Earlier today Postcards... was having one of those desultory flicks through bookmarked MySpace pages seeing if any bands were playing live soon, and came across this rather excellent five track studio video of the pretty excellent John et Jehn. I first came across the band at Shunt and wrote a rather ambitiously flowery article about them for the Guardian Music blog (posted below), which for one reason and another I never quite got around to sending. I've been meaning to write a post about them here ever since, but have never been all that happy with the stuff that could have accompanied it. But I reckon this video gets closer than most to capturing something of what I saw at Shunt – with the added advantage that it makes them look like something out of Katie Mitchell's Attempts... (if you're going to have aesthetic preferences, Haydon, make sure they're predictable)...
(If you're pushed for time, I reckon the second track, starting at about 05:15 is about the best shot and most listenable)
The below was originally written for blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/
As a theatre critic I don’t generally get to see many bands playing live, so I was pleased that after Unlimited Theatre’s excellent The Ethics of Progress at the Shunt Vaults, there was also a live band. John et Jehn are French. They’re also a couple. Their music live sounds like, well, like the most comprehensive tribute to my record collection that I’ve ever heard. It’s all there, in glorious live monochrome; imagine Siouxsie Sioux fronting the Stranglers, playing the Clash, with lashings of Joy Division, Johnny Cash, the Cramps, Nouvelle Vague, the Glitter Band (before such comparisons were a dirty word) and God knows who else thrown in for joyous good measure - then you’re about halfway there. I’m not sure I’ve ever been at a gig which contained so many people just smiling broadly at their sheer good luck at happening to catch such a great band.
The strange thing is, listening to them afterwards on their MySpace page, and the odd promo video on You Tube, only a fraction of the brilliance of the live article comes across. Granted, my tinny laptop [told you it was an old article] reduces even the most complex sonic engineering to something that sounds like Crass playing inside a biscuit tin, but I think there’s something more significant at play here.
What is crucial about John et Jehn is the performance. The band have an absolutely arresting stage presence. Imagine the White Stripes if they’d been invented by Tim Burton. John is all painfully thin and ill-looking; a sort of four-way cross between Lux Interior, Ian Curtis, John Cooper-Clarke and Paul Weller. Jehn, by contrast, looks like a feral Audrey Tautou cut with equal parts of Wednesday and Morticia Adams. While John is all laconic, dismissive French wryness, Jehn's onstage presence seems carved from raw sexual passion.
This is “playing live” of a whole different order. Here we have drama, passion; a pair of performances that cross cathartic display with a display of ongoing, unstoppable sexual attraction. I’ve seen a fair amount of faked sex on stage in my time as a theatre critic, most of it pretty dreadful; this was the first time I’ve ever felt like the I was watching the raw human desire that actually drives people into bed.
But, crucially, it was also performance. This was two artists who knew a thing or two about stagecraft. This wasn’t just two people who fancied each other annoyingly having to interrupt their sex-life to play a gig, it was perfect theatre. And, Jesus, was it effective. Rather than two people standing on stage, looking into the crowd playing their instruments, the audience sees interaction, a real dynamic, and human desire. There’s also a neat line in understated cool and a very Gallic irony at play.
Theatreland has been making some pretty extensive, and often ill-advised borrowings from popular music in recent years. John et Jehn prove that live music stealing a couple of good ideas back is long overdue.
Showing posts with label Shunt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shunt. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Friday, 25 January 2008
Off the beaten track
This week I seem to have contrived not to see any of the major openings at all, so far. And you know what? It’s kind of nice. I sent other people to the National and to the Hampstead for CultureWars to see Happy Now? and The President’s Holiday, while the nice PR people for The Sea could only offer me a ticket on Thursday night, for which I already had a reviewing gig booked in - of which, more later - with the short notice prevented me from getting anyone else to go. I am, however, seeing The Vertical Hour, on Saturday afternoon - well after press night - and am fascinated to find out in which of the impossibly polarised “love it”/”hate it” camps I end up (for what seems like a pretty fair appraisal, try Charles Spencer, who is always at least candid enough to put all his cards on the table and foreground his preferences).
Anyway, the net result is that I have caught a few shows that have so far eluded national broadsheet coverage this week. On Wednesday night I headed over to the Shunt Vaults, ostensibly with the aim of catching Simon Kane’s Jonah Non Grata, following the ringing endorsement from Chris Goode. I arrived at about nine and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my £5 entry fee entitled me to wander into all three pieces showing that night, free run of the (mostly reasonably priced) bar, and the chance to witness what I can only describe as a kind of avant garde “intervention” in said bar: - at eleven the lights went out, the PA system started playing very loud, horrible music - well, noise really - and a man appeared silhouetted in the doorway, naked and covered from head to toe in mud. Spotlit, he then proceeded to have buckets of viscera pour on him from the ceiling. Then, as he wondered across the bar, further viscera, then sand, rained down on him and any bystanders unlucky enough to be standing too close (seriously, if you’re in the Shunt Vaults Bar at about eleven, do check the ceiling above you before deciding on your vantage point). The whole thing took maybe three or four minutes, and was quite amazing to witness - exactly the sort of thing that every experimental avant garde bar should have.
On Thursday, I got to catch the afternoon performance of Point Blank Hotel, the new production from a group of Dartington students, one of whom had been in the rather excellent Tea Without Mother (11th para) at the NSDF a couple of years ago. Although essentially a scratch performance, there was still much to intrigue in this bizarre forty minute tale of a young woman condemned to work in a hotel owned by sadists and lunatics. It’s not a bad little bit of work. Yes, there is room for improvement, not least in the lighting department; and the multimedia film elements could perhaps do with a little more cinematic panache; but the what the piece does achieve very well is instilling a profound sense of unease. Scenes with the hotelier’s wife wielding a lethally sharp meat cleaver and footage of the young maid’s eye bleeding combine to evoke a kind of David Lynch-type atmosphere of not-quite-placeable nastiness. (Note to self: stop using David Lynch as a default reference, even when it is obviously the main influence. People will think you’ve only seen four films.)
On Thursday night I had the misfortune to witness An Audience with the Mafia for the FT. I’ll link to the review if/when it goes online. Suffice it to say that if for any reason you were contemplating popping along, reconsider immediately. It is without doubt the worst thing I have ever seen in the West End, and one of the three worst things I have ever seen in a theatre in my life. The fact I got paid to sit through it barely makes it any better.
In other news, did anyone else catch the wholly witless item about the Arts Council cuts on You and Yours on R4 this lunchtime? It really was very bad indeed. The chap from the Arts Council was allowed to make a series of baldly mendacious claims, unchallenged by an apparently unbriefed and credulous presenter. They then wheeled out the utterly useless Rosie Millard (erstwhile worst theatre critic in the world when at the New Statesman - the woman who started her Drunk Enough To Say I Love You review thus: “The title of Caryl Churchill's new play is also its first line.”) who trotted out some unverifiable claims about artists having a sense of entitlement and “why should taxpayers subsidise the arts anyway?” claptrap, without even the intellectual rigour to sound like she’d even thought through the position. Sam West was hauled out to oppose the motion, and though speaking beautifully and restraining his probable urge to punch La Millard hard in the face, did rather spoil the counter argument by setting out too vigorously, sounding a bit like he'd oppose every funding cut ever, as a matter of principle, rather than forensically pinning down the Arts Council on its myriad procedural failures and the sheer slapdash nature of the rushed-through botch-job of proposed cuts and the shamefully short time allowed for appeals, not to mention the even more ludicrously brief window allotted to making final decisions.
Following my NSDF post, I’ve stayed off the subject of the funding cuts as much as possible, mainly because so many other people were writing regularly on the matter that an additional voice would have been both superfluous and liable to contribute to compassion fatigue. But since I’ve now brought it up, I’ve been wondering lately if anyone else finding the basic tenets of the new McMaster report irresistibly reminding them of the following... (forward to about 1:40)
No? Just me, then.
Anyway, the net result is that I have caught a few shows that have so far eluded national broadsheet coverage this week. On Wednesday night I headed over to the Shunt Vaults, ostensibly with the aim of catching Simon Kane’s Jonah Non Grata, following the ringing endorsement from Chris Goode. I arrived at about nine and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my £5 entry fee entitled me to wander into all three pieces showing that night, free run of the (mostly reasonably priced) bar, and the chance to witness what I can only describe as a kind of avant garde “intervention” in said bar: - at eleven the lights went out, the PA system started playing very loud, horrible music - well, noise really - and a man appeared silhouetted in the doorway, naked and covered from head to toe in mud. Spotlit, he then proceeded to have buckets of viscera pour on him from the ceiling. Then, as he wondered across the bar, further viscera, then sand, rained down on him and any bystanders unlucky enough to be standing too close (seriously, if you’re in the Shunt Vaults Bar at about eleven, do check the ceiling above you before deciding on your vantage point). The whole thing took maybe three or four minutes, and was quite amazing to witness - exactly the sort of thing that every experimental avant garde bar should have.
On Thursday, I got to catch the afternoon performance of Point Blank Hotel, the new production from a group of Dartington students, one of whom had been in the rather excellent Tea Without Mother (11th para) at the NSDF a couple of years ago. Although essentially a scratch performance, there was still much to intrigue in this bizarre forty minute tale of a young woman condemned to work in a hotel owned by sadists and lunatics. It’s not a bad little bit of work. Yes, there is room for improvement, not least in the lighting department; and the multimedia film elements could perhaps do with a little more cinematic panache; but the what the piece does achieve very well is instilling a profound sense of unease. Scenes with the hotelier’s wife wielding a lethally sharp meat cleaver and footage of the young maid’s eye bleeding combine to evoke a kind of David Lynch-type atmosphere of not-quite-placeable nastiness. (Note to self: stop using David Lynch as a default reference, even when it is obviously the main influence. People will think you’ve only seen four films.)
On Thursday night I had the misfortune to witness An Audience with the Mafia for the FT. I’ll link to the review if/when it goes online. Suffice it to say that if for any reason you were contemplating popping along, reconsider immediately. It is without doubt the worst thing I have ever seen in the West End, and one of the three worst things I have ever seen in a theatre in my life. The fact I got paid to sit through it barely makes it any better.
In other news, did anyone else catch the wholly witless item about the Arts Council cuts on You and Yours on R4 this lunchtime? It really was very bad indeed. The chap from the Arts Council was allowed to make a series of baldly mendacious claims, unchallenged by an apparently unbriefed and credulous presenter. They then wheeled out the utterly useless Rosie Millard (erstwhile worst theatre critic in the world when at the New Statesman - the woman who started her Drunk Enough To Say I Love You review thus: “The title of Caryl Churchill's new play is also its first line.”) who trotted out some unverifiable claims about artists having a sense of entitlement and “why should taxpayers subsidise the arts anyway?” claptrap, without even the intellectual rigour to sound like she’d even thought through the position. Sam West was hauled out to oppose the motion, and though speaking beautifully and restraining his probable urge to punch La Millard hard in the face, did rather spoil the counter argument by setting out too vigorously, sounding a bit like he'd oppose every funding cut ever, as a matter of principle, rather than forensically pinning down the Arts Council on its myriad procedural failures and the sheer slapdash nature of the rushed-through botch-job of proposed cuts and the shamefully short time allowed for appeals, not to mention the even more ludicrously brief window allotted to making final decisions.
Following my NSDF post, I’ve stayed off the subject of the funding cuts as much as possible, mainly because so many other people were writing regularly on the matter that an additional voice would have been both superfluous and liable to contribute to compassion fatigue. But since I’ve now brought it up, I’ve been wondering lately if anyone else finding the basic tenets of the new McMaster report irresistibly reminding them of the following... (forward to about 1:40)
No? Just me, then.
Jonah Non Grata - Shunt Vaults
First draft
Simon Kane’s solo performance piece Jonah Non Grata is a remarkable little show. Taking as its starting point the Biblical story of Jonah it creates an abstract impression of the narrative using diverse elements from a Choose Your Own Adventure book to a bunch of mad little songs.
The show stars with the audience packed into a tiny concrete cell close to the entrance of the Shunt Vaults. Kane makes his entrance zipped inside a laundry bag, shuffles and rolls into the space, and disentangles himself to the sounds of ukuleles playing O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Kane is an enormously engaging presence - friendly but with enough edge to keep one slightly uncomfortable. He makes a convincing modern vision of a Biblical prophet, which is essentially the ‘character’ he is ‘playing’ here.
“I am a double act. Half of that act is me who tonight will be played by us.” he tells us. It’s pretty clear that the implied other half is God. The brilliance of this first section is the way in which it reminds us of the Sunday School God of whom many of us have a basic recollection, but here viewed through a prism which, while never naming its subject, deconstructs it through a series of absurd devices until one is left with a sense of the absolute strangeness of the idea of a God, what we are told about Him, and the what we do with the information. At one stage we all rise to sing along with a hymn, which includes the following verses:
O dust. O might. O Trilobite,
Come wash my senses black and white
For my senses are all cut down.
Surround me with three thousand spears
Evolve big death rays from my ears
So no bitches can do me in.
It gets exactly to the heart of what all hymns are essentially saying, and yet is utterly barking mad. At the same time, it is stirring stuff, and even through the nonsense, it still seems to conjure the same God as that of Blake or Milton in some intangible way. There is still the sense of mystery, wonder and grandeur in spite of the strangeness. A tape player repeats the word: “Scourge”.
The second section sees us move from the cramped cell into the Shunt lift and then out the other side into the figurative belly of the whale. Kane covers his head in a porridgy whale-insides-like viscera and warbles in a high pitched voice. The word “scourge” crops up again and reminds us that the general title Jonah and the Whale is a bit of a gloss. After all, kooky detail though the whale is, it merely serves as a cute aside in a story about a religious fundamentalist instructed by God to go to a city with which God is displeased and tell them to mend their ways or face obliteration.
In the third part, having gone back through the lift, we arrive in Nineveh with Jonah, who promptly books into a hotel and starts phoning everyone in the phone book to tell them God’s message, shouting: “You're dead. You should have believed him when he told you he loved you” into the handset. At one point, Kane goes out of the main Shunt entrance and screams the same message at passers-by on London Bridge station, while wearing a dressing gown and cradling a gutted fish in his arms. The show concludes with a song about Sonic the Hedgehog, which somehow manages to make Sonic sound like a perfect metaphor for human free will set against God’s agency in the world.
In many ways, though, it feels wrong to pin the thing down so closely to some of its apparent source material. After all, this is theatre doing what it absolutely does best - creating abstractions and making metaphors while remaining baffling, funny, frightening and hugely entertaining; allowing the mind to be led and at the same time to explore the explosions being triggered in its synapses. This is a glorious, astonishing show. Absolutely essential viewing.
Simon Kane’s solo performance piece Jonah Non Grata is a remarkable little show. Taking as its starting point the Biblical story of Jonah it creates an abstract impression of the narrative using diverse elements from a Choose Your Own Adventure book to a bunch of mad little songs.
The show stars with the audience packed into a tiny concrete cell close to the entrance of the Shunt Vaults. Kane makes his entrance zipped inside a laundry bag, shuffles and rolls into the space, and disentangles himself to the sounds of ukuleles playing O Fortuna from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Kane is an enormously engaging presence - friendly but with enough edge to keep one slightly uncomfortable. He makes a convincing modern vision of a Biblical prophet, which is essentially the ‘character’ he is ‘playing’ here.
“I am a double act. Half of that act is me who tonight will be played by us.” he tells us. It’s pretty clear that the implied other half is God. The brilliance of this first section is the way in which it reminds us of the Sunday School God of whom many of us have a basic recollection, but here viewed through a prism which, while never naming its subject, deconstructs it through a series of absurd devices until one is left with a sense of the absolute strangeness of the idea of a God, what we are told about Him, and the what we do with the information. At one stage we all rise to sing along with a hymn, which includes the following verses:
O dust. O might. O Trilobite,
Come wash my senses black and white
For my senses are all cut down.
Surround me with three thousand spears
Evolve big death rays from my ears
So no bitches can do me in.
It gets exactly to the heart of what all hymns are essentially saying, and yet is utterly barking mad. At the same time, it is stirring stuff, and even through the nonsense, it still seems to conjure the same God as that of Blake or Milton in some intangible way. There is still the sense of mystery, wonder and grandeur in spite of the strangeness. A tape player repeats the word: “Scourge”.
The second section sees us move from the cramped cell into the Shunt lift and then out the other side into the figurative belly of the whale. Kane covers his head in a porridgy whale-insides-like viscera and warbles in a high pitched voice. The word “scourge” crops up again and reminds us that the general title Jonah and the Whale is a bit of a gloss. After all, kooky detail though the whale is, it merely serves as a cute aside in a story about a religious fundamentalist instructed by God to go to a city with which God is displeased and tell them to mend their ways or face obliteration.
In the third part, having gone back through the lift, we arrive in Nineveh with Jonah, who promptly books into a hotel and starts phoning everyone in the phone book to tell them God’s message, shouting: “You're dead. You should have believed him when he told you he loved you” into the handset. At one point, Kane goes out of the main Shunt entrance and screams the same message at passers-by on London Bridge station, while wearing a dressing gown and cradling a gutted fish in his arms. The show concludes with a song about Sonic the Hedgehog, which somehow manages to make Sonic sound like a perfect metaphor for human free will set against God’s agency in the world.
In many ways, though, it feels wrong to pin the thing down so closely to some of its apparent source material. After all, this is theatre doing what it absolutely does best - creating abstractions and making metaphors while remaining baffling, funny, frightening and hugely entertaining; allowing the mind to be led and at the same time to explore the explosions being triggered in its synapses. This is a glorious, astonishing show. Absolutely essential viewing.
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