Review This Is Not Culturally Significant

This Is Not Culturally Significant
Devised by Adam Scott-Rowley

Tales Of The Unexpected
https://www.bunkertheatre.com/

Part of being a reviewer are the out-of-body experiences. Those moments when watching a show our mind hovers above, hooks into our brain and drags out like a reluctant piece of chewed chewing gum a long forgotten memory which then becomes a cornerstone cultural reference for the review.

At Adam Scott-Rowley's one-man show This Is Not Culturally Significant, TLT had one of those spiritual experiences!

Back in the day, G Wilson Knight wrote Shakespearean literary criticism, The Wheel Of Fire and The Imperial Theme which students borrowed from the college library and dutifully cited in essays. Little did we know that, one day very soon, we would be able to put a face - and other appendages - to the name.

We all filed in obediently, clutching our notebooks, for the distinguished octogenarian's guest lecture on Shakespeare, expecting the usual - and filed out shaking with laughter.

For Wilson Knight's coup de théâtre was the Timon of Athens finale to his lecture when, to illustrate his point, he stripped off completely naked and stood dramatically posed before us.

Remember please, dear reader, this was BTIMP (Before The Internet And Mobile Phones). At that time we thought Madonna was art school avant-garde.

Surely Knight, who was also a sometime actor and vice-president of the British Spiritualist Association, is the inspiration for the spiritualist lecturer in This Is Not Culturally Significant?

And probably in real life, encouraged by others in the then secure tenure of academia, he was also just a little bit bonkers.

Originally from North Wales, Scott-Rowley, has developed his gallery of grotesques since graduating from LAMDA in 2014, performing fully-clothed at the Edinburgh Festival. Now, having returned to London, he has decided to do what we shall now refer to as a "Wilson-Knight" and perform starkers. And it works.

Scott-Rowley has a supple, graceful, well-defined body with daubs of pagan white which  metamorphosizes with rhythm and dramatic musicality from character to character.

There's the American sex cam working girl, her hick father in the deep south, the Glasgow druggie baglady to, yes, the lecturer in Spirtualism who also runs a theatre company, the bereaved Pinteresque brutal husband and his brutalized wife, a mournful lesbian chanteuse, a needy lover, a club bouncer and pleading clubber, a racist Sussex upper-middle-class housewife.

There's a touch of artist Ronald Searle's types brought up to date in the 21st century with something of Kenny Everett, Little Britain  and the late Rick Mayall (though it sometimes feels quite American) but, dripfeeding the politics, out for pathos as well as laughs.    

We suspect this is a show that has growed and growed and a narrative thread gradually introduced.  The title is clever. It can encompass any range of characters in a loose lassoo and also adds a depth of meaning. 

But for us - yes it's imposing those cultural references again! - it also says something about pre-internet academic judgements when academics, the literati and, fie!, even drama critics waged wars about what was and was not culturally significant with a venom which seems almost Game Of Thrones-like in these more corporate times.

The set design is a simple black box - Scott-Rowley's body is his main prop but there's a stool and in a front corner a chain hangs down with a lamp. The expressive lighting conceived by Will Scarnell and developed by Matt Cater gives the show shape changing from character to character.

The strobe lighting and full frontal nudity won't suit everybody. However the show is enterprising, visceral and entertaining and at barely an hour doesn't outstay its welcome. With a narrative still emerging, and pretty well incomparable to anything in the current theatre scene, we award a green light.

Review Home Truths (Cycle Three)

Tim Gopsill watches the bricks and mortar of three women's lives fall apart in a dramatically satisfying, if troubling, final trilogy of plays charting the history of the current housing crisis.

Home Truths
Henrietta by David Watson
Nostalgia by EV Crowe
Grip by Chris O'Connell

A Home Of Her Own
https://www.bunkertheatre.com/

Three plays and  three women’s lives. Each of the plays in the last trilogy of Cardboard Citizens’ intriguing triple cycle of playlets about housing centres on a single woman’s fate.

Henrietta by David Watson begins with the death of a distinguished, real-life town planner, Henrietta Barnett (Caroline Loncq) in 1936.

In some mystical way she is whisked forward in time to 2017 to see what has become of the housing utopia she conceived called Hampstead Garden Suburb, where she envisaged “housing for everyone … the poor living next door to the rich”.

The locals are not fazed at being engaged in conversation with a ghost and readily volunteer the opinion of how dull the place is, with no pubs or shops and all the privet hedges the same height.

There is amusement at the “rich and poor together” ideal, since there are no poor people for miles and all Henrietta’s workers’ cottages are owned by banker and architects.

In real life, of course, it was precisely the progressive middle class professionals like Henrietta who began the gentrification of the Suburb, and she does come to concede, as her little odyssey goes on, that the garden city concept hasn’t worked.

Like Odysseus, she encounters exotic characters of the Suburb. The manic bus driver (Andre Skeete), ranting in Caribbean creole as he lurches the local single-decker \(on the real-life H2 route) through the suburb’s pretty lanes.

A sassy schoolgirl, Rebecca (Endy McKay), who has had a brainwave: a new kind of city where the rich and poor live together. It would be built on a big floating island, on pontoons off Southend on Sea.

Rebecca admits it’s a bit mad and shrugs: “it’s only a project at school.” “And what school do you go to?” enquiries this strange old lady she has got chatting to on a park bench. “Oh,” says the girl, “Henrietta Barnett”.The circle joins up again in unexpected ways.

Nostalgia by E V Crowe is a serious drama, but there is dark comedy in the moving monologues of young woman Anna (a stunning performance from Mariam Haque) as her chances in life and for a home contract. Anna is trying to find somewhere for when her soldier husband returns from fighting, but each move she makes is worse than the one before.

There is ingenious use of The Bunker Theatre's very basic space by director Caitlin McLeod and lighting designer Elliott Griggs,  as Anna speaks writhing inside a sleeping bag.

Her words are punctuated every so often by blackouts as her world literally closes in bit by bit in the light.

Meanwhile a doctor (Jake Goode) won’t listen to Anna’s complaint, a hypocritical neighbour (Loncq again) feigns concern but then does nothing leaving Anna's hapless husband Martin (Richard Galloway) to deal with events.

This all serves simply to let the audience breathe.For Nostalgia – with its short and concentrated span, the actress’s constricted circumstances, the harsh chiaroscuro of the lighting, the poetry and the deadpan tone of Haque’s delivery -- strikingly calls to mind the work of Samuel Beckett.

From Beckett's influence to that of Ken Loach: the third play, Grip, by Chris O’Connell, is a straightforward piece of grim, predicatable social realism. A 50-something tenant Lorna (the third demanding role played by Caroline Loncq) is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nevertheless she loses jobs and home when her landlord sells up and she finds she can’t get rehoused by the council – or anyone.

As in a Loach film, we see the other side as well. There's the desperate advice service that cannot help; the council leader prevented from building new homes by government cuts who outsources  emergency housing provision to a well-funded housing association out to buy properties. All this serves to close another circle of selling and buying but Lorna is left out. It's all laid bare, but everyone seems helpless to stop it.  

This is the harrowing world of housing that Cardboard Citizens, have taken on with this series of plays. It is a world in which millions are losing out and hundreds of thousands are in serious trouble – especially, but not only, in London.

It makes you wonder about the theatre company: what do young actors earn nowadays. Not much. So where do they live? It must be hard for them in the capital city. Their hearts must really be in their work. 

For many, the right to adequate housing, part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is less of a certainty now than for the past generations portrayed in the two previous sets of Home Truths' plays (here and here). The circle has again joined up, but in the opposite direction. It's a green light from me for an engrossing cycle of new plays.