| “A Real Zinger – Hilarious,Unpredictable, Bounteously Charming” |
Quarterly Critical Round-up |
| Jo Fong, the Sherman, Hijinx, Volcano, The Other Room, National Theatre Wales, RWCMD , South Wales & Touring Second Quarter 2024 , July 25, 2024 |
“The Rest of Our Lives” was a success at Edinburgh and reviewed at Theatr Mwldan in autumn 2022. JO FONG and GEORGE ORANGE have since been to the Brighton Festival and, unusually, to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City by way of Epsom, Margate, Norwich, London and many other places. The Stage caught them at Battersea Arts Centre: “Jo Fong is a Wales-based, community-focused dance and performance artist; George Orange is a circus director, clown, and street and physical theatre practitioner. Together they share something like 100 years of life experience. Premiered a few years ago, this semi-participatory existential dance comedy is a real zinger – hilarious, unpredictable, bounteously charming and, although it is about ageing and mortality, utterly unpretentious and absolutely life-affirming. “The show is a double act of carefully crafted chaos. Watching it is like witnessing a midlife crisis converted into a raucous party. “...The intellectual wheels spinning behind the show are cloaked by throwaway jokes, games, a singalong, a raffle and a quiz. Most of the dancing is fuelled by a terrific, mainly vintage pop-rock playlist ranging from Donna Summer and Rage Against the Machine to Booker T and the MG’s. “And what dancing it is, too: physically daring, absurdly funny and original. Orange shifts Fong, flat as an ironing board, over and around his body. Their quasi-seductive send-up of Endless Love is a hoot. But all the laughs, flurry of activity and slapdash air of spontaneity are deceptive. Always there is the LED screen reminding or asking us, “The struggle is real... Will I be remembered?... What’s the point?” “In an eloquent moment of sobriety, set to Dido’s Lament, Fong and Orange use two chairs as both tunnel and tombstones. The balance they strike between great fun and serious underpinnings is deft and disarming.” Extract, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review in the Stage, subscribers only. * * * * The Guardian was at the Sherman Studio for “ The Women of Llanrumney”. “....a blistering full-length debut play by Azuka Oforka. Conceptually dexterous and containing four astute and fearless performances, it marks Oforka as an urgent and important voice in Welsh theatre. “While the Llanrumney sugar estate in St Mary, Jamaica, was real, the narrative of Oforka’s historical play reimagines it under the ownership of the unwed and independent Elizabeth Morgan (Nia Roberts). Housekeeper Annie and her pregnant daughter Cerys (Suzanne Packer and Keziah Joseph) are enslaved in her service, but when the sugar crop begins to fail safety becomes brutally conditional for all three. “Like a trio of Mothers Courage, patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism force them into making accommodations and although what is at stake differs for all three, self-preservation comes at almost unimaginable cost for all. Who the villains of the piece might be is never in doubt, but the play resists easy caricatures; these are characters of complexity, containing competing and contradictory imperatives even when the tone demands that they be drawn in broad hues. While Matthew Gravelle gamely performs all three male roles in three distinct accents, the three remarkable female performances are searing: whole worlds shift on single lines and sudden glances. “What is most striking about Oforka’s deft text is that it seems to contain two plays, both performed simultaneously. The first is tonally akin to a farce, of powdered wigs, society gossip and elaborate breakfasts, reinforced by Stella-Jane Odoemelam’s single dining room set where the stage action mostly consists of setting and clearing tables. “But the second play is a more urgent drama, played out sometimes in subtext only, through self-effacing stillness and downcast gazes, where women seem to literally disappear into the walls. Patricia Logue’s incisive direction seems to suspend both worlds within a single room, but when the rupture inevitably comes it is shocking in its grotesqueness.” Extract, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review which can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/may/23/the-women-of-llanrumney-review-blistering-dissection-of-slavery-as-the-sugar-crop-fails * * * * NATIONAL THEATRE WALES continued with ten members of staff but without any theatre in the quarter or future programme of any theatre. The one activity in the quarter was billed as: “We’re looking to connect with four artists and/or groups to take part in a £2,000 seed commission for a 2-week residency and scratch night performance.” Wales is not large but Chepstow to Aberdaron still contains a lot of potential applicants. Nearly all were excluded as the invitation had a restriction. The word “National” is the company name and mission. Instead: “This opportunity is only open to artists and groups based in Cardiff.” * * * * HIJINX presented its Unity Festival over five days in Cardiff with satellite programmes in Bangor and Llanelli. The programme of events took place in and around the Wales Millennium Centre and included pop-up street performances, music, comedy and drag. Other events took place in the Weston Studio. Unity Expanded comprised exhibition of works by disabled artists and creators working in immersive technology: Notes On Blindness, Turbulence: Jamais Vu, Drop in the Ocean and Critical Distance. * * * * VOLCANO THEATRE held a season “The Shape of Things to Come 2024.” It included “Nythu” by and with Elin Phillips from her experience as a new mother and primary carer. “SANC” was by Akeim Toussaint Buck, an interdisciplinary performer and maker, born in Jamaica, raised in England, a graduate in 2014 of The Northern School of Contemporary Dance. * * * * THE OTHER ROOM returned and the Stage was in Bridgend for “Dumpy Biscuit.” “With The Other Room temporarily homeless, the company is taking its plays out on the road until it finds a new Cardiff base. This one, by first-time writer Holly Carpenter, directed by Samantha Alice Jones, is chiselled out of Port Talbot concrete. So the choice to stage a three-week run at the steel town’s gloriously refurbished New Plaza is apt. “...Port Talbot is an agreeable mid-sized town, hemmed in-between the blazing chimneys of the steelworks (to which it has been beholden for employment) and the great pillared wall of the M4 that cuts through its streets. Director Jones conveys this claustrophobia with each scene played in tight spaces, drunken conversations punctuated by dreamlike bursts of pounding, hypnotic dance communicating the friends’ unspoken frustrations. The audience is consumed by Millie Lamkin’s superb four-walled set the moment they enter, all graffitied concrete and exposed brick; we are simultaneously embraced and trapped. “...The narrative occasionally wavers in what sometimes falls into a series of vignettes, each well-written and performed, like workshopped scenes that play like a high-end BBC3 dramedy. The main arc fizzles before being picked up in a moving denouement. “Dumpy Biscuit’s biggest asset is its cast – Anna-Sophia Tutton, Georgia Warlow and Jalisa Phoenix-Roberts, alongside Carpenter, make up as tight a quartet as one could imagine. They are all newcomers, all local, all the embodiment of the Port Talbot spirit, brushing off whatever life throws at them and grasping every opportunity for a good time (a cocaine-and-shots fest at a wake at which they accidentally find themselves is a highlight). There is tenderness, too, as they wrestle with sexuality, jealousy and overwhelming crossroads decisions. The four terrific actors’ chemistry shines through triumphantly.” Extract, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the full review in the Stage, subscribers only. * * * * The RWCMD was subject of discussion on the floor of the Senedd, Rhianon Passmore MS raising a question to the Cabinet Secretary for Culture. The business of the Senedd for Wednesday 18 September includes a debate on Petition P-06-1455 “Protect the junior departments of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama from closure.” The closure was subject of a 989 word article by LISA PARRY entitled “Something is rotten in the state of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.” In essence: “In May, the families of nearly 400 children received a sudden email to say the college was planning to axe its junior music and drama training. “This will soon make RWCMD the only conservatoire in the UK, and possibly in the world, without regular junior provision. “...devastated students, some revising for their GCSEs and A-levels, launched a campaign. A Senedd petition quickly gained 10,560 signatures. “Nor has the College responded to an open letter begging them to pause the closure, even though it is signed by leading theatre practitioners, eminent musicians and even by the conductor of BBC National Orchestra of Wales. “In Scotland, the Royal Conservatoire has accessed substantial government funds in the past and there is also a funded specialist music school. “Its submission to the Senedd petition committee regarding this is full of buzz words that make no concrete sense.” The full article can be read at: https://nation.cymru/opinion/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-the-royal-welsh-college-of-music-and-drama/ A final note was added on social media: “Last day at RWCMD for the kids. Some of the families are moving to England for tuition, a couple are looking at leaving Welsh medium for better facilities privately. The vast majority can’t afford to do that. The national music service can’t provide lessons at the standard the kids need and the teachers in it are taken aback that’s being suggested as they referred them to RWCMD. No one knows yet what will happen to the instruments on loan - they were bought with lottery cash specifically for the juniors. “It’s just heartbreaking and unnecessary. They’ve created something beautiful and are throwing it away. Senior politicians from the Bay have written to the principal asking for a suspension so they can help only to be met with silence; all invitations for her to go in and work this through have been ignored. “...Despite the spin, the facts make it clear that it is not a middle-class Cardiff club: it pulls in diverse kids whose families drive hundreds of miles to attend. I think the loss to the sector and the way it’ll impact kids from state school is very real.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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