The skin game... Trade, Pleasance Theatre and on tour

This is a story told from inside out, a narrative swirled around a single character looking back from a pivotal moment as she explains herself to an audience close enough to see the whites of her eyes, the sick on her shirt, the blood on her trousers. There’s no place for the audience to hide in the Pleasance’s downstairs theatre and crammed in on three sides the audience were simply outnumbered and overwhelmed by the three players on stage as we looked into their eyes and saw only Sarajevo, Yugoslavia and the London nobody will admit to knowing.

 I didn’t know until I bought the book after the show that this was Katarina Novkovic’s professional stage debut, the second show of the week long run at the Pleasance… her second ever gig. She is so strikingly assured you’d never know it, switching the mood and holding the play together with forceful assurity, completely within character, pulling us into the moments. She is joined in this seemingly effortless alchemy by Eleanor Roberts who’d been in the play’s debut at Central St Martins and the run at last year’s Vault Festival, and Ojan Genc (recently seen in the excellent Slow Horses). Between them the three play many characters and create a dramatic experience that is both exhausting, humbling and, in parts, very funny.

 Yes, Trade is remarkably varied in tone for a play about human trafficking but as Katarina’s character, Jana, counts the tens, hundreds and thousands of days she’s been away from her home and family, she shows much resilient humanity and her jokes are not just about breaking the mood as adapting to horrendous circumstance and enabling her to survive. 

Katarina Novkovic (all photos from Ali Painter)

Written by Ella Dorman-Gajic, who is of Serbian and Austrian heritage, Trade is dedicated to a single story out of the millions around the world who are the victims of modern slavery and part of the play’s script sales goes to Unseen, a charity supporting such victims in the UK. The numbers in slavery are greater than at any point in history and estimates put over 100,000 people in this country in this position including many in forced sexual exploitation, 99% of which are women and girls who, in the cases of Jana and her sister Katarine (Eleanor), are of similar age to my daughter.

The play doesn’t take any easy routes to making its points though, this is a fierce entertainment that pulls you in and leaves you breathless by the end when Jana’s full journey is finally revealed. It’s not a binary world by any means and the worst of it is almost unmentioned as we focus on Jana’s head stretched to keep above the swirling depravity of her daily experience. 

The play opens with her every inch the “professional” as she later says, taking a call from some punter for one of the girls she helps manage. There’s a loud knock on the door and the police shouting through threats as she smiles us back to her teenage years working in the family grocers with her mother and younger sister. Jana is smart, almost fluent in English as she helps to tutor her sister. 

Katarina Novkovic and Ojan Genc

She meets a boy, Stefan (Ojan) who has come in looking for potatoes and the two bond over a cabbage, as you do. Their romance develops and the two plan to go to London, a place she has always dreamed of, plans are made and the two head off, Jana promising to see her sister soon. Once they reach Sarajevo, Jana soon discovers that everything is not at all as she was led to believe along with those of us who probably had too large a supper at the Depot Deli next door.

The moments of the first assault are horrifically quiet as the play lets our imaginations do the hard work as Jana’s bright white clothing is covered in a splash of deep red blood, she loses her virginity to the first of many men. It’s brutal and her casually resigned exposition only serves to underline how her life has been viciously removed from her control….

From there onto the UK via the sea, a gut punch given recent announcements, these are indeed some of our “invaders” … Once in London Jana’s routine of cleaning and sex work gets into a deadening groove and her escape is blocked off by her handler, Nicola (Ojan again), remind her that they know where her family and especially her sister lives. She’s trapped and yet resilient enough to find a means to survive within this horror; playing a version of herself that meets these men in terms of cunning, refusing the help of a journalist because she knows it will get her nowhere. 

The deeper she goes, the deeper she gets but there will be a reckoning… won’t there? Survival is complicated.

Eleanor Roberts 

IThankYou rating: **** Superbly directed by Maddy Corner, this is a play that pulls you into another world and continuously wrong-foots expectations and it will haunt me for days. Unsurprisingly it won an OFFIE Award and there will be many such garlands for this cast and this crew in the years ahead. 

Props too to stage designers Natasha Gatwood, Timothy Kelly and Kristina Kapilin for an impactful backdrop and artistically integrated captions that make Trade accessible to both d/Deaf audiences and native Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian speakers.

Trade runs at Pleasance Theatre until 25th March, Full details are on the Pleasance site.

It then moves on, click the links for ticket information: 

Nottingham Nonsuch on 1st April

Exeter Phoenix on 6th April, 

Birmingham Old Joint Stock from 7-9 April and

Norwich Arts Centre on 13th April. 

 

The Unseen website is here to find out more about modern slavery and human trafficking in this country; it’s here and there are people like Jana working throughout our economy, only a few paces away from our daily normalities, if we're lucky.

You can also order the Trade paperback from Salamander Street publishing with 10% of the sales going to support Unseen.

Tainted love… Medea Electronica, Pleasance Theatre

"I grieve for the woman I once was, naïve, open-hearted…”

Part gig, part theatre, the electro-musical Greek tragedy we’ve all been waiting for even though we never expected it… Mella Faye blew our socks off and set them alight as we watched in stunned silence. Like so much of London’s “fringe” theatre the Pleasance specialises in surprise and invention unfettered by the same commercial concerns of the West End – not that they don’t need a plentiful paying audience! But it’s the spectacularly unusual shows such as Pecho Mama's Medea Electronica that will ensure that the theatrically-curious will find their way to this superb complex nestled between Camden and Islington.

The play combined the buzz of both – a knowing and expertly-constructed musical populated by the kind of rare grooves you could have heard in the Electric Ballroom or Dingwalls, coupled with the theatrical verve of Upper Street.  Mella Faye’s voice carries a deliciously folky catch in the throat and is like a rougher-edged Liz Fraser, especially with ethereal double-tracking as she emotes over Alex Stanford synths and Sam Cox’s electric percussion. The three are indeed a band, called Pecho Mama, and to prove it they were even selling t-shirts and CDs afterwards.

Their music is so precisely of a period that I’d guess at 1982-85 even though I’d been expecting something a little more 1989, this was a deep groove to explore from an era when synth pop re-invented the torch song with vocalists such as Marc Almond, Alison Moyet and Phil Oakey… full disclosure; I saw Heaven 17 a few weeks ago and they’re still mighty.

Alex Stanford, Mella Faye and Sam Cox - photo Katrina Quinn

This period synth pop reflects the placing of Euripides' 431BC play in Thatcher’s Britain and the greed-is-good mentality of Medea’s husband, Jason East, who seems to have gone off the rails following the death of his father. He spends an increasing amount of time away from home, working long hours and supposedly dealing with his grief.

The family had moved from London to Bedfordshire and Medea has her hands full with their two young children Michael and Peter, especially the former who struggles to adapt to his new school. There’s a lot of love on show and the sound design from Simon Booth is superb as Mella Faye acts to disembodied pre-recorded voices with seamless conviction.

Jason’s true reasons for his absence are soon painfully evident as is his plan to disengage his wife from his life and family… but, this is a play based on a Greek tragedy and his wife, as she warns, will make him wish he’d never met her.

Mella Faye, photo Katrina Quinn

It’s a simple but powerful story that is told boldly and with so much invention, working as an electro-pop-opera with fascinating music as well as drama - a splendid platform for Mella Faye’s singing, acting and mime. It’s a primeval storyline with no modern compromise but, as Faye says, it invites the audience to be on Medea’s side and, despite the things she does, we do indeed want “to will her on, and to want her to succeed.” Is that just the music talking or are we still emotionally “Greek” in response to base betrayal?

Medea Electronica runs at the Pleasance until Sunday 23rd February 2019 before continuing elsewhere in the UK and abroad - full details are on the band/theatre company’s website.

IThankYou Theatre rating: ***** You won’t see anything quite like this all year: dramatically different and you will want to buy the album too!

Love, light and peace… A Sockful of Custard, Pleasance Theatre

Spike Milligan single-mindedly liberated our funny bones for a half century or more, he was the missing link between the Crazy Gang and Beyond the Fringe, a soldier blown up so high in the Second World War that he said he never really came down. 

Spike defined a comic sensibility that was as rock ‘n roll as Elvis or as be-bop as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.Why did The Beatles work with George Martin? Well, part of it was down to his having produced records for The Goons and for the lads as so many others from post-War to baby boom. His was a comedy that liberated itself from formula as surely as be-bop and rock shook free from big bands and manufactured pop. It was a very democratic mind-set, anyone could do it, well, anyone if they were funny enough and, in the case of this Lewisham lad, capable of genius-level silly.

Take Spike Milligan out of British comedy and you end up with less Peter Sellers, an unbearably smug Pete and Dud, Monty Python with no dead parrot and Ricky Gervais either still working selling paper or, at best, flogging minor New Romantic hits on the heritage circuit, bottom of the bill below Haircut 100. Spike’s was a major discontinuity in comic style and, together with other equally talented but perhaps not quite so inventive, he helped change the way we laughed for ever.

In the year of his hundredth birthday, Chris Larner and Jeremy Stockwell put their heads very close together, but not so close as to entangle their beards, and devised a cunning play of some 4.5 metres in length to answer the question of the custard, the sock and much-many more.

A Sockful of Custard manages to convey the essence of Spike without the restrictions of a straightforward narrative; it’s controlled playfulness masking the joyously hard graft of its component players.

Jeremy Stockwell

Jeremy Stockwell plays Spike Milligan and, as with his stint as Ken Campbell, shows what an excellent mimic he is… Spike is so specific that you just have to get him right and, opening the show shrouded in a sheet, Stockwell bravely takes on two of Spike’s iconic voices from The Goons. He nails it and the laughter starts to flow down from the cheap seats in the Pleasance’s Stage Space only to be reflected back Spike-style – by the two performers whose improvisations are so adept and sincere.

Interrupting our dreamy beginning Chris Larner, playing himself or someone slightly taller, strides on stage to direct proceedings by laying out cards which will form the basis of the narrative. There are 4.5 metres of instructions and Jeremy wonders if that’s just too long… It’s the two working out their structure and making a feature of the sheer difficulty in conveying Milligan.

They move from themselves to their characters with masterful ease and always direct to audience. That fourth wall is well and truly trampled especially as a glamorous redhead, let’s call her Catherine, is pulled on stage to help fold Spike’s sheet: it’s all part of the warm-hearted chaos Spike revelled in. 

And my better half’s smile as she tried to grab that sheet was so joyously in the moment, exactly what the veteran of 1940-45 would have wanted.

Spike and his Mum!

There was no containing Spike and after what he had seen, he was clearly convinced that laughter was the only way forward. I hadn’t been aware that he’d performed in Oblomov, at the Lyric Theatre and that his improvisations had created a record-breaking phenomenon.

As Spike plays the title character resolved to spend his days in bed, Chris Larner switches to the hapless thesp designated to play alongside him. He’s an insecure pro and looks out to his imaginary director repeating “is he…, is he…, is he…?” over an over with subtle intonations as he tries to second guess what the man in charge is trying to get him to ask and act. We’ve all done it but not perhaps Mr Milligan who grew bored of the script pretty quickly and proceeded to improvise the play to over four year’s of sell-out success, only stopping it when he’d just had enough.

The magnificent Joan Greenwood starred in the play and was initially very concerned but the mood shifted with her husband Andre Morrell declaring 'the man is a genius. He must be a genius—it's the only word for him. He's impossible—but he's a genius!'

That last sentence may appear to sum Spike up and Stockwell and Larner’s play is so disciplined in its in-discipline  - or vice-versa – that it conveys the unpredictability and raw unevenness of the man’s comedy and it is genuinely thrilling to watch.

Stockwell and Larner

Both recount their meetings with Spike and the mark he left; he respected his audience and was committed to kindness. He wished for “love, light and peace …” an echo of his early years in India and the post-war hopes for a continually-improved World. Now, as much as ever, we need to believe  in the prospect of happiness.

So don’t be daft, go and see these two marvellous men and their tribute to Mr Milligan; if you don’t you’ll never find out about the custard and the socks. And you’ll never get to feel that spirit in the moment.

A Sockful of Custard plays on at the Pleasance Theatre until May 26th and then transfers up to Edinburgh Fringe 2018 from 1st to 17th August at the Pleasance Dome.

Tickets available at the box office or online. The Pleasance is an excellent venue too – three stages and lots of bars!

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***** Funny, warm and thoroughly engaging. These two work their socks off and Spike is back in the room and he hasn't left me yet...