Gently tackling racism
on last year’s Fringe, When We Ran is a charming, whimsical piece of theatre with big themes, accompanied throughout by folksy music played live on stage.
Members of the company, working with their resident composers, the Mason Brothers, have written some beautiful songs to accompany the action.
The show could do with a bit more room to breathe – there is a feeling that the actors are always having to find ways to manoeuvre around the instruments, and more time, too, to establish relationships and explore themes. It’s a big story to tell in an hour, and some of the plot details get a little lost or muddled.
But the atmosphere is captivating. Set somewhere in North America, though it isn’t clear where or when, the show evokes a powerful sense of what it means to discover a world that is full of danger and wonder, far beyond anything you thought you knew. SUSAN MANSFIELD The Stand Comedy Club 3 & 4 (Venue 12) JJJJJ There are shows tackling racism in much tricksier ways, shows getting much angrier, shows much more overtly political. But I leave this hour feeling more strongly, thinking more deeply and having laughed much, much louder than after all of them.
Nokise is half Welsh and half Samoan, raised in New Zealand. The audience I sit in is a wonderful punch of Aussie, Kiwi and Pacific Islander. Plus a little Dutch, some French and American. The atmosphere is extraordinary. One of the first big laughs (from the Pacific Islanders) comes as we Europeans find out that we cannot even pronounce the name of their island properly – despite the English insistence that we “discovered” it. Nokise is a joy to have onstage, and his intense likeability makes some of the stories he tells us all the more appalling.
He makes the single most important point I have ever got my tiny white brain around, about racism. And he does it so gently. Immediately he makes it you cannot believe you have never thought of it like that before.
But I will bet that you haven’t. Comics are doing so much “calling out” these days that they seem to have forgotten the power of simply pointing out, in a resonant, intelligent enough way, and leaving it to sink in to the minds of what is, after all, a pretty generally liberal Fringe audience. Nokise offers tales to make you gasp, jokes that will make you hoot, and ideas that will spin around and open up your mind.
And yes, we talk golliwogs, their history, their subversion, their traumatic effect, their disappearance and their ready availability in New Zealand. We meet James’s own golliwog, made for and given to him by a Maori chief. Aussies, Kiwis, Samoans and the rest of us all learn the same
0 James Nokise tackles his subject in an unusual way big lesson. It is a paradigm 21st century approach to racism.
Nokise makes a highly political show personal. And a highly personal story, political. He is a phenomenal performer: empathise with more serious discussion of zero-hour contracts and benefit sanctions. The timeliness of this production is also a virtue, with the divided and antagonistic backdrop of Brexit Britain well echoed in the iconoclastic and destructively antiestablishment humour of the piece. DAVID POLLOCK relaxed and friendly, engaging and intelligent, persuasive, informed and genuinely, naturally, brilliantly funny. KATE COPSTICK Window-esque quality to it, as it follows two secret agents holed up in a room in postwar Berlin. The fusion of film and live action is an extremely interesting conceptual device, which enables dual realities to exist simultaneously: one in the recording studio type set-up on stage, and the other in the more constructed world of the celluloid images.
A relationship inevitably develops between the male and female protagonists, albeit one that favours icy veneers over the glorious romantic chemistry of Hollywood’s most famous on-screen partnerships. But as Simon Wainwright’s excellent imagery and sound stutter and break, reality is deconstructed in a way that has more in common with a David Lynch film. Experimental style is ultimately more of a focus than the content within this, but a disconcerting conclusion is both unsettling and thrilling to watch. SALLY STOTT