Camden People’s Theatre. There’s an impossible challenge in the name. The people of Camden include everyone from the residents of leafy Hampstead and Primrose Hill, the inhabitants of neglected council estates in King’s Cross, students in new flats ringing Bloomsbury, the tourists who traipse through Covent Garden, worlds away from the relative suburbia of Gospel Oak and Tufnell Park.
No one theatre that could encompass all the history and contradictions housed in the streets that surround it. But ‘Whose London Is It Anyway?’ is a festival of performance, talks and games that comes close, by reflecting and cutting through all the social and political intricacies of where we live, and why.
Rebecca Briscoe wrote, in a recent blog arguing for fewer theatres, that “In buildings you can choose to hide, or indeed the default is that you the artist are hidden.” Her vision is one of closeness between artists and their environments, of taking to the streets.
And that’s something that the festival is good at. Coney’s Adventure One patterns a game narrative onto the contested spaces of the City of London. Richard DeDomenici’s The Death of Social Housing is a funeral procession/DIY protest march through the streets of Camden, which are lined with the graves of council estates demolished or sold off en masse.
There’s a hint of modish psychogeography to these performances – they evoke Guy Debord’s ideas of space, his concept of the derive — loosely, a wander, a late 20th century reimagining of its early 20th century rural equivalent, the ramble, but tied to a new weight of artistic creation, of boundary-crossing transgression. But there’s also a kind of political weight: by wandering through London, you’re forced to pay attention to the dynamics of who owns what space, of private squares and public housing jostling together without ever quite touching.
Forgotten Camden Walks
Abandoned columns from St Pancras station, found on Tom Bolton’s Forgotten Camden Walks.
I started the weekend on Tom Bolton’s walk, a perfect primer on the complexities involved in talking about space, both from an academic perspective, and from a historical one. Who defines the stories we tell about space? Who shapes how we behave in it? These questions are massive. They defined my primary school geography project on Streatham High Road, where we traipsed up and down, marking the betting shops and charity shops on felt tip on graph paper, unaware of the street’s illustrious past and the music halls and theatres that used to line it. Dismissed as A1 (shops), A3 (restaurants), A4 (pubs), A5 (takeaways) — with the odd joyous D2 (leisure, aka the much mourned Streatham bowling alley/Zapp Zone) our area became literally two-dimensional and dull.
But here’s no such thing as dry fact, only dried fact: information with the juicy stuff squeezed or blotted out of it by uninspired teachers or councils with zoning agendas. Big landowners are doing their best to sanitise King’s Cross, to pave over its chemical ooze of rave culture, drug culture, glue factories and slaughterhouses. Tom Bolton’s guided tour drew attention to these attempts, and to the fact that any attempt to describe a place and its history is a political act.
“Is there anything special about this place? In its own right, I mean?” Asked one of our group, as we paused in a run of the mill 1980s council estate, well-kept, red brick, plonked down in King’s Cross instead of Barking or Stoke or Strathclyde only by some quirk of divinely-uninterested fate. The site it was built on, we’d been told, teemed with history: “Ague Town”, it had been nicknamed, a grim slum that haunted the consciousnesses and sometimes consciences of the Victorian public.
Yes and no.
Local historians trade in “hidden histories”: this place had an invisible history, with not even the faintest visual trace to match the teeming archives of mid-Victorian editorial frothing and hand-wringing about its unlucky inhabitants. Unless you believe in ghosts or unquiet spirits (and there is something about psychogeography that borders on romantic superstition, on leylines and imaginative traces) restoring or evoking its memory can only be part of a deliberately constructed narrative.
Architect Joan Soame’s tomb in St Pancras Old Churchyard. In the distance, new apartments rise.
Earlier on the walk, we’d seen prettier sights. Tom seemed almost embarrassed by the greying beauty of St Pancras churchyard – an ancient pocket dating back to Roman times, hidden but well-storied. He hurried us to its furthest edge, to look at the Eurotunnel lines and to meditate on the ungainly piles of bones that had been evicted to carve them out of the earth – in the same process, over a century before, Thomas Hardy had been hired to see these remains were treated respectfully. His point was clear: a century on from Victorian ‘progress’ and its mass displacement of the living and dead, nothing and everything had changed.
I hung back, chatting to fellow walker Paul (a little, unreasonably worried that he’d struggle to match our pace) and he confided, with pride, that he was a trained tour guide. Informed me, with the most restrained professional glee, that Tom had neglected to indicate the grave of Lady Edith Coutts, benefactor and Christian memorialiser of the disturbed graves.
Rival authorities presided over the walk from that moment on. Paul was alternately humbled (by Tom’s endless torrent of facts, his unflappability under a notebook-carrying student’s requests for precise dates, by his readiness with an apposite literary quote) and prepared with contributions of his own. Paul’s narrative was one of poverty, beautified: old wounds, healed. Tom drew attention to the deep cuts and divisions that still ran through Camden – a fascinating, oddly moving perspective on a fractured borough.
The Lowland Clearances
The Lowland Clearances. Photo: Jamie Harper.
Back to the Camden People’s Theatre, with a sense of the rich area it sat in. But inside, Lowland Clearances was beset with the same questions of authority – who’s leading? It’s a live action roleplay (LARP) – a kind of game where the “audience” are anything but passive observers.
The rules and origins of LARP are as debated and storied in online forums as Ague Town is in history books. Essentially, they’re a kind of user-created play with no audience, improvised by its members — who might be costumed, fully realised entities: or, as in this case, a group of about 20 people in a theatre basement, making a ramshackle world from cardboard and post-its.
The first half of the experience is a slow-paced but engrossing exercise in world-building. Each participant creates a “house” from the available chairs, along with cardboard, scrap fabric, rucksacks, and junk. We develop characters based on photos, and tentatively describe our new identities, relearning how to play.
It’s amazing watching a distinct identity for our invisible town take life around the prompts we’re set: a bizarre, neo-Victorian civilisation of cobbled streets, abandoned factories and herbs sold from village apothecaries. And as it forms, we’re introduced to the fact that some of our number are actors. It’s a brief, passing moment: but one which destabilises the dynamic of the second half of the experience. The play becomes freeform, as we go about our jobs. But it’s hard to forget that the actors aren’t really playing: they have agendas they have to pursue. “I’m going to build a railway!” my nextdoor neighbour announced, even though her character was a nurse, and she’d offered no prior signs of being an ambitious Victorian industrialist.
Other actors would bustle off, mid-conversation, to “do some plot”. It was a disconcertingly rootless experience: you could cook up whatever schemes you liked with the other players, but fundamentally it was the actors who defined what happened. The railway was built, as was the school. It was hard to invest in a drama of displacement that had been built to eliminate risk and chance: part of the point of allowing the audience to play is that you’re giving them the chance to destroy your game, to miss your point, to royally fuck up and learn something different.
This Is Private Property
This Is Private Property. Photo: Helen Murray
This Is Private Property had some of the same imposed agenda: hard to be told, not made to feel, that you care. But where Lowland Clearances’s long playing time let you build your own intimacy with your ramshackle house, This Is Private Property developed intimacy by force.
It’s a kind of performance supergroup, four CPT favourites were marshalled by CPT artistic director Brian Logan into a DIY journey through the London property market. This was protest theatre, with all the ramshackle charms and pitfalls that implies. Performers fluffed their lines, brimmed over with earnest enthusiasm, got lost in weird cul-de-sacs, or came up against brick walls of audience unamusement. We got: a Kafka-esque housing office skit, a freakonomics analogy for the housing market using chairs, traded and sold, the tale of a woman, “Ruth” and her desperate attempts to get a council flat. “We don’t want to live in Birmingham”, sung her baby, in a brilliantly surreal, bluesy lament.
But the intricacies of the housing crisis were lost in a black-and-white picture that set up real life property mogul Candy on one side, and the performers on the other. The spectre of “foreigners” owning London homes was conjured as an abstract bogeyman, estate agents were bashed for their opening hours (rather than their fees or deceptive selling practices), and the points system for council housing was made as surreal as a late-night game show.
The performance created a kind of assumed, didactic community between teacher/performers and audience members – with no room for us to hold our own views on what we saw. But it’s impossible to draw clear lines through the London housing market – as futile as trying to walk a straight path through the tangled railway lines and cul-de-sacs we found in King’s Cross.
Where Will We Live?
One of the (many) strengths of Where Will We Live? was that, as a verbatim performance, it divided the audience, made us look inwards. I couldn’t help, afterwards, looking at my own complicity in the thudding anger and frustration it raised, split and fractured into the viewpoints of residents of a fast changing Brixton: a vibrant cross-section of local councillors, residents, activists, shopkeepers, hairdressers and street-hawkers. The voices weren’t immaculately mimicked, Alecky Blythe-style, but they felt so familiar: the sounds of the people I grew up around in South London. My parents moved from the slightly leafier climes of Streatham to the outskirts of Brixton in the late nineties, back when cab drivers wouldn’t head South of the river late at night and memories of the riots that had careered up our road were still fresh. What’s now been cheerily branded as “Brixton Village” was a maze of groceries, African tailors, wax-print fabric shops whose wares I’d stroke, longingly, pet shops, and butchers that joked “You want me to cut that up for you?” as I scurried past, clutching a freshly-purchased birthday rabbit in a box.
People are flocking to a different kind of Brixton these days, where young bankers sip champagne and shuck oysters in the market at night, or load up on small plates. I don’t look out of place there, now, even though sky-high rents have meant I wouldn’t even think about hunting for my very own Brixton address. And returning to favourite teenage haunts I feel “part of the problem”, self-conscious as a tourist.
Gentrification is personal: it makes just existing in a space political, and forces you to consider your own class, ethnicity, your level of complicity in a system that’s chewing up and spitting out anyone without the capital to sail through it. And that’s what Where Will We Live Now? was so brilliant at realising. Right from an intro where performers sailed onto the stage, dancing to the rhythm of drums as a woman described the rush of euphoria she gets coming out of Brixton station.
Brixton is a storied place, star of its own songs (Eddy Grant’s improbably feelgood hit ‘Electric Avenue’ immortalises the riots), its own myths, its own status as spiritual home of the UK’s Caribbean community ever since the Empire Windrush brought over the first wave of Jamaican migrant workers in 1948. Walking through the sunken pathways of Windrush Square used to mean passing lines of young guys who’d mutter “skunk” in your ear – left untroubled by a police policy of decriminalisation – or unbenign neglect, depending who you ask.
Now, as two performers dressed as street hawkers describe, the square has been cleaned up, levelled off and raised so it can be surveyed from all angles. But “They can’t get rid of us”.
The emotional core of the performance is the fight between the residents of council estate Loughborough Park, and the Guinness Trust that’s doing its best to evict them to an uncertain future – out of Brixton, out of London entirely. Appropriately, the part of courageous tenant Marian is played by Ayesha Casely-Hayford, a qualified solicitor who brings heart-rending power to her court battle to stay in the city.
The story is incredibly immediate — Marian only won the right to be housed in the borough at the end of November. And playwright Elisabeth Winkler’s ingeniously woven script hasn’t trivialised Marian’s suffering. But she’s treated it with a lightness, setting a real howl of protest to the beat of Brixton’s streets. It’s a work that’s tied to the rhythms of real peoples’ lives, without being weighed down to them. And I felt something in me lift and respond, to let loose all the anger and emotional punch that had been simmering in me all weekend.
The relationship between arts and gentrification isn’t simple. There’s an age-old narrative of artists being enticed into cheap areas, attracting bohemians, creating perceptions of safety and affluence – of people being priced out, feeling like aliens in familiar streets. The reggae CD hawkers’ voices complain that the Black Cultural Archives, in Brixton, trap decades of black culture as though it’s finished, dead, but work like this has the power to make voices live and resonate. When OvalHouse moves to the area next year, performances like this are exactly the kind of work that needs to be made to navigate all the deep social divisions it will straddle. Intensely political, and carved from the living streets that surround it.
This Is Private Property and Forgotten Camden Walks are on until Jan 30. The Lowland Clearances is on until Jan 30. For more details of Whose London Is It Anyway?, visit the Camden People’s Theatre website here.
