All together now

This week on CW, Matt Trueman has more from the Edinburgh festivals, with an eclectic mix of narrative theatre and formal experimentation. Austin Williams considers the possibility of audience participation writ large in an investigation of David Cameron’s Big Society concept. Medical student Sabreen Maryam Ali laments the British public’s seeming inability to recognise progress. And Mark Napier reviews Jason Bell’s Englishman in New York exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

26 August 2010

A tantrum thrown or a tantrum shown?

Teenage Riot, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Essentially, Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed have done a Duchamp. They have framed a piece of theatre and presented it as a living artefact. Unlike Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, however, the thing presented remains in the same context. There is no signification about its status. Presenting a piece of theatre – warts and all – in a theatre is like showing us a urinal on the wall of the Gents. How are we supposed to know to look differently?

Fragile fiction

101, C Soco, Edinburgh

You are aware that this is not just your experience, but our experience. Who am I to intervene in the experience of other paying participants? They’ve come to see the company, not the heckler.

No trace of the token

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh

While it flows efficiently, thanks to diligently executed transitions as four screens slide into positions to create all manner of landscapes, it can still stutter. You’re always aware of the process of application that must, at one point, have asked, ‘OK, how can we stage this?’

‘The Big Society’ (or ‘Compulsory Voluntarism’)

A paper given to the Muslim Institute Summer Conference, Cardiff, 24 July 2010

‘The Compact Code of Good Practice on Volunteering’ continues: ‘The key element (of volunteering) that it is freely undertaken’ (my italics). Maybe the government thinks that this simply means ‘done for free’ but in fact it describes an activity ‘willingly, uncoercedly or generously’ given. As such, it is about the rights of the person who gives up his/her time.

The Whingeing Nation

A medical student takes aim at the relentless negativity of contemporary Britain

What irks the most is when the pungent smell of negativity crops up in a system that is working. Criticism should be constructive for it to be justified. Rants about the myriad problems in society only serve to fuel the fire of cynics who pick apart the threads of progress.

You can hear it in my accent when I talk

An Englishman in New York: Photographs by Jason Bell, National Portrait Gallery, London

The real highlights of the exhibition are the small cultural insights of the sitters New York stories displayed beside the stunning photographs. Their concerns and motivations highlight what it means to be English, to be an immigrant and where the two intersect.

Seeing stars

Beautiful Burnout, Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh

In the main, Bryony Lavery sticks to the rules in her treatment of five aspiring Scottish boxers, subverting proceedings with a final sucker punch that, though well concealed, isn’t quite the knockout blow that’s needed.

No mere monorail

En Route, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

There are some stunning vantage points and some intriguing moments within En Route. The sense you get of Edinburgh as a particular and a universal, the deeper exploration of what cities are for and how they function, is strong.

When improv goes wrong

The Friendship Experiment, Underbelly, Edinburgh

There’s a relentlessness to Big Wow’s style that just tips the scales. For all that their exasperated straight man and downtrodden goof formula is perfectly honed, we’re never given a chance to breath under a barrage of chaotic gags.

Crying out for cuts

Operation Greenfield, Zoo Roxy, Edinburgh

Their words, scattergun non-sequiturs, are all doubting caution; their bodies are squirming contortions. Rather wonderfully, the rhythm of their movements recalls the stuttering animation of early arcade games, lending a dated quality to proceedings.

‘There’s a show in this’

Sex Idiot, Zoo Roxy, Edinburgh

While Kimmings parades in a series of ridiculously extravagant costumes, from lederhosen to feathered headdresses, the bra and knickers to which she strips are comparatively demure and classy. Underneath it all, there’s a vanity that belies her clowning and public disgrace.

The world rotating around them

Hot Mess, Hawke and Hunter, Edinburgh

There’s real smoothness to Hickson’s dialogue as well. It’s entirely apt, for example, that the quixotic Twitch is quick to translate life into metaphors and similes, where Polo snaps forth blunt realities best left unspoken.

Grey old Luton

Bunny, Underbelly, Edinburgh

Wyatt relates events, amongst a cyclone of tangential offshoots, in relentless jabber of information. Her tone swings between warped pride, defensiveness and borderline self-loathing.

The internet: made for Islam?

iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam, by Gary R Bunt (Hurst & Company, 2009)

But what of the ostensible contradiction between Islam and modernity? Far from being in antithesis to Islam, the internet is entirely germane to a religion that has always been ‘wiki’ in its nature.

Fruitless indignity

Stationary Excess, Underbelly, Edinburgh

As an argument – even as a metaphor – it’s as familiar as a proverb: ‘We work for money for stuff for appearances for what exactly?’ You’ve heard it before, I’ve heard it before and, yet, on we all cycle.