What’s Happening in London Theatre?

The annual Shuffle festival returns to Mile End this weekend, August 26-27, featuring a Trainspotting double-bill with Q&A from acclaimed director Danny Boyle, a supporter of the festival and long-term resident of the district. This year’s event will include film, theatre, science, performance, architectural installations, walks, food and music, all contained within eerily lit meadows, enclaves and puzzling pathways.

At last summer’s Shuffle Festival in Tower Hamlets Cemetery I saw a philosophical and inspired adaption of Frankenstein amid the lamp-lit tombstones.

Mostly consisting of a dialogue between creature and creator, it was a profound meditation on the nature of reality and the moral implications of advanced science, in no small part helped by the atmospheric set and the setting of the mazy and dilapidated graves.

The cemetery, listed as one of London’s “Magnificent Seven” alongside Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park, Nunhead and Brompton, is magical by day and deeply mysterious by night, with crooked passages that are spooky, arboreal and labyrinthine.

The cemetery is comparatively unsung but is as interesting as any, certainly from an ecological and botanical perspective.

In Mary Shelley’s day physicians gave lectures in operating theatres and demonstrations on how a dead body might be recalibrated back into life, or at least momentarily reanimated, by galvanic electrodes. The hope and ambition of their age reached fruition in our lifetime when a sheep called Dolly was successfully cloned, realising a potential rich with moral and scientific implications. The play, like the novel, spoke volumes about creation, compassion and alienation: concerns which are a mainstay amid our shifting times.

Over the past year I have seen about 20 stage plays and performances in London, the most recent being the opening matinee show for the wonderful La Strada. I have rarely paid more than the price of a pint of beer for any of them: searching for cultural solutions in the vibrant hub of London sometimes means relying on your wits, flukes of fortune and a wily urchin hunger to attain these open sesames.

I still recall my earliest memories of theatre. The initial run of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was probably the best stage play I have seen, certainly the most intellectually stimulating. Shadowlands, performed before the film was made, was better than the film and perhaps the most emotive play I’ve seen.

One of the most macabre performances of recent times was Theatre Delicatessen’s production of The Hearing Trumpet at the Old Library in Camberwell. A game of subterfuge employing all manner of devices and trickery, it was an interactive and immersive drama which employed different media to create the bizarre life of an institution and the cast of characters therein.

The troupe of actors played various characters, all of them tantalizingly weird. Based on Leonora Carrington’s occult surrealist novel of the same name, it maintained a relish for the macabre, with its mutating and fluid characters and deployment of a phantasmagoria of grotesqueries and makeshift props. The overall experience was deliciously disorientating: like being handed a ball of string and made to enter the maze of the minotaur. But sometimes it is gratifying to lose ourselves, and, in the words of our most eloquent playwright, “by indirections find directions out”.

by Jim Newcombe

 

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