Thursday 29 January 2015

In praise of Mr Chiwetel Ejiofor

The National Theatre have announced their new season including Chiwetel Ejiofor in Everyman. I last saw Ejiofor in The Young Vic's astonishing A Season In The Congo here revisited

A Season in The Congo At The Young Vic Thursday 11th July 2013

The lights go down suddenly suggesting a tropical power cut and we find ourselves in The Congo as independence dawns. Seated cabaret style in a drained swimming pool with oil drums for tables, The Young Vic is merrily festooned with strings of coloured bulbs, evoking the bright exhalation of independence that too soon will dim to the sinister terror of Mobutu's Zaire.

But that's all in the future and A Season In The Congo begins as independence springs.

Written in 1966 by Aimé Césaire the play recounts the tragic trajectory of Congo's first president Patrice Lumumba deposed in a coup after just twelve weeks in office.

Sporting a crisp parting and perfectly pressed trousers we first meet Chiwetel Ejiofor as Lumumba as a charismatic travelling salesman hawking beer rather than Pan Africanism. With a restless energy and gift for oratory it's clear he is destined for bigger things than beer.

Cheered on by a cast costumed in juxtaposed wax prints with army fatigues, Lumumba's legend grows as does Ejiofor's, inhabiting the role here with conviction as he rebukes the departing Belgians for making "laundry boys" of men and promising to "straighten every crooked thing." Singing a lullaby to his wife he picks sweet guitar lines to soothe her nightmares, but far away rumbles of the changing season and Lumumba's peripeteia can be heard.

Weaving puppetry and music brilliantly into the narrative the direction is as dapper as Lumumba himself, whilst Daniel Kuluuya becomes genuinely menacing as Mobutu and Ejiofor seems to surpass himself with every role.

In a closing scene of gravitas, Lumumba's former friends sit at a table suggesting the last supper and silently pass a plastic basin washing his assassination from their hands and so concluding our tumultuous season in The Congo.

A digital scrapbook part one

A selection of published and broadcast contributions

Reader profile in Songlines magazine

 

 

 

 

Clear Spot Extra at 8.50pm – We Must Dare to Invent the Future – by Lucas Keen

June 26th, 2013 · 

Samedirepetition
The Clear Spot is a little short of the usual hour tonight, so it is followed at 8.50pm by a new short documentary feature. We Must Dare to Invent the Futureby Lucas Keen tells the story of the making of an album in West Africa earlier this year for which Keen was supported by the Arts Council and British Council to travel to Burkina Faso. It’s an affirming story of friendship and perseverance told against the backdrop of the crisis in neighbouring Mali.

Radio feature broadcast on Resonance FM




Radio transcript published on British Council Voices

Wednesday 21 January 2015

Picasso in a pickle

A one door farce at Corpus Playroom in Cambridge

A bizarre episode in art history provides the farcical subject for an hour of surreal student theatre complete with quick dialogue and mischief with pamplemousses at Cambridge’s Corpus Playroom until Saturday.

  • Picasso stole the Mona Lisa, billed as a `one- door tragi-farce’, is based on the audacious theft of the iconic Mona Lisa from The Louvre. This absurd incident thus provides excellent material for writer Jamie Fenton. There’s some decent clowning, and a few great lines, and the hot jazz of Django Reinhardt propels our players through this light hour of silliness.

    Showing at the cosy Corpus Playroom until Saturday 24 January, a dishevelled artist’s garret provides the setting sparely furnished with a chaise longue and a covered easel. This is the Parisian boudoir of enfant terrible Guillaume Apollinaire, novelist, poet and sometime journalist who once called for The Louvre to be burnt down and who stumbles through the single door of the `L’ Shaped playroom and into a pickle. 

    That covered easel turns out to be the Mona Lisa, and Apollinairee played by Haydn Jenkins and bohemian buddy Picasso (Yaseen Kader) are baffled as to how the renaissance masterpiece came to be in their shabby apartment. And so the farcical fun begins.

    At this juncture it may be worth explaining the episode upon which this anarchic comedy by it’s own admission is loosely based.

    In September 1911 the world was shocked by the theft of the Mona Lisa from The Louvre. Former gallery employee Vincenzo Peruggia would later cite patriotic reasons for the theft but would evade capture for two years by which time he had returned with the painting to their native Italy and shared his humble lodgings with the most famous painting in the world.

    So how did those two starving artists come to be involved?

    Apollinaire was arrested for aiding and abetting Peruggia whom he sheltered in his apartment and under questioning implicated his friend Pablo Picasso. Nonchalant cubist Picasso unimpressed by Da Vinchi’s masterpiece at one point receives a dressing down from Apollinaire ‘You’re just jealous because your oeuvre is not in The Louvre.’

    The enjoyable posturing pairing of Picasso and Apollinaire are realised well by Jenkins and Kader as skinny and shambolic, and an excellent sepia tinted silent film projected onto the playroom wall showing our hapless heroes attempting to dispose of the painting is a hoot. Colin Rothwell as a gendarme and frustrated art history scholar is excellent.

    Set around the same period but altogether more serious, Albert Camus’ Les Justes also at Corpus (10th-14th February) promises another highlight at this intimate venue where very reasonably priced tickets mean it’s always worth taking a chance. 





  • Commissioned and first published by Local Secrets


Thursday 15 January 2015

`Mama-dada rolls' WHIPLASH a film review

My first drum tutor was forever sympathetic and encouraging, teaching me the rudiments via onomatopoeia. Thus a double stroke roll (right right, left left) became a `mama, dada’ roll.

In Damien Chazelle’s Oscar tipped jazz drama Whiplash JK Simmons plays a conservatoire tyrant and bully personified, determined to push drumming prodigy Miles Teller to his limit at any cost be it violence or exploiting what he discovers of his young charge’s parents. 

Whiplash (the title refers to a jazz standard providing a musical motif throughout) opens with Andrew Neiman (Teller) practicing a single strong roll rudiment that accelerates as our narrative will.  Fiercely focussed but with few friends, Neiman is a student at a top New York music school his only other diversion watching movies and sharing popcorn with his devoted Dad who is as supportive and non- prescriptive as Simmons character Terence Fletcher is cruel and critical.     

In his fitted black t-shirt Fletcher leads the school’s first band and is notorious for his vicious perfectionism, ejecting musicians from rehearsal without mercy. Following a chance encounter Neiman is invited to join the band and so begins a thrilling confrontation between the two.

Shot in just over two weeks, director writer Chazelle makes excellent use of dimly lit subterranean basement rehearsal rooms to lend claustrophobia to the story. At first Fletcher seems reasonable and almost cuddly as in previous hit Juno, coaxing Andrew as he sits eager to please on the drum stool with `not quite my tempo’.  But as quick as the changes on the musical score he segues into a psychopath.

A relationship begins in parallel or maybe that should be paradiddle (apologies for another rudiment reference) providing Andrew with a conflict. He takes his girl on a date to a pizza joint but his idea of conversation is to name the personnel on the record in the background. Somehow though, she’s charmed. 

If there is a single problem with the film it’s that we don’t see this relationship really develop so when Andrew inevitably ends it as a distraction, we are as invested in it as he has allowed himself to become.   

With a brilliant soundtrack and central performances arrived at through method acting (Teller took intensive drums lessons and plays for real in the film) Whiplash considers the rage against mediocrity and asks if it is ever justifiable to push so hard or sacrifice so much. 

Sunday 4 January 2015

Celebrating World Circuit Records

The first Rendez-vous à Bobo of 2015 tells the story of how music from Mali, Sudan and Zimbabwe first visited the U.K and was invited to stay, and of the British labels and DJ's who opened listener's ears.