He’s a Starr in the making
There’s a 40-year-old topless woman in Leicester Square. She’s screaming, crying and “making porn noises,” explains Eve, a young, middle-class woman living and working in London. She doesn’t do anything about it, but then why should she?
This is the question at the centre of Isla van Tricht’s deceptively simple but extremely nuanced monologue – one that is pushed further when Eve encounters some men on the tube taking photos of another woman without her knowledge.
Eve is a well observed character – all for women bosses and “girl power”, but, as an IT consultant, she “just likes” working with men better. She is capable of stepping in when she sees sexist behaviour on public transport but gets nervous about doing so.
Through short scenes, van Tricht’s dialogue, which she delivers through an authentic and empathetic performance, pinpoints an everywoman’s experiences of everyday sexism, but also the dilemma that comes from taking a stance and creating a confrontation or doing nothing and being left with the self-critical voice in her head, who she refers to as “Karen”.
Through a series of scenes, Eve fails to effectively deal with the subtle discriminations in life, love and work situations, but also, herself. Finally, a catch-up with an ex, the supposedly “magnetic” Tim, isn’t just disappointing but a reminder of the kind of bad sexual experiences women are told are fine simply because they’re not rape.
It’s not a piece making grand declarations about female empowerment, but is more truthful as a result. “I hope you enjoyed it,” says van Tricht. “And if you didn’t I’m sorry.” It perfectly sums up the experience of a woman putting herself out there, but unable to shake the thought that maybe she shouldn’t be.
Songlines
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)
Garry Starr Performs Everything
Underbelly Cowgate (Venue 61) Undoubtedly one of the most fun shows at this year’s festival, Damien Warrensmith’s thespian creation Garry Starr is a delight to behold. Pompously charging himself with no less a challenge than saving the performing arts, the vainglorious Starr pledges to showcase every genre of theatre, a task he more-orless accomplishes in this uproariously funny hour.
Demonstrating a playfully silly wit, gentle spoof of theatrical self-importance and some sublime clowning, Warren-smith’s gymnastic physicality and commitment to Starr’s ambitions can’t be underestimated either, with the former Plague of IDIOTS frontman directed by The Mighty Boosh’s demanding guru Cal Mccrystal.
Blink and the strapping, ruff-sporting performer will have already soliloquied and deadpan-stripped his way through Shakespeare and burlesque, with nipple tassles a-twirling.
An extract from The Lover introduces some audience interaction and it’s hilariously executed, with
darkest Norfolk to live with her grandmother. Now, there’s nowhere to shoplift make-up, just fields and silence – and Stan, the geeky guy from the neighbouring farm.
Tallulah Brown’s play, directed by Dugout Theatre’s George Chilcott, captures well the awkward mismatches of teenage relationships, as Stan and Stevie dance around each other in a series of encounters, almost but never quite connecting.
Meanwhile, Stevie must negotiate the politics of a new school, ubiquitous rumours about why she had to leave her previous one and the attentions of a teacher who keeps offering her maths tuition. The ever-practical Stan, in turn, must live with his hot-tempered father.
The play centres on two superb performances from Fanta Barrie (Stevie), mouthy and city-smart but cast adrift in this unfamiliar world, and Pinter’s pauses among the little traps laid for the hapless mark assisting him.
Ballet, musical, slapstick, butoh, circus and drawing room comedy are just some of the genres brought vividly to ridicule, with every setpiece taking the show in a surprising direction and Starr’s performance growing ever more extreme.
Marrying high art with the lowest prat-arsing, the bathos is considerable. Still, Joe Hurst (Stan), frank and down-to-earth, confident in his connection to the land but not in his relationships with his peers. Both actors capture with uncomfortable accuracy the heady adolescent mix of knowing everything yet, at other times, being entirely guileless. Ironically, when Stevie does find herself in a dangerous situation, she doesn’t see what’s happening until it’s too late.
The action is interwoven with songs by all-girl band Trills, performed with soft folksy harmonies by Seraphina D’arby and Tallulah Brown, a pleasure to listen to, though it’s not entirely clear how they advance the plot.
The crises in the play happen near the end, when there’s a sense of a sudden intrusion of more serious issues, followed by a rush to the finish. But Songlines is a charming piece of theatre, often very funny, and Warren-smith never breaks character to acknowledge the ridiculousness, making it all the funnier when Starr’s professional frustrations come hurtling to the surface.
A puffed up, driven fool with self-evident status issues, he’s never so daft that the flashes of genuine virtuosity can’t be appreciated. His lingering resentment towards the Royal Shakespeare Company niggles away throughout unflinchly accurate about the problems of growing up.
Busking It
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) Gig theatre doesn’t come much more authentic than this, with Danusia Samal – an actor with real heart and a vocal performer with soul – recounting her experiences as a busker in London. She takes centre stage in a three-piece gig setup, with a guitarist on one side of her and a keyboard player and occasional accordionist on the other.
The songs don’t so much form part of the narrative as act as accompaniment, taking us out of the story to set the scene and the tone, before Samal returns to and there’s a highly revealing moment when he embraces mask theatre, his Keith Johnstone-style mask unshackling his id from his ego.
Over far too soon, this calling card of a solo debut from Warren-smith leaves you hoping to see much more of Starr, with further appearances for the character surely inevitable. her next vignette, creating a dreamlike reverie that evokes a rich sense of London alongside background chatter and an evocative set.
The story neatly ties together two experiences: that of a young black British woman whose family was fractured when her mother’s partner – her “sort-of-dad” – upped and left, as we later discover because of an unsuccessful asylum claim; and of a subculture of street and tube musicians, a group of DIY artists corralled by an increasingly corporate, rulesbased culture, and under siege as society shifts away from live entertainment.
The piece is light of touch and doesn’t bite deep into the subjects covered, but with the cast she weaves around us, Samal creates a London for those who wish to push at the edges of convention. In a world that seems increasingly bent on a replay of the traumas and horrors of the 1930s, Henry Naylor’s latest play joins Ruki, at C Cubed, in shining a light on a relatively little-known aspect of the story of Nazism, involving the fate of successful German sportsmen and women who were not of “Aryan” origin.
In Ruki, the hero is a boxer from the Roma community; but in Games, the two characters are both young female sports stars, the fencer Helen Mayer and the high jump champion Gretel Bergmann.
Both were Jewish, or partly Jewish; and in a series of entwined monologues, with a few face-to-face meetings between the two women, Naylor’s play traces the rising threat to their lives and careers posed by Germany’s increasingly draconian antijewish laws, which threatened both to exclude them from national teams, and to remove their German citizenship altogether.
In the end, Mayer lasted longer in the face of Nazi policies than Bergmann, who emigrated to the United States in 1937 after being unfairly rejected for the German Olympic team, and died there last year, aged 103.
In 1936, the blonde and Aryan-looking Mayer was invited to join the German fencing team in Munich, and notoriously gave a Nazi salute on the podium when she received her silver medal.
Naylor’s play, beautifully performed by Avital Lvova and Tessie Orange-turner, highlights these differences in attitude between the two women, with the fiercely disciplined and resolutely nonpolitical Mayer often rejecting offers of friendship and solidarity from the younger, more self-consciously Jewish Bergmann. And between them, they offer a chilling exploration of how insidiously a culture of racial and ethnic exclusion can become established, how it thrives on a spoken or unspoken alliance between thugs on the streets and politicians, and how it faces each individual with a profound and distinctive set of moral dilemmas, as well as with the prospect of being judged by history, for our response to them.