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Blood Show

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Blood Show by Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Blood Show comes with a spatter warning and plastic ponchos for the audience. The set, in Battersea Arts Centre’s small Member’s Bar room, consistsnof a pristine white carpet with a chair, a plant and a drinks flask filled with stage blood. The show, performed by the writer Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth, with Tim Bromage and Craig Hambling, is a surreal exercise in mimed violence. Hambling and Chillingworth stage a fight, the former painted all over in white, the latter slathered from head to toe in stage blood. It is a nasty and very believable fight with kicking, biting and gouging, and it ends with Chillingworth strangled to death in an alarmingly realistic manner. The white carpet, by this time, is smeared in blood. Then they do it again, and the shock of the violence wears off a little. Then again, and again, and each time the impact is reduced while the set becomes bloodier. There is also a ghost, adding unnerving comedy in a head-to-toe sheet costume, who glides around and sometimes sings – played by Tim Bromage I assume, although we never see his face.

The idea of repetition desensitising us to violence is a good premise, but the show takes a different course. The fight scenes end and Chillingworth becomes the sole performer, enacting a series of increasingly bloody and comic effects – including slamming plastic cups full of blood into their body foley-style. The volumes of blood grow, and it emerges from props and comes on stage in buckets to be sloshed around.

Blood Show is promising, but frustrating. It perhaps references violence against the trans body, violence in film, complacency about violence in society, or all of those things – but we never really know. The show seems to lack a driving rationale, and feels more like a scratch exercise than a coherent, finished production. The performers are physically committed to an impressive extent. However, the blood is a distraction and becomes the whole point. The need to produce more and more blood derails and defocuses the evening. And it turns out that when you examine it too closely, stage blood looks like stage blood, not the real thing,

L’Addition

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Bert & Nasi. Photo by Vincent Zobler.

L’Addition by Tim Etchells / Bert & Nasi – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Published at Plays International

As part of Forced Entertainment’s continuing  40th anniversary celebration, co-founder Tim Etchells has devised a two-hander in which reality is pushed to its breaking point through the basic mechanism of a classic farce set-up. A restaurant customer sits down at a table, the waiter offers him wine, pours a little, he tastes it and nods approval, then the waiter pours him a glass – but he carries on pouring until the glass overflows across the table. There’s mild panic from customer and waiter, when he realised what he’s done, he sweeps up the tablecloth with everything on it. Then they begin again.

From the moment they walk on stage, the performers, Bert and Nasi, are a comic timebomb always threatening to go off. Bert is English, bluff, matey, confident, and usually wrong. Nasi is French, smooth, conciliatory, and also usually wrong. Together, the pair are a well-oiled machine displaying comic skills that it is a joy to behold. Much of L’Addition is very funny. The comic scenario breaks apart continually under examination, becoming more and more ludicrous and hilarious. The performers know how to hold back comic gratification so that, when it comes, it is a true release. At one point Bert as the waiter, constantly laying and relaying a tablecloth, finally loses it completely and performs a strange, wild dance with the cloth which seems to continue for several minutes as Nasi looks on, astonished. The audience are beside themselves.

However, like all classic comedy L’Addition is buoyed on a tide of existential sadness. The underlying themes in Etchells’ piece are barely stated, but it becomes apparent that the show is concerned with , existence, ritual and death. There is a moment that stops everyone in their tracks when the pair fast forward to a point 50 years in the future, when they are still performing their skit. Then it dawns on them that much of the audience will no longer be alive, at which point it sinks in with each of us too. The process of ritualising and mythologising existence is examined too, as the scene becomes something different through constant repetition, a tribute to its original self enacted by people who cannot remember the original, or why they are doing it. But they know they have to, just as we know we have to eat, sleep, repeat to exist.

L’Addition, which was originally presented in French at last year’s Festival d’Avignon, is a brilliant piece of theatre. Tim Etchells, Bert and Nasi work together with a precision that most performers can only aspire to. In the influential tradition of Forced Entertainment, the show’s power is in inverse proportion to budget, complexity or pretension. It belongs to the tradition of silent film comedy, of Samuel Beckett, and of entertainment that takes nothing seriously, but means everything. It is assured, side-splitting and unmissable.

London Tide

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Ami Tredrea and Bella Mclean. Image by Marc Brenner.

London Tide by Ben Power, music by PJ Harvey – National Theatre: Lyttleton, London

Ian Rickson’s production of London Tide is both a delight to watch, and a significant achievement. The challenge of adapting Charles Dickens’ weird, labyrinthine novel for the stage is enough in itself, but turning it into a musical to boot, seems like a risky venture. Fortunately, the adaptation is by Ben Power and the music by PJ Harvey, an inspired pairing. Together, they have conjured up coherent, direct and involving theatre, judiciously updated, with songs that are on a whole different level of quality to standard music theatre fare.

Rickson’s staging, with sets by Bunny Christie, is sparse but effective and original. A void at the front of the stage is the Thames, which shapes the lives of Dickens’ characters. The entire cast climbs out of it at curtain up, and characters are cast in, pulled out sometimes dead, sometimes alive. The stage is a huge dark space edged with giant river piles, with a watery, translucent sheet at the rear used for some impressive silhouette scenes. What makes this something different is the way that the stage floor moves, rising and tilting like the river, and so does the lighting rig, which hangs low enough for it to lift one character into the air, has he grabs it with both hands. The gantries move rhythmically up and down, like in ripples like water, the first time I have ever seen a theatre’s fittings used almost as an extra character.

The story, stripped back expertly by Power, who also gives the gender roles a carefully judged 21st century boost, is pure London noir. Dicken’s novel is pretty absurd but its strength, and that of the stage show, is the filthy London atmosphere – a city of mud and shadows, poverty and fate, to which its inhabitants are, nevertheless, fiercely devoted. PJ Harvey’s songs, backed by a three-piece band on stage, underscore the noir themes rather than reiterating the story. With lyrics by Power, they are properly impressive, written in styles that range across Harvey’s fine career. At times songs sound like ‘Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea’, at others like ‘White Chalk’, or ‘Let England Shake’. When the cast lines up at the front of the stage, singing directly to the audience “This is a story about London and death and resurrection”, it sounds like a number from ‘The Threepenny Opera’.

London Tide is worth it for the music alone, but there’s a lot more. Dickens’ characters offer some excellent roles, which are grabbed with both hands by a young cast. Bella Mclean as the entitled Bella Wilfer, makes a convincing transition to self-awareness, and has a particularly excellent voice. Ami Tredea’s Limehouse girl, Lizzie Hexam, is full of character and determination. Jake Wood, as Gaffer Hexam who fishes bodies from the Thames for a living, has real menace. Ellie-May Sheridan makes a great deal of the small part of doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren. Tom Mothersdale is suitable distracted as heir-in-disguise, John Rokesmith. Peter Wight, always hard to beat in any role, makes Noddy Boffin clumsy and likeable. As principle baddie Bradley Headstone, Scott Karim is lugubrious and frightening. And Crystal Condie, as Miss Potterson, plays an important role as a landlady standing up the depredations of the men who strew damaged people in their wake.

London Tide is a seriously high quality evening. Ben Power, PJ Harvey and Ian Rickson make the show seem simple, and logical, but it really is nothing of the kind. Epic Dickens adaptations like the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby were once era defining. Now they sneak into the National Theatre’s repertoire, and it is a credit to the current management that shows of this quality can, to some extent, be taken for granted.