A turning of the tide at Hull
Finds to be another impressive showcase for this year’s UK City of Culture
Alighting at Hull, you’re greeted on the station concourse by the sight of a bronze statue of Philip Larkin, fashioned to look as if the poet is dashing to a platform. The line inscribed below it from “The Whitsun Weddings” (“That Whitsun, I was late getting away”) explains the air of hasty departure. But those aware of the arrow-shower of unflattering barbs that the poet loosed about the city might afford themselves a wry smile. “I wish I could think of just one nice thing to tell you about Hull,” he wrote in one typically unimpressed letter after arriving in 1955 to run the university library. “Oh yes, well, it’s very nice and flat for cycling.”
That flatness didn’t help when the city was subject to the Biblical downpour 10 years ago that caused more than 10,000 homes to be evacuated. When you consider the “story” of Hull overall – the most extensive bombing damage outside of London during the war, the decline of its industries – it’s hard not to see it as the cinders of the North.
It might sound premature to suggest that Hull’s renaissance is now officially secure but due to the flood of artistic activity during its year as UK City of Culture, the tide of perception has turned in its favour.
According to interim findings, the 2017 jamboree is already a triumph: the number of locals taking part in cultural events has more than doubled, hotels are reporting a surge in bookings, shops are noticing increased footfall. With the Turner Prize being hosted here later this month, the visual arts are a key component of the turnaround. For those who’ve long associated Hull’s theatrical “offer” with plays by John Godber about sweaty rugby players, the programme has been a typhoon of fresh air.
One Day, Maybe – an ambitious promenade piece staged by director Tristan Sharps’s Brighton-based company dreamthinkspeak in a disused Seventies office block – goes to the heart of explaining why the city has a spring in its step. It’s all about getting visitors up and about, out of their comfort zone, forcing them to look at everything anew – and leaving a lasting impression. On paper, it’s the ultimate foreign import yet it transplants splendidly to Humberside soil.
Devised in South Korea and presented primarily in their native language by over 30 Korean performers, it takes us from a shiny, East Asian vision of a hi-tech future back to the dark chapter of struggle and sacrifice upon which so much of the country’s freedom and prosperity is founded. In so doing, not only do we get a history lesson (about the brutally suppressed 1980 democratic uprising in the city of Gwangju), but we’re pushed into a meditation about the relation of past to present, of individualism to consumerism, that feels at once universal and insightfully local.
Without wishing to give too much away, initially it’s all fun and games. A replica shopping mall has been installed on one floor, pop videos playing along one wall, boutiques lining the other side. Armed with hand-held smart devices supplied by obsequious representatives of the “Kasang Corporation”, and virtual currency, we’re encouraged to go on a digital shopping spree, virtual reality headsets taking us inside state-of-theart kitchens. Everything we do is tracked and logged, eventually providing a vaguely sinister customised personal assessment.
Progressing on this quest, up and down stairs, in and out of gloomy old offices, the mood shifts. After kiddish excitement comes disorientation in a “game-zone” style maze of corridors, which we must navigate alone, against the clock, dodging guards. Then there’s alarm, as yelling police officers, catching us snooping through desolate cells, frogmarch us off. Finally, following a mournful tea ceremony and a vast, melancholy installation of row upon row of flickering candles, we’re left with a sense of grief at vanished lives – and a lingering question about the value of our own. A welcome fillip, you might say, and a potent invitation, as those lines from Larkin’s “The Trees” have it, to “begin afresh, afresh, afresh”. Hie thee to Hull.