Reviews PerformanceReviews Published 13 April 2012

Forest Fringe: Day 3

9th - 21st April 2012

Chris Thorpe with Tom Penn, Lucy Ellinson and Steve Lawson.

Diana Damian Martin

Forest Fringe has settled in well at the Gate; the third evening, featuring work from Chris Thorpe, Tom Penn and Lucy Ellinson with Steve Lawson on guitar, felt naturally uneven, politically charged, formally playful and defiant of any theatrical paradigms.

Thorpe’s What I Will Do When They Come To Take My Guns, initially presented at the Edgelands Conference hosted by Forest Fringe in 2011, is a response to William Piece’s (pseudonym Andrew Macdonald) The Turner Diaries. Written in 1978 by the former leader of the National Alliance, an American organisation advocating white hegemony, the novel, set in the near future, tells the story of a similar organisation overthrowing the US government through guerrilla war and economic sabotage to achieve white supremacy. It’s openly racist, anti-Semitic book whose tone of certainty struck a chord with Thorpe. His response piece is an exercise in such absolutism with a piercing motif that returns throughout the story: “I want to write like the fascists do”. This almost rhythmical repetition blunts any attempts to attach a narrative per se into the story, capitalizing on its uncertainty and deliberate violence in tone and imagery to examine and challenge not only political confidence, but its side-effects.

Thorpe’s daily ritual involves him taking all the things out of his pockets; phone, wallet, keys and whatever random items have managed to find their way. He has a certain confident aloofness which allows him to really play with his own engagement with the writing. At times, playfully dismissive and at others entirely gripping. In the case of What I Will Do.., there’s a refusal to embody any specific character despite the clear presence of one in the story. This is not, I gather, for fear of association but to create a space where the story can change shape and meaning, can mold. This fluidity of tone is a potent particularity of What I Will Do…, because it invites the audience’s imagination to interpret, whilst at the same time, the absolutism that frames the story means meaning surfaces abruptly.

Thorpe has crafted a space in which he can play with the implications of his reading act. His second short piece of the evening, There Has Possibly Been an Incident, is written for three voices, out of which he only reads one. In his words, it’s a study on heroism, but also one that takes account chance, and through evocative and inquisitive character-based writing, attempts to engage with the iconography of war and revolt. In its human detail- the character in the story returns to his awareness of holding a bag of shopping, as he’s been caught in this crowd in which he feels he’s the only person, it manages to dig its way into a situation whilst navigating several possible territories. Thorpe’s precise performance recalls imperative moments of silence and stillness that change the pace of the story. The steady wave of paper falling from his hands as he progresses through the reading is reminiscent of divergent moments in the story. It’s a powerful text that inherently contests the way we anticipate meaning in imagery, and the way we attempt to create consensus and essentialise moments of conflict in order to gain a better grasp and comfortable distance. The absence of the two other voices in the story is certainly felt; there’s something incomplete about the text which although effective in the context of the evening, would undoubtedly add to the effectiveness of the piece. Thorpe’s resistance to that resolution, in both his pieces, is challenging and astute.

Tom Penn’s Some Things are Lost is a complete turn around in tone following Thorpe’s brash and deliberately violent, but still humane pieces. Penn is a much softer performer, easing us into his story which recalls two moments he shared with his father. It’s a story about loss, but one that, albeit at times cunningly manipulative and overtly-emotive, is nevertheless moving. Penn creates two spaces onstage; the first is an area with a microphone, brightly lit by a spotlight, and the other, more intimate, of violent light. This division is something he engages with throughout the story, weaving different tones and narrative turns into the particularity of the stage. In his drawing of a map of memories onstage, Penn’s work recalls Alexander Kelly’s own retelling of an adventure in the footsteps of his grandfather to Cape Wrath, which was performed on the first evening of Forest Fringe’s residency.

Penn’s first film at the cinema was The Lion King, a motif that he returns to throughout the story, as he also experienced it for the first time with his father. He begins his piece by singing – via overtly specific descriptors- the opening of the film, and then embarks on telling a story about his relationship with his father, embodied by his own personal history and reflected in the moment Penn felt he lost everything. In its immediacy, it’s a moving piece, although its constituent elements, however intriguing and potent, don’t quite fit together. There’s a layer needed that the story doesn’t have, perhaps because in its confessional form, it suffers from too much decorating of detail and plush emotiveness. The bareness and openness with which Penn narrates can be very moving, and it’s that honesty which finds a comfortable home in the context of the evening. That being said, Penn’s generosity as a storyteller makes for a strong atmosphere and evokes a subtle tenderness to his writing.

Lucy Ellinson’s Torycore was another, more aggressive, awesome and brash intervention, with Thorpe on guitar and guest musician Steve Lawson. A happening in three acts, it saw George Osborne’s budget speech read out to the tunes of Death Metal, alongside the names of companies and individuals who are contributing the privatisation of the NHS.

With the audience standing, loud music and genuine anger, it was a thrilling experiment in protesting, albeit slightly blunted by its own correctness. It worked best when the screeching noises and screaming vocals joined forces in dissonant unison, and there was a real sense from the audience of wanting to join in. Torycore was slightly tame Death Metal; at times it felt in need of some darker undertones to purge that speech of all its nonsense for, as Ellinson put it, our un-enjoyment. As this was Ellinson’s first public encounter with Death Metal, it’s not surprising that there was a sense of restraint to test the waters. But for a fusion so fine as politics and metal, it was thrilling, a public cleansing ritual. I hope there’s a future to Torycore, one even less restrained, louder and with that same momentous fury.

Day Three of Forest Fringe’s residence at the Gate was thrillingly unpredictable, politically charged, challenging and malleable, so who knows what encounters will take place and what ripples they will cause over the coming week.

Forest Fringe will be in residency at the Gate Theatre until 21st April 2012. 

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Diana Damian Martin

Diana Damian Martin is a London-based performance critic, curator and theorist. She writes about theatre and performance for a range of publications including Divadlo CZ, Scenes and Teatro e Critica. She was Managing Editor of Royal Holloway's first practice based research publication and Guest Editor for postgraduate journal Platform between 2012-2015. She is co-founder of Writingshop, a long term collaborative project with three European critics examining the processes and politics of contemporary critical practice, and a member of practice-based research collective Generative Constraints. She is completing her doctoral study 'Criticism as a Political Event: theorising a practice of contemporary performance criticism' at Royal Holloway, University of London and is a Lecturer in Performance Arts at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Forest Fringe: Day 3 Show Info


Cast includes Chris Thorpe with Tom Penn and Lucy Ellinson.

Link http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/

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