A Gentleman’s Cultural Leanings #1
On Monday night I went to see some intimate comedy at a drinking club I’ve been going to for a few years called Black’s in Soho. It’s spread over 3 floors of a Georgian house, and rumour has it that Joshua Reynolds and Dr Johnson had traded ideas, blows and beers in the very room in which the comedy was taking place. Panelled walls, flickering candles and a roaring fire.
The comics were Tom Basden and Tim Key. Tim won this year’s Perrier aren’t sponsoring it anymore award at Edinburgh, and he and Tom have worked as a semi double act for years. Their tone captures a wonderful understated Englishness. Each gag apparently stumbled over and bashfully, accidentally delivered- belying the deftness and timing of it all. I suppose it’s generally acknowledged that Richard Pryor is the Greatest Ever Stand Up- and his act is the voice of angry Black America. Tim and Tom’s voices are those of If It’s Not Too Much Trouble England.
Tom performs comedy songs (which always slightly strikes fear into people- all Richard Digance and that song where someone sings Leprosy instead of Yesterday- but they’re really terrific- mainly because a) they’re really short- usually under a minute- and b) his singing voice is really really strong- so instead of that overenunciation that comic singers have to use- ‘LEP-Ro- SEE-’ to draw attention to how clever they’ve been, Tom just belts it out. I can’t do justice to any of them and won’t attempt to explain or spoil any of the jokes. He also read extracts from his novel. Bad writing done well is pretty good: his ambition to find success in each style of fiction- bad romance, bad comedy and bad crime fiction – all good. Find him on YouTube or go and see him.
Tim reads very short poems. It’s lucky he’s not from Hackney or he’d be known as the peddlar of the Hackney Haiku. Maybe he is. Maybe I’ve just saved some sub editor half an hour of pun based research. Tim’s delivery is very deadpan but occasionally he shouts a line as loudly has he can, which is a great choice. He can’t help himself from explaining what a poem is about half way through reading it- in a little aside- which constantly draws attention to his faux pomposity as a poet. He’s incredibly funny.
They also showed a 20 minute film they’d made a year or so ago, about a lottery winner who pays a top singer songwriter to perform a concert for him, alone on a remote island. Really affecting and very funny.
On Tuesday I went to see the new Roy Williams play Category B at the Tricycle in Kilburn. It’s the first of a trilogy of plays by black British writers- the other two by Kwame Kwei Armah and Bola Agbaje. It’s set in a Category B prison- the first stop for all offenders in the prison system. A great deal of posturing and well observed status games and violence, and some terrific performances, notably from Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as a new prison officer and Karl Collins as long term inmate Errol.
My dissertation at university was about prison drama so I’m hyper critical. The theatre is a great place to show prison life because it’s small, you’re constantly aware of time, and no one’s going anywhere. What the play failed to do was to really get underneath the feeling of incarceration. Dialogue was hurried and snatched and there was no sense of the endless silences of prison life- the endless feeling of time passing. And there was quite of load of really bizarre shouting. It doesn’t really work to shout as loudly as you can ten seconds after coming on stage. It’s just weird.
Wednesday I went to The Bush Theatre to see If There Is, I Haven’t Found It Yet. Written by a 25 year old, Nick Payne, who still has a day job at the National Theatre Box Office. It was a mesmerising play, incredibly well performed by a cast of four, including Rafe Spall and Pandora Colin. Spall’s Uncle Terry arrives unannounced at his brother’s house with a track record of fucking things up, and starts to fuck things up, particularly his 15 year old overweight niece- an incredibly good Ailish O’Connor. Spall’s brother, played by Colin Begley, is an environmentalist trying to work out whether Man’s ridiculous capacity for fucking up the planet means he is worth saving or not. Meanwhile his family is collapsing. The conclusion of the play sees him realise that his love for his family actually means that yes- there’s hope for humankind. I think. I realise this sounds pretty crass but it reduced the mother next to me (not my mother, that would be a weird way to refer to her) to tears for about half an hour. It’s a brilliant play. It’s running for about three more weeks. See it.
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