Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Edinburgh Fringe’

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Top Spoken Word Moments of 2012

In End of year round-up, Festival, Performance Poetry on February 3, 2013 at 11:00 am

- listed by James Webster -

As the year is (fairly) recently ended and a new one begun, it seems a reasonable (ok, fairly late) time to round up some of the Spoken Word events and reviews that have made this such a successful year for Sabotage.

Top 5 Most Viewed

1. Edinburgh Coverage – by far and away the most viewed Spoken Word reviews were from Sabotage’s coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe. You can find them here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 part 1, Day 4 part 2, Day 5, Day 6 part 1, Day 6 part 2, Day 7 part 1, Day 7 part 2. Phew, that was a lot of reviews: special mention should go to the most viewed day featuring: Ben Mellor’s ‘Anthropoetry’, Lucy Ayrton’s ‘Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry’ and Phill Jupitus’s ‘Porky the Poet – 27 Years On’

2. Hammer & Tongue National Slam Final!  - a wealth of poets competing from all over the UK with Adam Kammerling emerging as the worthy winner and UK National Slam Champion.

3. WASTED – by Kate Tempest – Tempest’s first play blended theatre and poetry into a heady intoxication of words.

4. The Stoke Newington Literary Festival – a bevy of events, speakers and performers all descending on Stoke Newington in a myriad of Literary goodness.

5. Edinburgh International Women’s Day All-Female Slam – a brilliant idea to promote female poets in the Spoken Word scene in a medium still dominated by men.

My Personal Top 5

On a more subjective note, here are a few of the events that I’ve most enjoyed this past year.

1. Nth Entities by Anna Le and Phil Manzanera - I’ve long been an Anna Le fan, and hearing her complexly evocative language soaring around Manzanera’s dizzying guitar created a unique duet of words and music.

2. Hammer & Tongue Oxford: Valentine’s Day Slam featuring Dizraeli and Superbard – Sabotage didn’t actually review this one, but it was a phenomenal evening of wordplay, love and gorgeousness. Dizraeli’s set was stupefying in its verbal ingenuity and poignancy, while Superbard’s interactive love story was a monument to his storytelling prowess and creativity.

3. Once Upon a Time in Space by the Mechanisms – an event of storytelling and music, twisting well-known fairytales into a dark sci-fi setting that frightened and delighted.

4. Dirty Great Love Story by Richard Marsh and Katie Bonna – full of memorable characters, hilarious wordplay, and all tied together by the charming performances of two outstanding poets.

5. Word Wrestling Federation Presents: Page Match 2 - bringing together my love of poetry and professional wrestling in a way I didn’t think possible. For all its flaws, this night was great fun; full of posturing, put-downs, poetry and larger-than-life performances.

, , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Content by Mixy @ The Albion Beatnik 04/09/12

In Performance Poetry on December 5, 2012 at 10:50 pm

content-1_24257

- reviewed by James Webster -

Who is Mixy?

Why, MC Mixy is one half of The Dead Poets (the rap and poetry duo that Sabotage have reviewed before)! He is also a talented solo performer, indeed his one-man show, Content, was one of the Spoken Word successes of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, given four stars by the Scotsman who said his show made “Mike Skinner of The Streets look decidedly average”. Having missed the show in Edinburgh, I was really happy to get to see it in a performance in Oxford back in September (massive ap0logies for the delay).

He sounds awesome, anyone else cool there?

Well, he was supported ably by Lucy Ayrton’s intricately rhymed rebelliousness and Claire Trévien’s lyrical turns of phrase, so it was a very enjoyable evening. But the main attraction was Mixy rattling through his spit-fire mix of rap and poetry, linked together with engaging and amusing anecdotes.

Amusing? So he’s funny too?

Yup. Of particular amusement was his ongoing conceit that he was dating the audience, even giving us an endearing nickname ‘Chinchilla-hips’, which elicited plenty of chortles throughout the evening (even if in the end he did leave us for another audience, the bastard).

So he pretended to be in a relationship with the audience?

Yeah, he did, it was both funny and appropriate, as a great deal of the show dealt with Mixy’s relationships, in particular one relationship that was especially momentous for him in how it interplayed with his ongoing happiness. He set the tone for this with his first piece, ‘Upbeat’, a nice avowal of taking life lightly, with inspired rhyme punching out like the click-clack of a typewriter.

But it’s not all upbeat, right?

Indeed not. Another aspect of his life that informs the show is his anecdote of having been ‘born stillborn’ and having to be resuscitated at birth, which is a superbly gripping story, out of which comes some excellent poetry. One such piece is a hugely entertaining conversational rap-battle between himself and Dr Stix, the doctor who saved his life when he was born, and is really the crux of the show. Mixy indulges his pessimistic streak and the depression of having messed up the relationship he cared about to confront the doctor, essentially asking ‘how dare you bring me into this unjust world’ and the doctor’s response is fun, clever and life-affirming. From the entertaining put-down ‘the first thing you did was shit on me’ to the simple ‘are you telling me you never made anyone happy?’ the doctor’s no-nonsense approach is an effective foil to Mixy’s self-loathing.

And he does do the self-loathing thing very well, capturing the romantic self-pity evocatively and insightfully, eloquently wallowing in his misery (‘words cut through my side like a blunt knife’) while remaining just self-aware enough to wonder if maybe he should take responsibility for his own unhappiness.

So the show’s about him being, y’know, a bit unhappy?

No, it’s far more poignant than that. Ultimately, Mixy’s meditations on what it means to be happy and on the consequences of your own behaviour is what the show’s all about, and his trance number towards the end ‘For Granted’ in which his words floated between the music, hitting each beat like a featherweight boxer, did a good job of summing this up. Saying we should ‘thank those who break our heart’ and that ‘we all come at a cost’, it was a powerful celebration of all the experiences, good and bad, that made him who he is.

So it’s all good in the hood?

All good in the what? Ahem, well the show’s not exactly flawless. Where the show possibly suffers is in the details of the relationship. The story of how they met and got together does come with some fun poems about working in a call centre (‘I rock that telephone headset with elegance’) and messing up a job interview by being too candid about your flaws (a dirtily self-denigrating rap, the opposite of gangster-rap arrogance, that’s a bit like Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ but for a hip-hop audience). But at points it feels like he’s dwelling on the details too much and you lose the sense of how it fits into his overarching narrative, becoming just a story about a relationship that ends badly because of his ubiquitously dick-ish behaviour. As such, the show sags a little in the middle and his messy story of a night out with a colleague that goes too far, while amusing, lacks the insight and weight of his other pieces. Plus, now and again there were a couple of off-colour jokes at the expense of women that I found off-putting, but that might just be me.

But overall it’s a good show?

Absolutely. One might even say very good. His winning nature keeps the audience with him and the wordplay, rhythms and emotional resonance of his stronger pieces more than make up for the occasional filler.

In the end he leaves it on a bittersweet note that is very appropriate for the show. ‘Wet Summer’ lets the words spill over a forlorn backing track to great effect, showing nostalgia for a relationship that ‘swerved and it crashed’ but bearing in mind that some clashing is inevitable in relationships and even though ‘we remember pain so well’ he stresses the way love can be rewarding as anyone will ‘know if you’ve ever been a half of a whole’.

Whether self-indulgently sad, aggressively self-deprecating or powerfully life-affirming, this is a show that hits highs and lows of emotion that are skilfully expressed and eminently relatable.

, , , , ,

The Long and the Short of It – Richard Purnell and Gary from Leeds

In Festival, Performance Poetry on September 5, 2012 at 3:53 pm

- reviewed by Anna Hobson -

Anna Hobson kindly reviews one of the Spoken Word shows from the Edinburgh Fringe that James Webster and his winsome sidekick Dana Bubulj didn’t manage to catch.

There was a good crowd in the slope-ceilinged, chilled yet moist underbelly of the Banshee Labyrinth that afternoon (no mean feat when the weather outside was delectable). Chairs scraped on the flag stones, and the wet air clung to our skin as The Long and the Short of It prepared to deliver a poetry consultation to a willing and eager audience.

The pair’s asymmetrical dynamic set the scene at first glance, and as soon as the accents were thrown in this became a comedy duo to anticipate with relish. They introduced each other (affectionately, melodramatically) and began with a couple of poems, delivered with a tragi-pathetic whinge, with their subtle acting skills highlighting the humour in the poetry.

The entire performance was riddled with dichotomy: their significant height difference, the North/South divide, the subject matter and length of poems; and yet they worked seamlessly brilliantly together.

We were taken on a linguistic journey, a lyrical adventure; subject matters such as allergies, maladies, justice, death and public transport slapped us in the face immediately, and we were taught that these themes underpin all decent poetry. Richard Purnell began with a theatrical lament about celebrities, and hinted at the hypocrisy of grieving for these false idols. This was swiftly followed by a poetic burst from Gary from Leeds, making me laugh out loud with Freud’s Knock Knock joke. This was one example of the tumultuous ricochet between solemnity and brevity from our Consultants, who consistently delivered a satisfying mix with their comedic rapport.

There was a lightness of touch and a deft dexterity woven into a sharp script that sustained the verbal tour upon which we had embarked. I did appreciate the social and political commentary that rumbled beneath; it added a bit of meaty flesh to the proceedings.

I felt that although the tongue-in-cheek seminar structure of the show could have been emphasised more, the experience was thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable. Happiness Graphs, Poetic Sweet Spots and creative audience participation were sure-fire ways of ensuring I left with a smile on my face.

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 7 (07/08/12) part 2: The Girl with No Heart, Evie and the Perfect Cupcake, Ash Dickinson @ the Inky Fingers Minifest

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 10, 2012 at 11:05 pm

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

These are the last of the Edinburgh reviews from Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster and his stalwart reviewer Dana Bubulj. We had a great time in Edinburgh, saw some amazing spoken word artists and reviewed 35 shows. And although this means we mightn’t  have new bumper-reviews every day, we’ve got some people on the ground at the Fringe, ready to catch the things we’ve missed (although, still no competitive crop dusting).

If you haven’t checked out the previous reviews then you can find them here: Day 1,Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 part 1, Day 4 part 2, Day 5, Day 6 part 1, Day 6 part 2, Day 7 part 1.

Evie and the Perfect Cupcake

Tina Sederholm’s vision of an alternate reality, the ‘Calorie Galaxy’, where the world is ruled by ‘The Thinners’ and weight is obsessively monitored and obsessed over, is a near flawless depiction of a world that is all-too familiar.

As mentioned in the review of the preview, the world-building is creative and gorgeous, full of clever devices and inventive ideas (the ‘warlocks of extreme pastry’ who create desserts to be admired as art and never eaten are my favourite) that highlight the way the damaging food-dystopia of the ‘Calorie Galaxy’.

What had changed from the previous review was that the show was far more smoothly performed and had been cut, stitched and streamlined (now coming in at a very manageable 45 mins) and this more focused performance made for a stronger show. And while there were still moments that were judgemental of the deliberately flawed characters, they came across as brainwashed mouthpieces for the ‘Thinners’ (rather than 2-dimensional straw men/women), which made for a better and more coherent show. I warn you though: it still carries a trigger warning for anyone sensitive to the subject of weight/calorie-counting or casual rape jokes.

The show’s message about the damage of societal obsession with weight and size instead of health came across strongly, with Tina’s language fluctuating from luscious to fragile and perceptive, it made for a heady mixture and a very powerful show.

Star Rating: 4/5

Evie and the Perfect Cupcake was on at 5pm at The Banshee Labyrinth and the last show was on the 9th August. If you can see this show in another venue in the future we heartily recommend it.

 

The Girl with no Heart

The Girl With No Heart, from Sparkle and Dark’s Travelling Players, combines live action with puppetry to create a heartbreaking story of a paper world ravaged by war where children’s hearts power nuclear blasts as they are torn in two. The puppet characters were stunning, and they were moved and spoke very expressively. The idea of the paper-hearts, which the children kept on their person but hidden, say on their sleeve, was reminiscent of Pullman’s daemons, particularly in the energy from their violent severing.

World building is introduced through the eyes of our protagonist, an ingénue from a parallel Eden-like world. As such, her wide-eyed wonder at the bleakness of war and its fallout made for a played-out dynamic, but it was rescued by the use of story-telling as a mechanic for escapism and as a way to properly compare the ‘reality’ of the ash-world with her own. There is a great use of origami cranes, both as a means of transport and potential escape and their relation to the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima.

It is a powerful and enjoyable play, but make sure you get a view of the front of the stage, because much of the story-telling is set there, and it is easy to miss a lot of detail.

 Star Rating: 4/5

The Girl with no Heart is on at 5pm at Bedlam Theatre, from 9th-25th August (not 13th)

 

Ash Dickinson @ the Inky Fingers Minifest

The Inky Fingers Minifest is running alongside the Fringe festival in Edinburgh until tomorrow (the 11th) with a plethora of interesting literary and performance events. On Tuesday Sabotage saw multi-slam winner Ash Dickinson, supported by Graeme Hawley, at Pulp Fiction Books.

Graeme Hawley gave a thoughtful and occasionally angry set; ‘Ambition’ explored his fascination with the people who place 6th or 7th and was a sweet tale on those athletes who train as hard, but don’t win, whose ‘fireworks went off in daylight’, ‘Additives’ was a brilliantly phrased poem using mayonnaise as a metaphor for all the things we mess things up and try to fix (instead of not messing up), and ‘Mosaic’ was an ace piece railing against debt culture, accompanied by an actual mosaic made of chopped up credit cards. That said, I feel with a better performance and more interesting language, he could be even better.

Ash himself (runner-up of the UK All-Star competition) performed an entertaining set filled with short punchy comedy pieces, including some great haikus, while his poem on ‘Shoes’ explored one of the few areas where men suffer more than women: lack of interesting clothes (though he may have overlooked the fact that heels can be somewhat painful). He does redress the balance with a nice, if simplistic, piece on women’s magazines, expressing a simple message of confidence and inner beauty that wasn’t too preachy.

A few of his other pieces were also a little simplistic, such as the funny ‘The Boy Who Ate Only Butter’ or the well put, but slightly prosaic ‘Status Update’. It’s not that that’s inherently bad, it just seems like he could have done more with them.

Where he excelled were his more speculative pieces, ‘Daytrip From Your Heart’ was a brilliantly realised journey through a loved one’s body, taking it in as if it were a tourist attraction, with an amusingly downbeat ending. And his poem on doing a life swap with the ocean was phenomenally imagined, with some lovely lilting language, great comedy and a brilliantly wistful ending.

Star Rating: 3/5

Inky Fingers’ Minifest continues tomorrow with guerrilla street performance at 2.30pm at a surprise location, then Poetry Polaroids (a great project of collaborative poetry artwork) at 6.30pm and the closing party at 8pm, both at Pulp Fiction Books.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 7 (07/08/12) part 1: Oddlie, Charlie Dupré Presents the Tales of Shakey P, Perle, Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 10, 2012 at 10:51 pm

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

These are the last of the Edinburgh reviews from Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster and his stalwart reviewer Dana Bubulj. We had a great time in Edinburgh, saw some amazing spoken word artists and reviewed 35 shows. And although this means we mightn’t  have new bumper-reviews every day, we’ve got some people on the ground at the Fringe, ready to catch the things we’ve missed (although, still no competitive crop dusting).

If you haven’t checked out the previous reviews then you can find them here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4 part 1, Day 4 part 2, Day 5, Day 6 part 1, Day 6 part 2.

Oddlie

From Bag of Beans Productions, this was a stunning piece of one woman (with occasional instrumentation as background) spoken word/poetry/theatre, narrated, sung and performed by Aleshea Harris. Set in a “city of garbage heaps”, we follow a quiet girl grown up an outsider compelled by seeing some particularly great oration in the town centre very reminiscent of the civil rights rhetoric to find her own voice/magic. She does this with the help of another outcast, Sasha, an old woman suffering from the “disappearing disease” (an AIDS analogy) who used to be a Griot herself (“I was a tsarina of rhyme, a princess of powerful plosives”). The characters are compelling, with fantastic and distinct voices and mannerisms and the acting is brilliant, not to mention a wonderfully lyrical script.

It had some fantastic commentary on the process of finding a poetic voice, a process not for the faint-hearted, and the cathartic finding of expression that evolves from finding the “imperative” in life (rather than the simply “important”), writing and performing as separate steps does not make this piece a simple poetry version of training montage: it does not come easily, and the resolutions are painful but right and beautiful. The characters served as good contrasts to each other, particularly as the play progresses. Oddlie’s final soliloquy is a thing of beauty, dedicated to life, to poetry and to her friend that mustn’t be missed.

Star Rating: 5/5

Oddlie is on at 11.45 at Venue 13 from 9-18th August (not 13th). GO SEE IT.  

Charlie Dupré Presents: The Stories of Shakey P

Rap is just a form of poetry, right?

Well, yeah, but there’s often reluctance on both sides of the Spoken Word/Hip-Hop divide who see poetry as stuffy or who look down on rap as ‘not proper art’, so it’s refreshing to hear Charlie Dupré point out the similarities between the forms (highlighting the similarity between 5-beat bars in rap and iambic pentameter) in this rap-infused poetic history lesson.

Dupré’s lyrically inventive re-imaginings of Shakespearean plays (and one Marlowe play) are really well done; his spitfire rhymes and rhythms make the theatre of the pieces come alive and give them a modern relevance. He teases out parallels between the subject matter of ‘Shakey P’ and modern hip-hop with a light touch, especially effective in his take on Othello (covering Eminem’s ‘Stan’), the classic tale of obsession, rivalry and sexual jealousy transferring very well to a hip-hop context.

There are some dips though: his takes on Much Ado and Macbeth are still good fun, but compared to his other pieces come across as a little prosaic, mainly just recounting the plot, albeit with excellent lyrics and interesting framing devices (Much Ado is done as a wedding speech, while Macbeth recalls all the decisions that led to his death in a clever take on causality).

But the rest of his material really lifts the show, from the amazing rap-battle between Shakespeare and Marlowe that is incredibly effective and hilarious in the way it recreates them as rival school MC’s, with amazing Shakespearean insults and theatre jokes (‘hate to break it to you mate, but no-one really rates The Jew of Malta), to his awe-inspiring take on Hamlet (where Hamlet’s madness is personified in an aggressive and cocky rapper-style voice, pouring lyrical fire into Hamlet’s ear), the show breathes life into these timeless tales.

Star Rating: 4/5

Charlie Dupré presents: The Stories of Shakey P is on at 12.30pm at The Banshee Labyrinth, 4th-25th August

 

Perle

Dancing Brick’s ‘live comic book’ was part mime, part play, part comic book, part interactive theatre and a truly touching tale of loss and grief. Myself, I think of it as an ‘Unspoken Word’ show.

A slightly oblique take on the medieval poem of the same name by the Gawain Poet, the tale was told entirely by a silent character using narration, sound and cartoon from chunkily retro television set to tell his fractured narrative. He uses some really inventive and well timed physicality, hands disappearing behind the TV to be shown on screen, and an incredibly fun scene where he makes a sandwich on the screen.

He also used effective written instruction to lure the audience onstage, using them as characters in the narrative, and even converses with an audience member using dialogue on the screen (hilariously mismatched).

This funny and forlorn show may not be for everyone, the oddball silent character and disparate narrative could put a few off, but the audience on the day found it enchanting and heartbreaking and I couldn’t agree more.

Star Rating: 5/5

Perle is on at 1.45 at the Assembly Roxy, 2nd-25th August (not the 13th)

 

Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word Cabaret

Today’s Other Voices had:

Fay Roberts in her absolute element with a gorgeously sensuous poem to a mermaid lover, for whom she’d “turn sailor”. It had some lovely imagery, such as casting nets to “catch the moonlight” and the rhythm of the sea that throws itself again and again; this was a delight. Her later poem ‘Thanatos and Eros’ was a fabulous short lesson in the difficulties of various insults to carve into a car in runes and her last, ‘Dedication’, on struggling with queer stereotypes and finding her “own colours” was a nice way to address lesbian culture.

Sarah Thomasin had a great take on David Starkey’s racist comments on the riots with ‘Mind Your Language’, with some nice commentary on the evolution of spoken word (“language RIP as we RP”). ‘Going Nowhere’ was another nice take on community dialect (cab drivers using transport metaphors) that sadly fell for easy jokes (“friends all had ride [on bus/girlfriend]“). Her ‘Stand off at Cashpoint’, with yells of “Withdraw!” was a cute modern Western. ‘Normal’ was another similarly simplistic subversion: where the dysfunctional families were not as “strange” as families where people could be trusted. She ended on a battle rap response to defend her fondness for poetic structure, in a witty reminder that raps are forms too, despite people’s aversion to learning at school as it wasn’t cool.

Alison Brumfitt had some comic poems that could have been a bit more fluid. She had an exuberantly filthy take on chocolate vs sex (where she’d “rather have a shag”) and a serious point on the absurdity of sex-ed classes both coming too late and with no focus on mental health, coupled with the useless analogy of condoms on brooms (whose constant rigidity make poor stand-ins). Unfortunately, the point of emotional wellbeing/healthy relationships was lost in the advice on having “shagged a nutter” (sigh). Her other poem had the strongest content, although was a bit stumbly. It took on gender stereotypes and their use solely as creating insecurity and thus markets for advertisers, calling on us to truly own our own body.

Mika Coco argued that any music/poetry was effective (be it “Dylan or Bieber”) if it reached people and elicited emotions. That said, his introduction was somewhat offensive (and against the event’s raison-d’etre) and as such, didn’t endear himself to me (or the audience).

Chella Quint finished the night with a Sesame Street style sex ed song on menstruation, with a trip through the cycle that included “they float on your vagina on a RIVER OF BLOOD” in the chorus. Just a bit cheering.

And some familiar voices:

For the occasion, Harry Baker performed his Man Poem on traditional masculinity and James Webster‘s somewhat primal love story ‘Long Ago’ suited the catacomb venue. Lucy Ayrton‘s ‘Fuck You Corporate Land’ was appropriately full of repressed frustration, ‘Al is not really a Vegetarian’ was sad about nice mackerel being dead and Tarquin (from her show) is still a great set piece.

Performers Star Rating: 3/5 for a mixed bag, but certainly a fun event.

Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word Cabaret is on at 2.50pm at the Banshee Labyrinth from 9th-25th August (not Wednesdays)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 6 part 2 (06/08/12): Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart, Flea Circus Open Slam

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 8, 2012 at 6:53 pm

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

This week Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster, and contrary reviewer Dana Bubulj, are up in Edinburgh taking in the Fringe Festival. While they’re there, they are trying to review as much Spoken Word as they possibly can, as well as a few other things that catch their eye (and fall vaguely within our purview, e.g. stand-up-orienteering)

Midsummer Night’s Dream

This Drunk Tank production set the play in a Post-apocalypse, where the characters come from Athens Bunker and music, clothing and technology seems to have stagnated in the Forties. This as a concept drew us in, and it’s a shame that a lot of its potential was wasted.

Titania’s rendition of ‘Summertime’ was delightfully decadent and the old-style film-competition of the Mechanicals was a nice nod to the era, but the setting wasn’t fully utilised. Oberon’s court were decked as soldiers, using sleep gas at the end, and the ‘lover’s remedy’ was clearly radioactive, but more could have been done to incorporate the theme.

The acting was great and the direction showed some deft touches, really managing to hit all the humour of the play; Helena in particular was fantastic. The Jazz Age wasted fairies of Titania’s court were also a nice take on the otherworldliness of Faerie, and the truculence of Puck was hilarious. As such, it was great fun, if missing some tricks.

Star Rating: 3/5

Midsummer Night’s Dream is on at 5.45 at Paradise in St Augustine’s from 4th-27th Aug (not 13th or 20th)

Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart

Richard Tyrone Jones has been a driving force behind the burgeoning Spoken Word scene at the Fringe this year, and his own offering chronicles his problems with heart failure. From the unexpected beginnings just after his 30th birthday to his near-death experience (spoiler: he didn’t die), the show gives us all the fascinating (and sometimes disgusting) details.

And it is fascinating. The show is like a ventricle clogged with interesting facts and gobbets of medical information and NHS anecdotes (some flattering, some not). You come away with a much enlightened view of how the heart works (or more specifically, doesn’t work) and possibly a sudden sense of paranoia at how badly and suddenly your body can go wrong (encouraged by RTJ’s song detailing all the genetic problems you could inherit, to the tune of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, which is very well done).

There’s not a lot of poetry in the show, but what there is, is well done and Jones’s prose-poem style means some of the poetry goes unnoticed, but certainly enriches the show. And Richard’s illness, hospitalisation and eventual slow recovery is a powerful and inspiring narrative, with a great structure. The show’s use of whimsical drawings that are projected over Jones, creating characters and sets is also really well used and draw the audience into the action.

There’s a lot of black comedy, which may not be to everyone’s taste, and some gross-out humour (that wasn’t really to mine), but it’s well done and fits the show, which ends of a touching piece appreciating life and a final tribute to those with heart problems who won’t recover.

Star Rating: 4/5

Richard Tyrone Jones’s Big Heart is on at 6pm at the Banshee Labyrinth, 4th-25th Aug (Not 13th or 19th)

Flea Circus Open Slam

This night’s slam had good mix of subjects, each allowed 5min with some grace period and called-out scores that often leaves scores higher than needed.

Winning poets (and feature):

The highlight of the night was Katherine McMahon (whose chapbook will soon be reviewed on Sabotage) with a lovely poem about a good break-up turning to friendship. It had some lovely imagery, particularly feelings that “filigreed our veins with time”. With a score of 28, she goes through to the final on 14th August.

Fay Roberts’ ‘Credit where it’s Due’ had a nice thread of money as a debilitating addiction, with a cry to arms against banks full of “electronic mockeries of life”. It was quite quiet, however, and a little stumbly. (27.1)

Harry Giles‘ jazzy Love Poem was also good, with a nice use of rhythm matching frantic feelings and compulsion that only briefly became indistinct. (27)

Feature Jack Heal performed ‘The Relationship’, an origin story of his show’s character (Murderthon reviewed here). It was a bawdy story replete with relentless puns (“she was shrieking like a virgin or some other Madonna song”) that went down well.

Others:

James Webster’s ‘What are you thinking’ (reviewed often) had a nice touch of updating its political content to be more topical, and Lucy Ayrton’s ‘I don’t hate men, I just hate you’ was a fantastic put-down to dismissive men with “big, hard, throbbing degrees in economics”. David Duff’s school disco piece was sweet, with conversation mishaps and first kisses. Least favourite had to be Alec Beattie’s played for laugh poem about squirrels raping pigeons (sigh).

Performance Star Rating: 3/5 (a nice enough mixed bag)
The Night: 4/5 (less formal than most slams and slickly hosted; chaotic fun)

Flea Circus Open Slam is on in the Banshee Labyrinth at 7.30 from 4-14th August.

, , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 6 part 1 (06/08/12): Harry Baker: Proper Pop-up Purple Paper People, Letter to the Man (from the Boy), The Man Who

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 8, 2012 at 6:31 pm

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

This week Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster, and contrary reviewer Dana Bubulj, are up in Edinburgh taking in the Fringe Festival. While they’re there, they are trying to review as much Spoken Word as they possibly can, as well as a few other things that catch their eye (and fall vaguely within our purview, e.g. stand-up-orienteering)

Harry Baker: Proper Pop-up Purple Paper People

This show was effectively an account of Harry Baker (UK Slam Champion, International Slam Champion) in his first year at Uni in Bristol. There were a fair amount of familiar stories about awkward first conversations and strange experiences with societies (his piece on going to a Pole Dancing Society taster is appropriately awkward), but all with Baker’s off-beat personality stamped all over them.

He had a good mix of poetry, including some that were purest fun frivolity, messing mischievously with language; like the German presentation he did in rap form (in both German and English) with a minor striptease involved, or his ridiculously silly haiku-one-liners that garnered equal numbers of laughs and groans from the audience. His univocalism (using only one vowel, namely ‘u’) was also fun, but while these pieces entertained with excellent comedy manner and physicality, it’s when he has a little more to say that Harry really shines.

He’s perhaps at his best when mixing his intricate rap-style rhymes and tongue-bending delivery with a mixture of comedy and commentary. An old favourite ‘I am a Man’ has some funny lines (‘real men cry, that’s why they make man-sized tissues for man-sized eyes’) and also explores the concept of what masculinity means to our generation of giant man-children, while also touching on acts of amazing bravery (like Jordan Rice who gave his life to save his brother). And his poem about being the only guy at Pole-soc (to impress a girl) really captures youthful social awkwardness and also has some interesting (if light) commentary on gender roles.

But he’s at his very brilliantly world-beating (literally, this poem won him the international slam) lyrical and comic best with his penultimate piece, the eponymous ‘Proper Pop-up Purple Paper People’. It’s full of killer wordplay, insightful allegorical political commentary (with the idea of ‘paper cuts’ and ‘origami armies’) and ends with a powerful and blissfully hopeful message ‘people have the potential to be powerful’. This poem alone lifts this to a 4-star show.

Star Rating: 4/5

Harry Baker: Proper Pop-up Purple Paper People is on at 12.00pm at the Royal Oak, 6th-24th August (no Sundays).

Letters to the Man (from the Boy)

Henry Raby’s show is a thoughtful and intelligent concept, skilfully executed, asking questions of his own life and the lives and experiences of his audience with warm audience interaction, making for an ice-cool show.

It takes the form of a letter that Raby is writing to his future self, reminiscing on his life so far, reminding his future self of past victories and failures, and asking questions about the man he has become. But where the show really succeeds is in the way he also encourages the audience to write their future selves a letter, using fun randomised prompts from the ‘mystery box’ and encouraging the audience to share their answers. The result is a lovely atmosphere of shared confidences and mutual trust between Henry and his audience: after all, he’s sharing so much with us that it seems only fair for us to share a little with him. He also cleverly uses audience comments as links to his next letter or poem, which was a very nice touch.

The letter itself has some choice lines and interesting nostalgic wisdom (‘don’t listen to any advice that doesn’t come from Yoda’), while his poems are fun and accessible; his poem on children’s TV shows taking over his childhood world nicely highlights the slightly twisted weirdness of some of those shows and elicits lots of laughs from those who get the references (as a child of the 80’s I found it hilarious); his piece on adolescent house parties is appropriately chaotic and full of youthful bravado; and his poem on leaving town to go to Uni was quite touching.

The only flaw is that the poetry, while good, is often almost too accessible, lacking the entertaining artifice that can lift a poem and make it great, but the accessible style blends very well with the show’s format and informal interactive style, which makes the show such a nostalgic and involving joy.

Star Rating: 4/5

Letter to the Man (from the Boy) is on at 1.10pm at the Underbelly, 2nd-26th (not the 13th)

The Man Who

This was a fun and well written piece of theatre about romantic and professional rivalry between two of the first inventors. While the love triangle and the idea of the first wheel were fairly standard, what it excelled in was an interesting take on the importance of roles and names, and if they can be interchangeable. The three characters all have name changes: The Younger Man becomes The Man Who Invented the Wheel and then Brendan, The Man becomes The New Man Who Invented the Wheel and The Woman becomes, um, Matthew (in a slightly obvious joke).

Perhaps a comparison to ‘The Man Who Sold the World‘ is apt: much of the tale deals with the consequences of fame and fortune weighed against Love itself and the balance shifts throughout the play as The Woman alternates between the two men, preoccupied with ideas of settling on “having a The Baby”. As such, some of the potential of playful semiotics is lost, to the show’s detriment. It was an enjoyable, if ultimately played-out story.

Star Rating: 3/5

The Man Who was on at 2.55 from 2-6th August at the Underbelly.

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 5 (05/08/12): Jack and Nikki: Killing Machines, Love in the Key of Britpop, Once Upon a Time in Space, Alternative Sex Education and Jack Heal: Murderthon

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 8, 2012 at 2:01 am

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

Last week we reviewed a selection of Edinburgh Previews from Tea Fuelled Arts. We enjoyed them so much that this week Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster, and trusty reviewer Dana Bubulj, are up in Edinburgh taking in the Fringe Festival. While they’re there, they are trying to review as much Spoken Word as they possibly can, as well as a few other things that catch their eye (and fall vaguely within our purview, e.g. no tax evasion acrobatics)

Jack and Nikki: Killing Machines

We’ve reviewed this show already at preview stage, and it seems that it’s come on in leaps and bounds since then (in a relatively short time). This comedy double act is very sleek, smooth and confidently performed; Jack proving an effectively funny ‘straight man’ to Nikki’s well rendered off-the-wall-osity.

The conceit that the whole thing’s a business presentation for a new contract killing start-up is well put together, with lots of ridiculous business jargon, a terrible jingle on the glockenspiel and a hilariously bad logo. And the transferable skills they have accrued in their various dead-end jobs are both funny (a high score on Modern Warfare proves marksmanship), and capture the truth-bending reality of presentations and job interviews.

Some highlights are the dance number, some fun audience interaction and a really awkwardly funny (and somewhat sad) video of the two proving their assassination skills (on a cat), while the finale provides a great payoff and is surprisingly sweet.

Some of the humour aims for awkwardly funny, but just hits awkward, and some jokes are repeated to the point they’re not amusingly self-referencing, but just a bit tired. While the portrayal of Nikki as a mentally unstable woman who just wants love (and killing) may make some uncomfortable, and the show still flags a little before the end, the strength of the pair’s comic timing, sense of character, and strong absurdly silly writing carry off an intensely enjoyable hour.

Star Rating: 3/5 (but if it keeps improving at this rate, who knows?)

Jack and Nikki: Killing Machines is on at 12.05pm at The Voodoo Rooms, 4th-14th August, FREE

 

Love in the Key of Britpop

Emily Andersen’s tale of anglophilia, Britpop and doomed transcontinental love has some lovely lines and is slickly performed, but fails to engage either the audience or its themes in any depth.

Telling the story of a relationship formed quickly and intensely in Melbourne between the narrator and a British lad over on a tourist visa, the two decide ‘after the second beer that from now on [their] fates bleed together’ and so their relationship begins (in the best part of the show) amidst boozed-up hopes and Britpop idols.

The problem is this: the continued description of their misadventures, drunken bohemian antics and markedly and too-deliberately-quirky lifestyles go on too long and are too repetitive. There’s also a definite feeling that Andersen could have done more with her themes: for a poem so heavily invested in a certain kind of music, the feel of said music, its rhythms, atmosphere and quirks feel noticeably absent. There are lots of references to bands and some quoted lyrics, but she barely even attempts to capture the spirit and ridiculous joy of Britpop, and as such the poem has to rely on the ups and downs of a fairly standard-sounding relationship for its limited entertainment.

With a more animated performance, more of her occasionally superbly imaginative phraseology and more engagement with its own themes, this could have been a really good piece. Instead it’s just ok.

Star Rating: 2/5

Love in the Key of Britpop is on at 3.10pm at Fingers Piano Bar, 4th-26th August (no Mondays), FREE

 

Once Upon a Time (in Space)

Performed by The Mechanisms, a character-band of lovable space-pirate-misfit-immortals mixing steam and cyberpunk, this dark and twisted take on familiar fairytales was performed through rocked-up folk songs with jovial energy and bone-rattling showmanship.

Throwing King Cole, Snow White, Rose Red, Cinderella and a host of other recognisable fairytales into space, they recreate their narratives into an epic space opera through story and song, where there are ‘no happy endings’. This is hard-hitting and emotional storytelling, with phenomenal world-building on a grand scale, all reported by the immortal crew of the Aurora, who watch the unfolding war with morbid glee (and inject the show with its few moments of comedy).

While the crew of the Aurora are a little too resonant of the cast of Firefly (in costume, irreverence and plot), and this kind of fairytale reimagining has been done many times before, the sheer rip-roaring fun that The Mechanisms bring to it, and the grimly epic war-torn worlds they create, make for an entertaining hour of bloody dictators, plucky doomed rebels and doomed love.

Star Rating: 4/5

Once Upon a Time (in Space) is on at 5.30pm at Whynot?, 4th-25th August (no Tuesdays), FREE

 

Alternative Sex Education

Lashings of Ginger Beer Time, if you didn’t know, are a queer feminist burlesque troupe. In this, their latest show, they tackle the importance of good sex education, and the potential damage bad or nonexistent sex ed can do, with a mixture of hilarious sketches, songs and stand-up.

Some highlights are the sketch on female role models in pop culture (pointing out the successes and failings in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars amongst others), a Twilight themed version of Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ and a brilliant and educational ‘kink scouts’ skit. Plus Sally Outen’s stand-up on the distribution of snails by ‘overzealous gender warriors’ was hilarious. The show’s genuinely full of clever parody and funny lines.

There are some issues though, mainly with the show’s format and structure; it’s set up as a lesson in alternative sex education, but the show’s more pop-culture material isn’t as clearly linked into this mission statement as it could be. While a later tribute to young queer people makes it clear why inclusive and liberal sex ed and positive cultural role models are so vital, it comes a little too late to make all the material make sense.

There are also a few weaker numbers, some songs that aren’t as inspired (such as the opening ‘2012’ set to ‘America’ from Westside Story) and a couple of songs that were a little out of time or off-key.

But overall it’s a very good, very funny, and well-performed show that provides a real queer and kinky education and the information and message that it conveys make this a fundamentally important show if our society’s going to continue to progress.

Star Rating: 3/5 

Alternative Sex Education is on at 8.30pm at The Bongo Club, 3rd-17th August.

 

Jack Heal: Murderthon

Former Student Comedian of the Year (2008) Jack Heal’s show is a kind of stand-up storytelling, full of intricately written jokes and plays on language, amusing mime, and some groaningly good puns.

Presented as a kind of ‘found’ show, it revolves around a diary that Jack supposedly found on the train to Edinburgh and suddenly finds himself in. The plot is appropriately meta, with lots of nods to the diary’s written format, gags about storytelling, and the collision of fiction and reality. The jokes come fast and, well, not furious, but impressively ridiculously, and Jack has a very practiced and accessible manner that helps keep the audience engaged at all times.

Heal seems to have made the more confusing aspects of the plot more clear, and also made an effort to make the female characters less of a punch line than in previous incarnations of the show (but there are still several jokes about prostitutes and loose women).

It’s very strong, very clever, and I really liked the way the final twist was worked into the show throughout (and even made it into his request for donations).

The ending could have been a little bolder and more defined, but that doesn’t really detract from this superbly funny tale of meta-theatrical-murder.

Star Rating: 4/5

Jack Heal: Murderthon is on at 9.50pm, at the Banshee Labyrinth, 4th-14th August, FREE.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 4, part 2: They Came With Outer Script, Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word and Flea Circus Open Slam

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 5, 2012 at 8:15 pm

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

Last week we reviewed a selection of Edinburgh Previews. We enjoyed them so much that this week Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster, and curmudgeonly reviewer Dana Bubulj, are up in Edinburgh taking in the Fringe Festival. While they’re there, they are trying to review as much Spoken Word as they possibly can, as well as a few other things that catch their eye (and fall vaguely within our purview, e.g. no all-body yodelling)

They Came With Outer Script

This improv show from Asterix Theatre was full of amused giggles, ridiculous guffaws and the occasional big belly laugh. Performing an improvised B Movie they used audience suggestion, amusingly daft sound effects and a small child’s balloons to craft a suitably silly story about firefighters, arson and princesses.

While some of the improv was shaky, and the performers definitely could have been more confident and quicker on their feet, they had enough imaginative improvising to tease a lot of comedy out of the ideas. If they’d been a bit more vocally assertive, stumbled a bit less and the ‘director’ had controlled the proceedings with a bit more incisiveness it could’ve been great. But their enthusiasm and self-referential humour means it’s still a lot of fun.

Star Rating: 3/5

The Came With Outer Script is on at 1.05pm at Laughing Horse @ The Free Sisters, 3rd-11th August.

 

Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word

The brainchild of Fay Roberts, organiser of Cambridge’s Hammer & Tongue chapter, the point of Other Voices is to showcase the voices that are seldom represented in the Spoken Word genre. It was really cool to be a gig where the female performers outnumbered the middle class white men, and the format of 2 guest poets (Lucy Ayrton and Ruth E Dixon), open mic and then a feature poet (Mark Grist), all with Fay’s smooth hosting and some of her delectable poetry.

Fay’s jazzy beat-style opening was a lovely lyrical slice of nostalgia, while her ‘I Want More’ is a right-on indictment of how women’s magazines attempt to dictate appearance and lifestyle (‘I’d rather buy drums than a chemical peel’), with nice nods to anti-consumerism and exploring the idea of media using such magazines as a smokescreen to distract from other issues. Her final piece, using audience clapping in a 4/4 beat, was also ace, as Fay hit the beats with staccato lyricism, crafting an electric poem of streets and crowds.

Lucy Ayrton performed ‘I Want Never Gets’, following an ever-climbing progression of the lessons we learn growing up as we realise the world gets ever more unfair (‘and then I learned the law, so I didn’t need to tell right from wrong any more’), and summarising the ways in which she wants more from the world, covering a variety of issues insightfully and amusingly. While ‘Missing You’ was a sweet and clever little poem with some lovely lines (‘I can craft a text message with the love of a jeweller’) and her poem ‘The Nightingale’ is a haunting and powerful story of ‘the sweetest affair’ between a lady and a knight, complete with her silky singing voice. Lucy’s show Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry is also on at the Banshee Labyrinth until the 14th (reviewed here).

Ruth E Dixon had some amusing poems on her children, ‘School Hour’s Breakdown’ was very funny with some great lines (‘Look at me, I’ve done a wee on the kitchen floor! Look at me, I’m three!’). She introduced her final poem by wondering why lots of her colleagues think she’s a feminist and after the poem I honestly wasn’t sure myself. ‘A Weather Girl’s Got to Have Tits’ was a sad piece of objectification, the playful tone and language of which (‘with the help of her rack, this cold spell’s less cack’) couldn’t make up for the way it reduced women to their bodily parts. It felt like something out of a Lad’s Mag and didn’t sit with the event’s mission statement at all.

Open Mic

There was only one open mic’er on the day, and that was Alec, who did an entertaining poem about bus banners arguing about religion, and Edinburgh’s new tram arriving to be hailed as a saviour.

Feature

Mark Grist (whose solo show Rogue Teacher we have already reviewed and is well worth seeing) gave a really entertaining set, his grubby love poem to the city of Peterborough (‘enjoy romantic nights out at the dog track’) is a lot of fun, with his affectionate vision of a town that may not be amazing, but is clearly his. His piece on upper-class condescending attitudes towards teaching is also a great piece, a big screw you to people who believe the idea of Broken Britain, and also an inspiring take on the effort teaching takes, but the important changes it can make. An amazingly sleazy and grimy sounding character piece followed, on male attitudes towards girls in clubs, and it was so effective I felt the need to shower afterwards, while his final poem ‘A Girl Who Reads’ is one that I have some problems with, but it’s still very well performed and a great tonic to Dixon’s earlier sexism.

For this style of show it seems unfair to judge just by the performers of the day, so we’re giving two scores: one for the show’s format and mission, the other for the day’s performers.

Performers’ Star Rating: 3/5 (Ruth E Dixon dragged it way down)

Show Star Rating: 4/5 (really well executed show with an admirable mission statement and FREE SWEETS)

Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word is on at 2.50pm at the Banshee Labyrinth 4th-25th August (not Wednesdays), FREE

 

Flea Circus Open Slam

Another Tea Fuelled Art creation, this event was fun and fast-paced, embracing the slam format with gusto.

Lucy Ayrton popped up again (fresh from Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry) and hosted with slightly flustered efficiency, handling the audience with practiced charm. She also acted as ‘sacrificial poet’, and her ‘I Don’t Hate Men, Just You’ was a tongue-trippingly amusing and perceptive defence of feminism.

The Slam

Kevin Acott’s poems had nice lines (‘cherry breath of encouragement’) but he wasn’t practiced enough and his two pieces (one on fancying a riding instructor, the other on a ponderous park walk) were a little overlong and lacked focus. Score: 14

Robert Alcott’s piece the Spanish occupy movement (15th of May) was a cool piece on the unglamorous reality and frustrated potential of revolution, but it felt like it never got going and a forgetful performance didn’t help. Score: 16

Hannah Elwick’s poem to a lover, continually promising to better herself was awesomely sad, her repeated ‘I promise’ providing a continued punch to each self-erasing declaration. Could’ve done with a bit more to drive the point home. Score: 19

Henry Raby is currently performing Letter to the Man from the Boy at the Underbelly. His piece reimagining a breakup as various different film genres was clever, well-performed and sadly amusing. Score: 22

Matthew West’s ‘Anametics’ was a great exercise in wordplay and language, crafting a 26-line piece, in which each line uses only words starting with that letter of the alphabet, about animals. Great performance, but felt pointless to me. Score: 23

Result: West wins by a point, but Raby goes through to the final on the 14th as West won’t be in Edinburgh.

Feature: Richard Tyrone Jones, the poetic giant who organised the entire Spoken Word section of the Fringe gave a set filled with surreal humour, occasional filth (especially his poem on Richard Dawkins’s sex life) and a poem called ‘Heartstopper’ (from his show Richard Tyrone Jones has a Big Heart) that had a dangerous frenetic energy and brilliantly painful language to it.

Performers’ Star Rating: 3/5

Show Star Rating: 4/5

The Flea Circus Open Slam is on at 7.3opm at Banshee Labyrinth, 4th-14th August, FREE!

, , , , , , , , ,

Edinburgh Reviews Day 4, part 1: Phill Jupitus: Porky the Poet in 27 Years On, Anthropoetry and Lucy Ayrton: Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry

In Festival, Performance Poetry on August 5, 2012 at 8:09 pm

 

- reviewed by James Webster and Dana Bubulj -

Last week we reviewed a selection of Edinburgh Previews. We enjoyed them so much that this week Sabotage’s Performance Editor James Webster, and curmudgeonly reviewer Dana Bubulj, are up in Edinburgh taking in the Fringe Festival. While they’re there, they are trying to review as much Spoken Word as they possibly can, as well as a few other things that catch their eye (and fall vaguely within our purview, e.g. no all-body yodelling)

 

Phill Jupitus: Porky the Poet in 27 Years On

‘Why do a free show? Fuck it, it’s a recession, why not?’ is the cheerful explanation Phill Jupitus gives for his involvement in this year’s PBH Free Fringe.

You get a nice sense of Jupitus’s history in the show, he starts performing his first ever poem from memory and his twisted tale of the much-beloved characters from the Beano having grown up (‘Biffo is well into anarchy now’) was super-entertaining.

He follows this with some funny anecdotes, superbly performed, about his early work as a civil servant and trade union organiser (apparently it’s notoriously difficult to organise mothers working part-time when you’re 19), and about the week he met both Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones in adorably fanboyish fashion.

The following poem ‘He Loves You’ on McCartney was lovely in its use of Beatles references to couch the poem in sweet nostalgia, and Phil comes off as amusingly awkward and cack-handed.

While his anecdotes are funny and memorable, he thankfully gets on with the poetry soon enough, and his poems are alternately insightful, silly, and at points hilarious (especially his Blade Runner parody entitled ‘How Rutger Hauer Helped Me Lose Weight’, which caused curmudgeonly reviewer Dana Bubulj crack up). I especially enjoyed his mournful, but chaotic piece in memory of the Woods brothers, those absurd rock music legends (‘laughter is their language’).

The performance of his poems could have been better, but they were otherwise very well done, and his practiced patter and the excellent performance of his linking anecdotes more than made up for it. A great show (and free!).

Star Rating: 4/5

Phill Jupitus: Porky the Poet in 27 years on, is at The Jam House, 4pm, 4th-25th (not 13th) August

 

Anthropoetry

Ben Mellor’s new show is a “journey across human anatomy” with some slick poetry set to music and a particularly impressive political and lyrical bent on topics that (in other hands) could have been puerile. Give it a day or two and he’ll have it all off by heart, but despite occasional glances to the script when I saw it, it was a professional and enjoyable show.

He kicks off with a fantastic introduction to how versatile the body is in common expressions: he “welcomes [us] to his neck of the woods” in a gloriously confident radio voice that continues the theme wittily to draw in the audience.

His political poems are the strongest pieces: The fabulous ‘HeadState’, explores the mind’s power and disturbances with a fantastic analogy of politics, governments where centre-left and centre-right both fuck the poor, where “top-down mental structures collapse mental economy”. ‘Tax Pastiche’ for the Digestive system deals with ‘Pastygate’ and is a fantastically acerbic political broadcast in the style of a food ad, full of “saccharine additives to make [the govt] look less unsavoury”. The Mammary Glands are treated to “News in Briefs”, inspired by the somewhat amusing change of speech bubbles in recent years on Page 3 girls to spout a political standpoint (Tim Ireland discusses this at Bloggerheads), which was a nice take on sexism and objectification.

The Heart continues a political bent more subtly, set in a “utopia realised” where there’s no hunger and the energy crisis is solved; love is the only scarce commodity. With no way to reproduce it, love falls into decline, reserves bought up (“a third off hugs!”) and the character must face a world where all the love’s used up. This is powerful, however, the horrific alternative given, where “adultery ceased to be taboo”, and apathetic teens were “casually [calling] abortion clinics if late”, is massively slut-shaming; unfortunate given that the world-building would work well enough without it.

Without this focus, the work is less powerful, although still enjoyable. The weakest piece was ‘Face Look’, a palindromic cinquain, playing on the beauty of symmetry. The Diaphragm is given a rhythm of breathing through the layering of his own voice, but the built backing track & explanation of how breathing works took too long for the eventual poem and it was perhaps the least polished work. But it had some nice ideas, such the assertion that “breath remains fragile as freedom”.

Of course, we end on Genitalia, although he promises there will be more as the run continues. His poem “Naming Of Parts”, is a take on the Henry Reed poem, which shares its name with a 1992 study of genders and their respective colloquialisms: from the military-like penis-euphemisms to a new-agey place of “lady gardens”. It could perhaps have done without the female side at all, given that the play on gun-maintenance and phallic imagery was a rife enough playground (“slide rapidly, back and forwards…”) and having both sides made it unnecessarily gender essentialist.

The show is professional and well put together, with a strong sense of narrative. The set pieces are mostly excellent and the informative and humorous patter between them makes this easily a 4 star show though with minor changes could score 5. Also, it’s free, so there’s no excuse not to see it.

Star Rating: 4/5

 Ben Mellor’s Anthropoetry is on at Fingers Piano Bar at 7.50pm, 5th-17th August (no Mondays)

 

Lucy Ayrton: Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry

Previously reviewed here by Sabotage, Ayrton’s show about the power of fairytale remains an astute dissection of how the narratives that we tell children affect their expectations of the world around them, and thusly change the world we create for them.

From beginnings explaining why you might use stories to illustrate dangers (if you lived thousands of years ago you’d want to warn children about wolves, but neither telling them nor introducing them to a wolf quite do the job), she takes you on a journey that takes in the printing press, Disney and one and a half songs.

While the show has a distinctly feminist leaning, it does so in a discursive and open way that conveys her point of view without preaching, always backing her narrative up with examples and poems to illustrate her meaning.

The poems are smooth, intricate and gorgeous, with a lot of variety (and evocative backing tracks). From childhood warnings to more adult and heartbreaking dangers and superbly empowering tales (including an interactive create-your-own feminist fairytale), they made me laugh and sent shivers down my spine. My favourite on the day was her final piece that had all the power, energy and enjoyment of magic.

Star Rating: 5/5

Lucy Ayrton: Lullabies to Make Your Children Cry is on at 6.20pm, 4th-14th August, at Banshee Labyrinth and it’s FREE.

 

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,219 other followers