In the introduction to the programme of Confessions of a Dancewhore the creator and performer of the one-person show Michael Twaits says describing what it is is a “semantic nightmare” – and he’s certainly right.

But let’s try: it’s part cabaret, part stand-up comedy, part polemic, part tragedy, a lot comedy, part multi-media performance, a bit of a lecture – that’s a lot in 85 minutes of intense performance, storytelling and confession.

But those are a generally gripping, dramatic, and often moving 85 minutes – certainly not everyone’s glass of vodka, and if you’d described it to me beforehand as an exploration of one person’s gay identity and rage against society’s attempt to put individuals into neat boxes of sexual identity, I might not have gone.

“Why is who I choose to fuck such a decisive factor in who you think I am?” is an interesting question, but in the wrong hands could easily have lapsed into self-indulgent navel-gazing.

But I’m glad I did choose to see Confessions of a Dancewhore – it was a powerful, political, lively evening – and filled with laughs, which is always a plus. And it would have been worth it almost for the line alone: “I am a post-drag queen.”
Continue reading

Article first published as Theatre Review (London): Dig by J.D. Smith and No More, Salvator? by Michael Hart at the Old Red Lion on Blogcritics.

A one-act play is a tricky thing. You need to present the characters, create scenarios for them, then neatly roll it up, all within something less than an hour.

You need to grab people fast, but make them feel like they are getting something meaty and substantial, with something to talk about after the show.

The two plays that have just premiered together at the Old Red Lion in Islington take two different approaches, although both are centred around the interaction of two characters.

The first, Dig, sees an incompetent, nervous, weak hitman try to force his planned victim to dig his own grave. But his victim isn’t playing ball.

It’s hardly an original scenario, and it really doesn’t quite work. The behaviour of the nervous hitman is logical enough, but that of his victim-to-be makes little sense. The explanation he gives to the audience – I really couldn’t tell if we were supposed to believe it, I certainly didn’t – just doesn’t hold together.
Continue reading

That you could turn 1984 into a seriously comic story is one surprising aspect of the Blind Summit Theatre’s premiere production of the Orwell classic. That you could play Charrington and Goldestein with puppets and make that make glorious sense is another. And when you add quite the oddest, but possibly most effective, sex scene you’re likely to see on stage in many a year into the mix, then this is a production that delivers the unexpected.

That it also delivers a polished, entertaining, gripping evening is a tribute to director Mark Down, puppet designer Nick Barnes and a fine acting team.

There have been many attempts to stage and film 1984, and few have been successful. Really, this is a book about what goes on in Winston Smith’s head – and that’s not easy to put on the stage.

The challenge is centrally overcome here by the use of a chorus – which sets the scene and carries the stories, and the thoughts, along. It marches for Hate Day, it dances obediently to Big Brother’s tune, it sings patriotic songs, it is the puppet-master – and it never leaves the stage. Even when Julia goes to light a gas flame in Winston’s “secret” room, the “flames” are the dancing fingers of a chorus member. And then there’s that sex scene – Winston and Julia’s first meeting in his “golden country” – in which the chorus manipulates their bodies. It sounds weird, but in fact it is an effective metaphor for the whole story unfolding before us.

Added to that central frame provided by the chorus are some fine, sophisticated conceits. This is – an old trope but in this case an effective one – a production within a production. We meet the cast on the bus on the way to the BAC, and they explain the staging, and announce each scene.

And there’s also a “staging” of Emmanuel Goldenstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by means of moving comic book – playing wittily off the current trend towards “comic book” versions of philosophical and political foundational texts.

The puppetry too is entirely self-conscious and upfront. A cardboard thrush is an odd conceit, so to a Goldenstein of head and hands that pops over a screen, yet both are curiously effective and affecting. And the spookily human-and-yet-not-human movement of Charrington, the junk shop owner who rents Winston a room, is something that will linger in my mind.
Continue reading