the London fringe: two plays and a trailer

Okay, that’s enough Salinger. I’ve had a weird few days, headaches and dizziness and malaise, fallout from being “let go” in a scheduled meeting while sat there (with prepared work, notebooks, folders, a little pen) (“but we’ll pay you to the end of the day”), all mixed together with a nice big dollop of hormones. Tasty. I didn’t get to look through my Salinger books as planned because my ability to concentrate deserted me. But it’s also been a busy few days in its own way: I’ve been to the theatre three times!

1. Innocence, by Dea Loher: a 3-hour-long German play, like a series of philosophical essays all given some form of roughly human embodiment (the crazy middle-aged lady; the bitter middle-aged lady; the crazy, bitter middle-aged lady; the undertaker ["I couldn't be a doctor because I never managed to have the compassion to hurt people, to heal them, but with the dead I can give them what they need, I can make them beautiful"] , the undertaker’s sad young wife who longs for a baby, the two illegal immigrants; the blind pole-dancer who talks like Katharine Hepburn and clicks her fingers every five seconds ["my parents were both blind; they wanted a child who would also be blind, because you see, their world was complete and I must be part of their complete world"]) all tacked together with some weird surreal touches which were, I later gathered, meant to be amusing. It steadfastly refused to pander to our bourgeois hankering for retrgrade narrative or the kind of reliance on individual character that gets in the way of the Issues Under Discussion. It had a friend in it; he was great; it ended yesterday. Friend is on way back to Manchester as we speak. (We mentioned the Hepburn mannerism to him; he said, “well, the actress is Canadian…”)

The space in the Arcola is diabolical. It’s a long time since I had to sit on a metal folding chair – for a three-hour play! Even the ceiling was black. And the bare-bulb house lights were so harsh that I was awake in the night with a pain in my old glaucoma-ridden eye… And that’s before you get to the audience, oh dear doctor as Gran Gran would have said. You never saw so many difficult haircuts, so many deep facial expressions, so many roughly stitched shoulder bags made from bits of old curtain. And the director was sat next to us in the second half laughing like a drain.

2. The Whiskey Taster, by James Graham, at the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. Wonder ad-boy has synaesthesia. Works with a girl of the type one so very often encounters in real workplaces. The Big Contract to win, rebranding a vodka. He relies – or, rather, she relies – on his gift for translating one sensation into words that evoke a different one to establish the all-important pitch. She is hyper-ambitious (“I’m from Croydon”) and up for a promotion. All this works fine until someone has the bright idea of bringing in an old traditional whiskey taster from the Highlands to do his voodoo on the vodka…

The cast is fabulous: there are only five of them. The boss is a bit of a caricature, the client is marvellous, and the whiskey taster is John Stahl, who does Shakespeare, and it shows. In fact, most of them have some Shakes in their credits. The lead, Samuel Barnett, is utterly convincing and wonderful, and I only realised afterwards that I saw him in Desperate Romantics (which I know, I hesitate to admit having seen any of but I was sick, okay, and I gave up after a few episodes. The performances were lots of fun though & Sam was good).  The play is funny and touching, and full of extremely clever ideas which are played out very satisfyingly, through dramatic situation and character (up against the wall!), with a bit of exposition thrown in. (The only bits that didn’t work were a couple of places where the characters started to try to explain themselves; budding new playwrights, please take note.) The set is spare and clever and effective. The lighting was part of the set and used to evoke the synaesthesia. The space is tiny, the seats a bit high, but really the thing was so engrossing it didn’t matter. The whole audience was sat forward with attention. We were happy afterwards and went for a pizza.

3. The New Act of the Year Award at the Hackney Empire, of which more later on today, once I’ve been out for a coffee and got to grips with the sunshine out there.

And now, as it happens, my friend is waiting for me in the coffee shop.

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