamping the small stages and huge arenas of Britain. A straight man to the disembodied voice on the CD player, Hodder needs do little more than react to his master’s dismissive commands, but at times I was laughing so hard my face seized up. Actually, painfully, worryingly seized up, and I was blinded with tears. It was terrifying.
Nick Hodder is the Moses of comedy. Here endeth the metaphor.

Full Stage Splash
Superhero movies, in this year alone, have made more money at the box office than every other film ever made combined. $14 trillion. That’s not just fanciful hyperbole, that is a genuine exaggerated fact. And yet comic books themselves have grown so sophisticated that it’s possible to obtain a doctorate in philosophy simply be reading them. Even the ones that still feature underwear being worn outside the tights.

Full Stage Splash is an attempt to educate the layman in the broad strokes and fiddly details of the history of comics, from the birth of Superman to the heat death of the comics multiverse and beyond. Covering eighty years in an hour means the pacing is frantic, and despite being cleverly explained by enthusiastic geeks, is more than a little overwhelming. The writing is often brilliant, managing to come across as prose hip hop and instructional poetry. Some of the performances, however much filled with a love of their subject, are more claylike than an semi-animated golem. And Kate Quinn, the one girl in the troop, is given little to do besides be the one girl in the troop. I’d‘ve hoped comics had come further than that.

Red Girl
An overworked BBC radio personality gives her lazy boyfriend an ultimatum to sort his life out, then zips off on her moped to interview some obscure classical musical composer. In her basket is a bottle of wine and a loaf of lemon drizzle cake. Somewhere along the way a wolfish AA mechanic redirects her from the A road to the B, to the C and on through the alphabet until she finds herself lost in the land of The Third Policeman and Kafka.

There are funny moments in Red Girl, mostly provided by a radio host and a composer sat in the corner of the stage, who occasionally get to be silly. Overwhelmingly, though, Red Girl is a meandering attempt to jam as many levels of artistic meaning, symbols, upended fairy tales, medical blather, cultural references, and cod psychology into a long, hot hour as possible. It’s needlessly exhausting. And with only a couple exceptions the cast don’t seem to be actors. Maybe friends of the director who proved able to memorise swathes of text about anatomy and the workings of major organs? There are loads of big ideas in Red Girl, but it needs a major edit, a huge injection of energy and precision from its cast, and less self-importance as a piece of art not to sink into a pit of pretentiousness.

Arabian Nights
The first true work of genius at this year’s Camden Fringe! With air conditioning! Bliss.
In the court of King Shahyar, Queen Scheherazade delays her execution for 1001 nights by telling her murderous husband bedtime stories. Some of the stories presented here are from the original compilation of folk tales, while others have been improvised and whipped up by this amazing company. This is one of the best Fringe shows- one of the best pieces of pure theatre- I’ve seen in fifteen years. Physically inventive and brilliantly funny, these folks will be the next generation of comedy stars once those blinkered TV execs tear themselves away from Edinburgh.

Hammer and Tongs Theatre Company, Emilia Petryszyn, Eddy Cottridge, Tamara Astor, Tom Alvon, Charlotte Reid, director/producer Jennifer Rose Lee, the shy guitarist/tea cup percussionist in the corner and the a/c engineer of the Camden People’s Theatre, you are all my new heroes. Enjoy your moment, as I am fickle and have the memory of a cantaloupe. However, if this show is ever remounted you, my dear dozens of readers, have to see it.

Oh, and a note to all theatre companies in this and every other Fringe. Would you all please, PLEASE, get in a professional photographer at some point during your rehearsal period and have some publicity shots taken? Put them up online. Theatre reviewers, whatever some of them might think of their own importance in the world, exist to help sell your shows. You can help them by making decent, sexy images of your show available online. A minimum of marketing effort will go a long way.

SYH by Egyptian Hip Hop

Former Manchester teens Egyptian Hip Hop are back following an extended hiatus. Their debut album, Good Don’t Sleep, is released October 22nd through R& S Records. Check out the hypnotic SYH below.