Burton Taylor Studio
4h Week, Tuesday 4 November – Saturday 8 November, 7.30pm

Whenever I go to see a piece of political theatre or theatre with some political implications – be it Antigone or Julius Caesar – I cringe at the thought that the director might forcibly update it to some big political issue of the day, be it CCTV cameras, the ASBO generation, or (in most cases) American foreign policy. Luckily, this time-neutral production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist promises to earn its merit relying mainly upon the play’s comedic brilliance, and leaving the spectator free to make any links to our present situation on her own.

The play is probably the best known by the Nobel laureate Dario Fo. It is based on a real event in 1969, when an anarchist protester, accused of being involved in a bombing massacre previously that year, died in police custody, falling to his death from a fourth story window of a police station in Milan. By the time Fo wrote the play the truth was emerging: the attack was in fact committed by the Italian far-right in a ‘red terror-esque’ scheme aimed at placing blame upon the politically emergent communists. Fo uses a pointed mix of farce and absurdity to expose the alleged complicity of the police and state in the affair.
A Maniac (Johnny Rhodes) is a prisoner held at the station, who manages to convince the policemen that he is a magistrate investigating the eponymous accidental death. As the policemen bend over backwards to explain the increasingly incriminating evidence the Maniac produces, the humour of the resulting situations ranges from the superintendent telling “What’s bad about a dead baby” jokes to pure slapstick, such as the loss of a glass eye, which is then slipped on. This production exploits the grotesque potential superbly: there are false limbs aplenty and we even get a full Scooby Doo style chase at one point.

The play’s attack on the authoritarian understructures of modern politics may feel a bit black-and-white at times. The characters are neatly divided into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, with a dogged, “democracy-loving” journalist on one side and a pack of corrupt cops on the other. Still, this modern classic contains some cutting material, which is excellently conveyed by Polar Bear’s production.

4 Stars

Written and directed by Helen McCabe, The Last Train Out of Here is a brand new script which seeks to explore familial relationships and an intricate love triangle as they reach their climax in one emotionally charged night. Except they don’t quite.

Set in a small town in East Lancashire, the play explores the relationship of two brothers, Rob (Andrew Bottomley) and Sam (Tom Bishop), and their new step-sister Nikki (Prudence Buxton), while articulating Rob’s overwhelming desire to escape from a town where he doesn’t belong and break out into the real world. Things are further complicated by Rob’s feelings for Nikki, who he has been sleeping with for the past month, and the revelation that it is in fact his brother that she is in love with. Throw the discovery of letters between Rob and Sam’s parents which make the boys familiar with past events they had been oblivious to into the mix, and it is hardly surprising that the play ends with a dramatic confrontation and suicide attempt.

Prudence Buxton gave a strong performance as Nikki, while both boys tended to fall flat at times. Part of the problem was a lack of chemistry between the characters, although this became less apparent as the play went on. The relationship of older and younger brother was stretched too far at times, with Andrew Bottomly an overly awkward, ‘good’ older brother, and Tom Bishop rather too petty and childish as the younger brother. However, the heart-to-heart of the final scene revealed both as good actors able to capture with poignancy their characters’ struggles with identity.

The last scene was certainly strong, but would have been more powerful if there had been a clearer build-up of tension. Instead, much of the beginning of the play seems to focus upon the three teenagers arguing simply for the sake of portraying the clichéd ‘dysfunctional family’ backdrop upon which the play clearly depends. The script is also sloppy at times, repeating details which we have already been told. And the box from which the revelatory love letters were produced could have done with being bigger, to make the audience believe that they had been concealed at the bottom. These may seem minor points, but the proximity of the audience to the actors in the BT make details like this extremely visible. Aside from this point, however, the set was very good and the staging well choreographed.

It is subject matter which has been treated before, but this did not make McCabe’s script less honest. Although melodramatic at times, it was also a powerful exploration into many of the difficulties which teenagers grapple with in their private lives. Enjoyable may not be the right word to describe a play which was hardly cheerful, but it was compelling. And as an audience member commented at the end, ‘That’s just like a scene out of my house,’ suggesting that elements of McCabe’s portrayal resonated with us all.

3 Stars

Now in its twenty-second outing and with a sixth Bond actor cemented in the role, the longest-running franchise in cinema history continues with the premier of Quantum Of Solace this Wednesday.

In light of the phenomenal critical and commercial success of Casino Royale, the highest grossing Bond film to date and Daniel Craig’s first outing in this career-defining role, expectations are greater than ever. Casino Royale offered a return to form for a tired looking franchise, staggering under the weight of poor scripts and un-inspiring, dull performances. Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of this change has come from the casting of Daniel Craig, whose portrayal of Bond allows for a turn to the darker side of Bond – much more in keeping with the character envisaged by Ian Fleming. Craig has made the role his own. Not only is he probably one of the finest stage and screen actors of his generation, he is also far more importantly undoubtedly the best wearer of unfeasibly small blue shorts (many have tried the same feat and failed) in cinema. In Quantum Of Solace Daniel Craig has the chance to move one step closer to the mantle of, probably the best ever Bond, that dangerously cool Scot, Sir Sean Connery.

Away from our leading man the supporting cast in Quantum Of Solace presents an array of new talent and stellar performances from true screen legends. Our two new Bond girls, St Trinian’s Gemma Arterton and the obligatory James Bond Russian Olga Kurylenko, are two relative newcomers sharing screen-time with the weight of two cinema greats, this year’s Cesar winner Mathieu Amalric, playing the token James Bond foreign bad guy, and of course our very own national treasure, Dame Judy Dench who reprises her role as ‘M’. Behind the camera too lies a plethora of talent. The new director Marc Foster of Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland fame and the two time Academy Award winning screenwriter of Million Dollar Baby and Crash pens his second successive Bond film to name but two.

With such a weight of on and off camera pedigree it is no surprise that Quantum Of Solace continues with the same momentum of Casino Royale, starting just one hour after the end of its predecessor and the death of Vespa Lynd, the drama and intrigue rolls on from Craig’s first outing as Bond. The costs were bigger, the explosions are bigger and somehow even Daniel Craig got bigger, and behind this bluff lies the sentimentality and subtlety of a very good actor creating a very different and exciting Bond. He might not care how he drinks his martinis now, his quips might have lost some of Connery’s misogynism and his “Bond, James Bond” might miss that Scottish slur, but Bond is back and its star, Daniel Craig, continues this fantastic revolution of a forty-six year franchise. Bond is back, so roll on Bond 23. Happy Viewing.

The transposition of graffiti art from the urban jungle to the gallery wall is often a lazy, uninspired one, redolent of both slapdash GCSE projects and local authority youth outreach schemes, so I came to Cuban artist Jose Parla’s debut UK show with some trepidation. When I discovered that his following includes Eric Clapton, Tom Ford, and the international doyen of cheap, mass-produced, consumerist ‘art’ himself, Takashi Murakami, my fears were only increased. Art that attracts celebrities, particularly when those celebrities are as dull as Clapton, as vapid as Ford or as heavily associated with the very worst aspects of contemporary art as Murakami, should set anybody’s critical alarm bells ringing. When he says things as pretentious as ‘we believe ourselves to be on the cusp of evolution but perhaps we are only experiencing an involution’ or as downright obvious as ‘the marks on the walls of our cities are perhaps a testimonial, like scars of a wounded civilization’ it gets difficult to approach a show like this with anything other than abject dread.

Yet approach it I did, and was glad I had at least attempted to do so with a fairly open mind, because Parla’s art, when left to speak for itself, free of celebrity endorsements and his own navel-gazing balderdash, is really rather special. Parla spent his formative years in Miami and Puerto Rico, trained as an artist in Savannah, Georgia, and began his graffiti career in 1985 in New York, where he still lives and works. There really does seem to be a sense in which the characters of all the places Parla has lived his life are tangibly present in the pieces he presents in Adaptation/Translation. Grey and beige backdrops play the role of weeping New York concrete, and underpin every scene without overpowering any one. They are necessary for the life of the works, but do not seek to dominate. Transcending the near-monochrome of the backgrounds, sometimes merely puncturing it, often obscuring it almost entirely, is a riot of colour that seems to evoke New York graffiti less than it does the vibrancy of Florida and the Caribbean, where Parla spent his youth.

Parla’s art’s real strength lies in a feeling, pervasive throughout, that what the viewer is looking at is somehow deliberately divorced from any specific truth; everything in this exhibition is suffused with a certain unreality that is simultaneously unsettling in its falseness, and comforting in the anonymity it offers. This is so because Parla’s works only superficially appear to be real pieces of graffiti. Those New York concrete backgrounds are in fact nothing of the sort, they are mere impressions of the real thing, made on wood and board. These aren’t graffiti-covered walls, they are, defiantly and self-consciously, images of graffiti-covered walls. Whilst real graffiti is about singular displays of identity, expressed through tagging, the ‘writing’ on Parla’s pictures forms only contorted, unreadable calligraphic messes, only ever suggesting real words or statements, and often obscuring legible writing beneath. Yet this continual emphasis on an absence of reality never makes for an absence of truth; the lack of language in Parla’s works only universalises them; they could have been inspired by graffiti on any wall in any city. The pieces that make up Adaptation/Translation transcend any single spoken language; like Rothko and Pollock before him, both of whom he evokes, Jose Parla’s works establish their own visual code of communication, with which they speak both to the viewer and, most powerfully, to each other.