Category: Reviews

Review – North East Rising by Rowan McCabe

I was recently one of ten people selected to write theatre reviews for the North East Artist Development Network, which of course has made me very happy and has also forced me to admit that I know very little about reviewing. So my cunning plan is to do some warm-ups on here.

Rowan McCabe
Rowan McCabe

I’d really like to tell you about ‘North East Rising’ by Rowan McCabe, and I will, I will – but in all fairness, I must declare an interest. I’ve been working with Rowan in my capacity as Apples and Snakes co-ordinator since he started as a performance poet. He’s come up through Scratch Club, had performance mentoring from me, been programmed and commissioned by me on a range of projects and most recently I acted as a freelance mentor helping him edit the text of this show. Fairly obviously, I think he’s good, but then so do all the other people who have supported him to write this first solo pice – Arts Centre Washington, Arts Council, ARC Stockton and the like.

North East Rising is based on a simple observation, that the portrayal of the north east and Geordies in the popular media is unfairly skewed towards negative, vulgar or impoverished stereotypes. It’s grim up north, always has been. What McCabe sets out to do is to use his own experiences as a north-easterner to set out a stall of alternative exemplars, exploring what for him is the true ‘essence of the north east’. He does this through a series of character sketches in poetic form, ranging from poignant to lyrical to comedic, linked loosely together by an imagined walk through Newcastle and beyond, up the Tyne valley. The overall tone is one of relaxed, chatty comedy, as he moves from poem to poem via links that are scripted a little like stand-up routines, and this all works extremely well. He’s an affable presence, the audience is always on his side and happily jumps up to twerk with baked goods for his Stottie Rap! And the final piece, stretching out its fingers towards this new positive ideal of north east community and culture, is truly moving.

If I have any reservations, it’s about the support acts. In keeping with the stand-up nature of his delivery, the show is presented within a cabaret format, with a first half consisting of music from Alix Alexandra (who was sublime) and poetry from Jess Johnson, all hosted by Robbie Lee Hurst. This is a fantastic format, it really makes sense as a structure given the feel of Rowan’s piece, but I was a bit taken aback by Jess’s set. She’s a tremendous actor, incredibly vivid on stage, and I’ve seen her in late-night cabaret settings and laughed until I hurt. But the same material shifted to early-evening theatre struck a different note. Her themes are sex, jealousy, domestic abuse, drug-use, drunken brawling and council estate slaggery  – so, many of the negative stereotypes that Rowan’s show is trying so hard to move away from. Her set seems to undermine his in its content, but this could be mitigated if the pieces were delivered with more invitation to empathise, and there’s plenty of space to do that as she’s writing with heart and not to judge or mock. Instead they are spat at us, obscenities lobbed like bricks, angry and confrontational. It’s like being blasted with a flamethrower.

I know there may be tweaks made to the support set for the next three performances, so I really wouldn’t let my responses put you off, not least because you may enjoy Jess’s piece very much, there were plenty of others around me finding it funny. And the main show I wouldn’t have you miss for all the pasties in Greggs.

North East Rising can be seen at Northern Stage, Newcastle on 21 October and at ARC, Stockton on 23 October

Fringe review 3 – I Felt I Had Earned The Curry

Well that was a strange old day of shows missed and shows abandoned. Having delivered a command performance-slash-dress rehearsal to Sophia Walker in the basement of Forest Cafe, I proceeded to loiter on the wind tunnel that is the Royal Mile in a vain attempt to thrust my flapping flyers into the hands of Swedish tourists just looking for shelter. I then arrived at my venue ten minutes too late to exit flyer Tina’s show, and just in time to miss ‘Yeti’ by Gary From Leeds due to the pressing need to change into performance clothes, warm up, go and do last minute flyering, warm up again and do my first show.

I then went to see ‘Raj Rage’ by Charmian Hughes, which had the exciting premise of a personal pilgrimage to India following the footsteps of her great-grandmother, who escaped the Indian Mutiny and left behind letters containing a species of eye-witness account. Ten minutes into the show and we were still listening to tepid jokes about middle-aged women’s mandatory pixie haircuts and the tribulations of travelling with a friend only to be mistaken for lesbians. When the ancestor appeared it was via the theatrical device of a faintly Victorian looking headband, which was donned before the action continued with no alteration of delivery or language whatsoever. Are these letters real? Was Hughes’ forebear simply an incredibly dull correspondent with no epistolary panache? A thousand words of this painted no picture at all. I left, sadly before the human banana sacrifice promised in the blurb.

I then perched at the back of the Banshee’s torture chamber to sneak a peek at Rob Auton’s ‘Face Show’, which follows the now-familiar Auton format of drawing us in with endearingly awkward whimsy before nearly losing us in a slightly unravelled middle section and then finally approaching what he’s actually talking about via an extended emotional crescendo. In this case, he literally draws us in, as in, draws faces for a while. It’s charming and a bit funny. There’s some energetic facial workouts. It’s absurd and a bit funny. There are a lot of baffled silences. He makes them longer, until they’re a bit more funny. There’s something about mice and aliens, but I was getting a bit tired at that point and had to have a little sit down. Auton is a genuinely lovely and unique performer, and to watch him is to walk a tightrope between confused, bemused laughter and delighted, surprised laughter. Whatever he talks about – the wonderfully poignant interconnectedness of all humanity for example – he talks about from the bottom of his strangely vulnerable heart, often all but breaking mine. I wouldn’t bill him as comedy, though. Not sure it’s spoken word either. It’s Rob.

A swift spell at JibbaJabba ensued, with sets by Jim Higo, Mandy Maxwell and a rather inspired open mic bit from a guy selling his services as a hit-man exterminator of stray helium balloons. Then back across Waverley Bridge to the Banshee for Stand Up Tragedy. An opening set form comedic storyteller John Harding was genuinely funny – it takes some tightly-managed delivery to tell a tale of explosive diarrhoea without being off-puttingly crass. But the next three acts left me and my companions cold, so we absconded in favour of curry, running the gauntlet of Niddry Street after the watershed, when all the people outside venues are suddenly aggressively flyering for shows called ‘Yank Me’, “Phone Whore’ and ‘Sex With Children’.

And now it’s tomorrow already, and I must get some sleep before seeing Jack Dean’s ‘Threnody For The Sky Children’, which may well have just beaten my ‘The Moon Cannot Be Stolen’ for the coveted ‘Most Pretentious Title’ award at this year’s Fringe…

Edinburgh Fringe – review 1

So yesterday I took a flying visit to the Fringe to catch a few things I would otherwise miss when my own run begins next week. This is what I managed to fit into five hours…

I started the day with The Good Delusion by Tina Sederholm at Royal Oak, a teeny, tiny, self-contained cellar room at a very welcoming ‘proper’ pub, with seating for around 20. I saw Tina last year at Banshee Labyrinth doing her previous show, Evie and the Perfect Cupcake. My first thought was that this year’s venue is much better suited to her style as a performer, being less gloomy, less gothic, less plagued by noisy, nosy walk-bys in the corridor. Sederholm is most definitely not gloomy, nor is she confrontational or intentionally difficult – she specialises in warm, charming and accessible poetic storytelling. The Good Delusion is more directly autobiographical than the upbeat moral fable of last year, and is maybe less honed as a narrative, using an episodic structure that sometimes seems quite loosely linked to the purported subject ‘being good’. But of course, this isn’t actually an in-depth exploration of a moral construct, it’s entertainment, and in that it succeeds with plenty of giggles and sherbet lemons – though ironically given the show’s conclusion, I suspect she’s still trying to be good enough for us to like her! And we do…

By contrast, Can’t Care, Won’t Care by Sophia Walker is a very demanding show, and rightly so as it deals with serious and important issues around the realities of working in the care system. The audience is cast in the role of jury as the poet/care worker is put on trial for the negligent homicide of a service user. Walker plays both the defendant and the prosecuting counsel, shifting the language of her speech and body rapidly between the two. It’s a strong performance, obviously springing from personal experience and personal conviction (no pun intended), and there’s no let-up to the pace and emotional pitch. It’s a lot to take in – the exposure of the unwieldy bureaucracy of the care industry that fails to recognise the context of individual needs, the savage and ignorant cuts to funding that have left front-line workers exposed to dangerous lone working, the grotesque injustice of their consequent culpability when things go wrong. And on top of this, the performer’s own expiation of a guilt that may really be hers, or may be an imagined scenario, but in any case is delivered full-force. A few more pauses for breath and contemplation would be a kindness. Definitely go and see this, but do what she asks at the end – deliberate, discuss, decompress over a coffee before you head off to your next show.

I didn’t decompress, I rushed off to do a guest slot at Get Put Down, an afternoon poetry cabaret hosted by Edinburgh’s own Max Scratchmann and Alec Beattie. They work well as a hosting team, in an ‘Odd Couple’ kind of way, Max being genial and self-deprecatory, Alec a bit grumpy and sardonic. After a quick set there I had to do the unforgiveable and run straight off to another guest slot at Other Voices, again a cabaret but this time run by Fay Roberts and featuring strong female performers. I was lucky enough to get there in time to hear a beautiful open mic poem from Miriam Nash, and a guest set from Jess Green.

In fact my next port of call was Jess Green’s show Burning Books, another poet taking a scathing look at the impact of government policy and cutbacks on a public service sector, this time the education system. Green recently went viral with ‘Dear Mr Gove’, a poem written from a teacher’s point of view as an open letter to the then Minister for Education. It’s included in the show, alongside equally eloquent, passionate and stunningly-written pieces from multiple characters – the library assistant, the teacher forced to go to a team-building session with a nightmare poet, the teacher with a coke habit. Green has always been an excellent writer and performer, but for me the great thing about this show is the maturity of vision and empathy she shows in stepping outside herself and into these convincingly realised voices. She has teamed up with a guitarist and percussionist to set the whole sequence to music, and I’m not convinced it adds much to the experience other than providing a click-track that helps her overcome a slight tendency to let her emotions accelerate her delivery. But having said that, there were others in the audience really rocking along to the beat, so what do I know?

The plan is to write something every day next week about shows I’ve seen – if my stamina holds up! These shows are all part of the PBH Free Fringe – there is no charge, so if you’re going to the Fringe please budget to make a donation and/or buy some merchandise. For example, I bought Jess Green’s CD of the show for £5.

The Good Delusion, Tina Sederholm, Royal Oak, 12pm

Can’t Care, Won’t Care, Sophia Walker, Banshee Labyrinths, 1.40pm

Burning Books, Jess Green, Electric Circus, 4.30pm

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