Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel at Battersea Arts Centre

For reasons I do not quite understand (fire and covid excepting) I had not been to Battersea Arts Centre for several years and I was very glad to go back.

What pulled me back was Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel or, to be more precise, the reviews I read of it on Twitter. The final straw was a tweet from Dan Rebellato (playwright and Professor of Contemporary Theatre) which I read late at night and booked the show immediately afterwards.

The show has been selling very well and the best seat I could get was at the end of the second row (B1). It was a Pay What You Can event and I went for the recommended £14.

Things had changed a little since my previous visit, in particular the bar has stopped doing food, other than pizza, which was bit of a shame. Still, the beer was very nice.

The show was in the former Council Chamber on the first floor, a delightfully grubby space.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel is a difficult show to describe, as the name suggests. The obvious things are that it is a one-person show written and performed by Tim Crouch which mixes observations on theatre with stand-up comedy. But that tells you nothing important.

The show starts with Tim describing a theatre during a performance, commenting on the prices of the seats, the type of people in them and what they are up to before moving on to the play itself, King Lear Act III. The play takes a turn for a weird when Tim points to the fool and explains that he is the actor playing that role. It turns further when he describes the cars parked outside of Gloucester's house.

The story sort of went from there with Tim switching between guide and himself (?) indicated by the wearing and removal of a virtual reality headset. As himself (or the performer of another role) he commented on the state of theatre and threw in a few jokes, ending on quite a good one about a penguin.

Somewhere he asked the question, "Who is saying these words", and while the answer, "I am", was factually correct it was of little help as the "I" was open to many questions.

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel may sound something like a dog's dinner (poor pun intended) but the elements worked well together and the show both entertained and stimulated in large amounts. I don't know what it was, but I liked it.

E15 at Battersea Arts Centre was a brutally honest look at the Housing Crisis

I had not been to Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) for a few months and I was happy to correct that error with E15, an overtly political play with the strap-line Social Housing Not Social Cleansing.

The £12.5 price tag suggested a shortish play and at around 75 minutes that was clearly good value. For that I got seat A11 in the middle of the front row, my favourite spot.

Despite being banished to work in Teddington BAC was still easy to get to with a mainline train taking me to Clapham Junction which just left me the short walk up Lavender Hill.

I got there in good time, about an hour or so before the show, which gave me time to enjoy some of the delights of the Scratch Bar which include an interesting and satisfying meal, a bottle of beer with a nice label and a window seat to spy on the world from. Later I had a coffee too. Front of house is important to me and is one of the strengths of BAC.

E15 was staged in the former Council Chamber, basically a large room with some stadium type seating in one half and the other used as a performance area. The staging was dramatic with the three walls festooned with political banners and the floor covered in chalk slogans that the cast were busy adding to as we entered. Someone else was shouting more slogans through a portable loudhailer. We were immersed in the action from the very start.

The story of E15 was based on the Focus E15 campaign which was started in September 2013 when a group of young mothers were served eviction notices by East Thames Housing Association after Newham Council cut its funding to the Focus E15 hostel for young homeless people.Four young mothers and a young man told us how they came to be in the hostel. All were vulnerable, all relied on benefits to live and all had strong connections with Newham. All were decent honest people who deserved the help they needed.

The play took us through their campaign, which had its ups and downs. Driven by need they had come together to fight for the right to live locally, rather than joining the 68,000 people rehoused outside of London every year, away from the places and people they know and away from whatever support structures they had. It was a brutal story with some brighter moments such as when they decided to hold a children's birthday party in a developer's show home.

I went to see E15 for the politics and there was plenty of this. In particular we could see the impact on real people of the government's policies enacted by local councils. I also hoped to be entertained and E15 did that too with a well constructed story and a good cast who made me care about what happened to them.

I signed their petition on the way out, I think everybody did, and would have thrown some paper at them if they had had a bucket to collect donations in but I failed to find one so I made sure to give them some money online.

It is a crime that plays like E15 are necessary in this day and age but they are necessary and more people should see them. These stories need to be told.

The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland at Battersea Arts Centre was engrossing

A play called The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland is obviously going to pique my interest and the description of it only made me more determined to see it.

The venue for this event was the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) which has a reputation for doing different things and doing them well, as my visit there only two days previously had shown.

I had to work in Reading that day but that proved not to be a problem as the train I get back to Richmond goes on to Clapham and the show was not due to start until 8pm so I had plenty of time to get there. The only risky bit was leaping off the train at Richmond, the limit of my return ticket to Reading, to check in on my Oyster card. Luckily, planning had nothing to do with it, there was a red Oyster card reader just by where my coach stopped and so I was able to check in and get back on to the same train.

Arriving at BAC in good time for the show also meant that I had plenty of time to eat something first. I went for something small and spicy which was good and good value. I had a beer too.

Then it was time to go upstairs to the former Council Chamber for the show. The excitement started on the way up as we were split into two groups with half of us going into one side of the chamber and the other half into the other side. The two sides were separated by just some boarding and some curtains. There was a door in the flimsy wall.

The story started on our side of the wall with a strange conversation between a mother and her two grown-up sons. They talked about domestic things like food but in an odd way and with repetition.

Then one of the sons went through the door to the other side and started talking to a doctor that we could not see but could hear clearly. This new conversation was unrelated to the previous.

The word "schizophrenia" was a clue as to what was happening but it was more complicated than that.

The two rooms may have represented two sides of one person but if we were looking at somebody's mental illness then it was not clear whose. Three of the four characters exhibited multiple personalities.

Things were complicated further when the doctor / patient conversation in the other room mentioned schizophrenia and the patient said that he knew that the proposed treatment had eradicated schizophrenia in Western Lapland because that was the name of the play that they were acting in.

There was a break after which we swapped sides so  moved from the house to the surgery. The story repeated some of what we had heard in the first half and then went further without becoming any clearer, and I am sure that was the point.

The conversations had some funny moments as well as strange ones, especially when the patient (if that is indeed what he was) told presumably delusional stories about his genius that included going to university aged nine. These conversations grabbed my attention while the confusion weaved its web around me.

It was quite some experience though quite what sort of experience it was I am finding hard to say. There were some characters and some fragments of a story but they were deliberately kept apart to create a mood rather than a narrative.

Whatever The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland was, it worked. I found it thoroughly engrossing and excitingly different.

The Paper Cinema's Odyssey at Battersea Arts Centre was magical

I have been fed a steady drip of Greek theatre in recent years and each interpretation has had its own flavour of quirkiness. The Paper Cinema's version of the Odyssey was as quirky and inventive as they come.

I went to see it at the Battersea Arts Centre and, as with Orpheus the previous year, the seating was arranged with cabaret seats at the front with normal tiered seating behind. This time I went for a cabaret seat and the cabaret package of food and drink that went with it.

But first I had to get there. I arranged to work in London that day and took the Northern Line down from Kings Cross to Clapham North which gave me a nice walk to BAC and the justification for a beer. With two shows on that night the bar was busy and the staff were struggling to cope. It was a long wait to get served (being English we had formed a queue but they insisted that we changed this to a free-for-all along the bar).

In addition to my beer I also ordered my food and drink for the show and took great care to use the word "vegetarian" as much as possible. It did not work and I got the standard meat and fish version of the meal anyway and by that time it was too late and the bar was too busy to try and do anything about it, so I have the best of a bad job.

I am not sure what I expected from The Paper Cinema but if I had thought about it then I could probably have worked it out from the name.

The main technique used to tell the story was to move paper cutouts in front of a background drawing and this was projected onto the large screen on the stage.

This picture, taken after the show, shows the performance area in the bottom-left corner and the final image on the screen.

The technique was similar to that used by TV animations like Captain Pugwash but with a lot more sophistication.

There were no spoken words and the few projected on to the screen were chapter headings and character introductions. Music took the place of words and there was a small band playing along to the action, much as in the silent movie days (so I am told!). There were also sound and lighting effects, for the storms etc.

These were all simple components but they meshed together neatly to make a compelling storytelling environment.

The paper figures were the star of the show and there were two people keeping everything moving along at a brisk pace. Seated as I was near them, it was fascinating to see them at work constantly changing and moving the paper cutouts to produce a visually stunning and very attractive show.

I liked the story too, especially as it had an unexpected happy ending - my knowledge of Greek legends is not that great and most of the ones that I know are tragedies of the greatest order.

The Paper Cinema's Odyssey was very effective entertainment and it was impossible not be captivated by the storytelling. I left very happy.

Ring at Battersea Arts Centre was dark, really dark

Ring at Battersea Arts Centre sounded sufficiently weird and unusual that I had to go.

The promotional blurb suggested that it was an unreal sound journey in complete darkness. There was so much about that brief description to like, complete darkness for a start.

The evening started well and I found a new route from Clapham Junction to BAC which took me behind the main road past Lidl and Boots. I do not think that the route is very much shorter but by avoiding the busy junction by The Falcon it is certainly easier.

The evening continued well when I arrived at BAC as I was in plenty of time to get some food and grab a pint. I even managed to get one of the tables on the raised section of the bar which somehow felt separate from the rest of the room.

There were other shows on at BAC that night and Ring was staged in the former Council Chamber upstairs. I had admired the scale of the room on a previous visit but had not imagined that it would be used for performances.

Come the time we were ushered in to the room which was arranged as if to watch a game, something like chess, being played. There was a gap down the middle of the room and the rest of the space was filled with chairs facing the centre.

As we took our places our host spoke briefly to  few of us and took a few names. This, it transpired, was part of the show and we were led in to it carefully and subtly that it was only afterwards that all of the cleverness could be understood.

The chairs were fixed a little distance apart and we were told to move so that we were not sitting next to anybody that we knew. Hindsight says that this was so that we could not reach out for reassurance during the show.

Word of mouth (e.g. Twitter) and good reviews had done their work and every seat seemed to be taken.

We also did a light, or rather a dark, test. The room was made completely dark, I was surprised at just how complete the darkness was, and we were told that it would be like this for an hour and that if we were uncomfortable with that then that was the time to leave. One person moved closer to an exit just in case.

We were given headphones to wear and out host continued to explain what would happen. Somewhere along the way the host's voice stopped coming from him and came from a recording instead. From then on all we heard was through the headphones and we say absolutely nothing.

The scenario that we were led in to was that of a self-help group, hence the Ring, and we heard the other members of the group talking. The audio was amazing in that it sounded completely natural with a depth of sound as well as width. We also had one person whispering in our ear. It was all very effective.

Remarkable though the set-up was it would not have worked unless the story worked and it worked very well. The other people sitting in the Ring talked and argued so that we were quickly immersed in their histories and passions. The details of the story did not matter, it was the mood, the energy and the tension that held me spellbound until somebody slowly put the lights back on. There was a murder in there somewhere which gave a dark turn to our story in the dark.

I went to see (?) Ring because it was different and loved it because of the way it immersed me in its intrigue.

Return to the Voice at Battersea Arts Centre was reassuringly haunting

The Battersea Arts Centre is my sort of place, I just wish that it was a little closer. The main hall is host to a wickedly diverse range of shows, I've not been to a "normal" play there yet, and the lovely building also has a welcoming bar area that is the ideal place to go before a show. This time I had a beer and a burger both of which hit the required spots.

I was there to see Return to the Voice, which I had forgotten was a concert. What attracted me to it was the promise of a work inspired by ancient Gaelic and Scottish music, including laments for death and love, psalms and songs of exile. It helped that the group behind it were called Song of the Goat Theatre and they came from Poland.

Every show I've seen at Battersea has been different and so has the seating arrangement. This time it was surprisingly standard with normal chairs laid in slightly curved rows on the flat hall floor facing the raised stage. No racked theatre seating for this one. I managed to grab a decent chair in about the fourth row just to the right of centre.

The show opened with a solo song presented from the platform built at the front of the stage. They were joined musically by a solo musician playing something like a Uilleann pipe, i.e. a small single pipe fed from a bag inflated with bellows.

Then the other singers. I did not count them very carefully but I think that there were ten of them, five men and five women. They sang a series of short ballads, mostly a cappella, in a language that I did not recognise, not that that mattered. What did matter was the mood of the music and that was as lyrical and haunting as I had hoped it would be. I am not at all familiar with modern Gaelic music so the only near comparison I can give is Enya.

There were a succession of songs, each I would guess at around the standard album track length of four minutes. There was a lot of group singing, some more soloists and the pipes made a reappearance too. There was even some movement but nothing like enough to be called dancing, it was more a readjustment of the pieces on the stage as the music changed.

It was well off my usual beaten track musically but I enjoyed it immensely none-the-less. Perhaps it was my Irish heritage reminding me that it was there.

Joyous Orpheus at Battersea Arts Centre

I was hoping for something a little different when I went to see Orpheus at Battersea Arts Centre and that is exactly what I got and I had a fabulous time with it.

The main theatre was divided in to two parts with the front section transformed in to a Parisienne cabaret bar in the 1930's and the rear arranged with traditional theatre seating. Some of the audience was seated in the cabaret section watching the show and the rest of us were in the theatre seats watching them and the show.

To complicate things further the cabaret act performed a musical version of the Orpheus (he of the Underworld fame) so we had a story within an act within a bar within a theatre.

The final complication were the intervals. There was an interval in the theatre when everything stopped and also an interval in the act where the musicians carried on playing and some of the audience in the bar started dancing.

It was all a little weird but it was also very original and it worked superbly.

The cabaret was hugely entertaining with all the musicians playing and acting with gusto. It was all nicely over the top to properly capture the mood of the cabaret. The performance was packed with neat touches such as the minimalist props used to indicate the woodland animals at the start of Orpheus' story.

It was light without being frivolous and there were some scenes of heavy drama too, such as Orpheus' climb out of the Underworld to the accompaniment of pounding drums.

I never knew that a Greek tragedy could be so much fun.

The Red Shoes at the Battersea Arts Centre

It was a late decision to go and see The Red Shoes at BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) and it proved to be a wise one.

BAC is just a quick train to Clapham Junction and a short bus ride up Lavender Hill yet this was my first time there.

I've been to Clapham many times but have normally got no further from the station than the Falcon. I also spent some weeks there in 1992 campaigning (unsuccessfully) for Labour from an office almost across the road from BAC so at least I knew where it was and what it looked like.

The interior of the building is rather fancy, if not quite as grand as it once was, and houses various social spaces. These include the Grand Hall, a spacious informal theatre crafted from what looks like a former assembly rooms. There is an old stage at one end of the room but this ignored and hidden under seating in favour of a small stage in the round.

I like intimate and unusual theatres and BAC scores on both counts.

The space suits The Red Shoes well as the story is very much told to the audience in the knowledge that we are there watching.

I do not read reviews before shows as I'd rather be surprised and make my own mind up. And so it was that I had no real idea what sort of show this was going to be. It soon transpired that it is a pantomime for grown-ups.

It tells a typically gory fairy-tale in a typically gory way but laced heavily with humour, a narrator to guide us and a splash of audience involvement (nothing quite as crass as "behind you!).

The small cast fight for and play a mix of roles that are then indicated with the briefest of costume changes and, for example, a suitcase proclaiming that the carrier is "The Girl".

The Girl was played by a girl but the two women were played by men. All spent most of the time in their underwear. It's that kind of show.

It's also an excellent show.

A great deal of care and attention has been paid to the little details in the script, staging, music and performances to make a rich texture from what is, essentially, quite a thin story about a pair of shoes that go wrong.

But the obvious labour is not laboured and the story skips along without overplaying it's hand or trying to pretend to be something that it's not.

The cleverness of the show would not be enough by itself and its the fine ensemble performance that makes The Reds Shoes a special show. And the layout of the BAC really helps here by bringing you close to the action.

The enthusiastic ovation at the end was well deserved. It was a Saturday afternoon very well spent.

The journey home was as easy as the one there, though I did take a little detour via The Falcon! I'll be keeping an eye on the schedule at the BAC now in anticipation of repeating the journey before too long.