Trying to make sense of absurdity
It’s a treat to watch SK Shlomo close-up, taking our oohs, aahs, and roars and brilliantly making dance music out of them on the modest machine he calls The Beast. In his new show, Surrender, he charts his story from the days when he joined the bellydancers at his Iraqi Jewish grandparents’ home, the only child of an immigrant family at an English primary school. His parents’ gift of a drum kit foreshadowed a career as record-breaking beatboxer and world looping champion who has worked with Ed Sheeran and Bjork.
Then crisis hit: he came off the road, cancelled everything, and vowed to take a new course. The “waters of anxiety” began to rise. Isolated by “the shame of secret suffering”, he set about making a different kind of work, while enduring damaging abuse on Twitter. In the atmospheric cavern space of the Bellydancer, he quickly has the audience on his side and on their feet.
We saw this on a quiet, raindrenched Sunday, rather than a Saturday night riot of noise and light. It was a little unclear whether his career reached a full-blown crisis, or a creative fork in the road, in his quest for a safe way to be vulnerable.
Croquet is not a game, it’s a declaration of war, as any aficionado knows, and Mallets came with a 16+ advisory warning. Sadly, this is mostly down to puns about shafts.
Retiree Sam is fiddling with his perfect lawn, swigging gin and Pimm’s, while his longsuffering spouse Philippa dreams of breeding moles. He fumes as they await a foursome with friends, but mysteriously only Kate shows up, firmly alone.
Mallets has the odd competent crack, tries its luck with a love triangle but struggles to persuade – students might pause before trying to play retirees. The great croquet play has yet to be written.
Sarah Kendall: Paper Planes
Assembly George Square Studios – Two (Venue 17)
Sarah Kendall has had writer’s block.
The London-based Australian storyteller, known for her brilliantly funny and insightful shows, has been finding it hard to sleep. She has been scrolling the internet instead of getting on with her work. And although she does not go so far to say she’s depressed, she’s been struggling to find the joy in life.
The trouble is, she says, that her faith in the power of stories has been called into question. The rise of Donald Trump has made her doubt that actions have consequences.
And as the world hurtles toward environmental disaster, she finds it
The Kaye Hole
Both shows Assembly Checkpoint (Venue 322) It’s always a good sign when a show takes most of its running time to get to its starting point and you don’t mind a bit.
Reuben Kaye’s bravura cabaret is nominally structured around a powerfully formative experience from his Australian adolescence but it’s a long time coming. Instead, we’re glamorously steamrollered by Kaye’s megawatt charm, room-filling voice, whipcrack timing and remorseless audience interaction.
The sequins and smut come flying at such a pace, and the mash-ups of, say, ZZ Top and Kurt Weill, command the attention such that you barely notice the growing roster of cultural references peppering Kaye’s material – a glance at the Brontës here, a cute disquisition on Berlini there – or indeed the increasingly barbed doses of social critique.
When, late in the show, the narrative does kick in, it turns out to be a superbly balanced miniature epic of longing and desire, glamour and violence,
Sarah Kendall: Hard to concentrate on work when the news seems to get worse and worse
increasingly hard to tell her 11-year-old daughter stories that make sense of the world.
Weaving together tales from Greek mythology and
trauma and redemption – all delivered with eroticism and pathos tangled up with daringly camp absurdity.
Having battered any normative defences into submission early on, Kaye has us wrapped round his little finger, leaving us both fascinated and appalled, before closing the deal with a showstopper. It’s quite the masterclass in using high entertainment to challenge and provoke without letting the joins show.
Meanwhile, at weekends, Kaye also hosts The Kaye Hole, an even more unbuttoned late-night variety spree. There’s some overlapping material, as you’d expect, but a looser, hair-down vibe makes for ramped-up audience entanglement and extra-macabre material.
As well as rotating guests from shows around the Fringe – the night I went featured master pop pasticheurs Frisky and Mannish and grotesque clowns The Long Pigs – there’s also cracking regular support from sensational fire-breathing burlesquer Kitty Bang Bang, stupendous sword-swallower Heather Holliday and compelling acrobatic contortionist Beau Sargent.
the account of a work trip to Los Angeles, Kendall takes her audience on a search for meaning in a world which is out of control.
She introduces us to her frightfully posh English literary agent, meets a Hollywood star and witnesses a spectacularly awful first night at the theatre.
But she also shows herself scrolling through news headlines on the toilet, watching disaster documentaries and obsessing about which is the safest place to sit on a plane.
Kendall has always been open about her emotional life but she seems more vulnerable than before and genuinely less able to find solace in structure, imagination and humour.
Her narrative is neatly divided into chapters, with headings, but this isn’t one of those stories where everything is neatly wrapped up and all the ends are tied together at the end.
Trump is still in the White House, the weather is still out of control and there is still a risk that planes will fall out of the sky. But Kendall does find cause for optimism in a very unlikely setting.
JJJJ
JJJJ