Find a job, buy a Nintendo
I’ve just finished reading Chris T-T’s lyrics book, Buried In The English Earth.1 I reached the final page just as the local robins and sparrows were telling me it’s dawn.
To mark the end of his pop career, Chris buries his beloved acoustic guitar in a shallow grave, and goes home.
Today I am putting my possessions - a broken ukulele or two, three Doctor Who mugs, some books, flyers for shows that happened years ago - into various boxes and bags, and moving on.
This flat hasn’t been particularly kind to me, but Brighton has. I’ve carved out a life here, and I hope to find somewhere more permanent to put my framed photograph of Ian Bell soon enough.
Brighton Folk Choir at Jack In The Green
Yesterday was Jack In The Green, when many Morris troupes and some inexplicable samba musicians descend upon Hastings for a day of drinking from pewter and engaging in mild disobedience.
It’s also perennially interesting to me that to make a town beautiful and friendly for a day, you need to reclaim the streets from cars, so that we can all walk and scoot freely, and enjoy slightly less air pollution than usual.
We don’t have enough festivals and holidays in England. JITG is one where the old rules melt away for a while, and I can’t figure out if this is a crucial societal safety valve or something that simply keeps us at our desks for the rest of the year.
There was an old man with a horn in a pub where soggy revellers gathered after the procession.
He was blowing it for attention, and to herald his increasingly drunken pronouncements. The crowd became angry. One woman threatened to shove it up his arse.
He wobbled over to our table. “Any other day but today, you and I wouldn’t even be talking”, he said. And he had a point.
As I walked back to the station in the early evening, the young people of Hastings thronged the pavements in the drizzle. Few of them had much to do with the jingling bells, the drumming, and the old songs2 , and now had emerged, to vape, drink, and reclaim the streets.
Brighton Fringe
I’m writing some reviews for Reviews Hub this year, largely as an attempt to force myself to go to as many shows as possible in a slightly more economically sustainable way.
This means I will end up seeing some shows that are not - in my subjective opinion - good.
In recent years, I’ve mainly written reviews for the Star, and I mainly go along to see things that I know I’m likely to enjoy.
In my twenties, I enjoyed writing funny sentences about bad shows3, thinking I was some kind of iconoclast. I’ve long since realised it’s both harder and more interesting to write about things that are good.
So this is a new challenge for me.
Below, I have written about two shows that were not good, and one that was.4 Unnecessary Simpsons reference count: two.
There will be many more reviews to come over the next few weeks.
Brighton Fringe: Linda(?) - The Actors Theatre
A surreal and moving exploration of feminine panic by up-and-coming clown Ellie Brewster.5
First, all we see are a pair of gloves behind a screen. After some emu-style hand antics, which go on (artfully) too long, Linda(?) emerges from her portable curtain, ass-first, to wild applause, and then... and then. What is supposed to happen next?
What happens if you freeze like a rabbit in the headlights? Are a smile and wild, pleading eyes ever enough?
This is feminine catering (in both senses - there is a lot of cake), passivity and accommodation to the point of chaos. Here, this is served to us by a young woman with an expressive, horrified face, dressed in shocking pink, who wants to make sure we’re having a good time even if it kills her.
Wonderful stuff, though some in the audience give the impression they’ve never seen silent clowning before, and take a while to understand how to react.
First in the guise of a psychedelic Lyons waitress (ask your great-grandmother), and then as the glamorous birthday party girl, Brewster offers us cake from increasingly unlikely places, all topped with delicious squirty cream and squirmy audience members.
Her face - Linda(?)’s face - is endlessly fascinating, and carries the first quarter of this show with desperate mugging alone. From here, we’re treated to a physical performance with notes of doomed 1920s servant, a doomed 1950s air hostess, and doomed 1970s Abba fan.
The awkwardness is the point, and the repetition of a seventies classic is the Simpsons Sideshow Bob rake scene with added pink sunglasses and costume change.
This is people-pleasing to the point of hysteria, and Linda(?) leaves heavy questions hanging in the air about the ongoing expectations and performance of gender.
How is a woman supposed to look? How is a woman supposed to act? These are existential questions, but ones mined very richly here, especially during the section where Linda(?) poses for an audience member’s photos. In this era where the young are defined by what they share online more than ever, Brewster’s material throw social media vanity and the infinity of digital imagery into sharp, hysterical relief.
While there are no problems with the show being wordless, there are some minor pacing issues that, when fixed, will help shy audiences along with Linda(?)’s world. The opening, while clearly deliberate, tested the patience of some of the more confused punters, and this could be fixed without damaging the show’s delightfully uncompromising nature.
When things go wrong, as they surely must, Linda(?) is extraordinary. But what lingers is that sense of a character doing what they have been told is the right thing by the patriarchy and society as a whole, to their own evident discomfort and potential catastrophe.
It’s silly, it’s a mess, but it’s also deeply thought-provoking.
****
BRIGHTON FRINGE: Brighton Belles - Laughing Horse @ The Temple Bar
A patchy lineup of Brighton circuit regulars, with awkward, low-energy hosting, mercifully featuring a star turn from the singular Martha Casey.6
Brighton Belles runs throughout the Fringe, offering all-women lineups for a slightly merry, early-evening crowd. Hopefully the night, presumably named after the legendary Pullman train, finds space for non binary, and trans performers. The lineups are not advertised on the Fringe website, so it’s difficult to know what the booking policy or ethos is, other than “female comedians”.
Is this a feminist night? Does “Belles” mean there is a femme vibe? In a less progressive city just having a lineup of women might be enough, but we are in Brighton, and it isn’t. It feels like some bloke has gone “oh I know, women. That’s a theme”.
We’re left none the wiser by our MC, Katherine Kenway, who engages in hangdog audience exchanges about whether we have children (we mainly don’t) and what we do for a living (one of us works in IT).
Kenway is a confident presence, and has some fun and mildly subversive jokes about parenthood, but the role of host is to define the night and control the energy of the room.
Our first act, Rachel Quinn, starts promisingly, especially when she explains how her deafness in one ear helps her tune out specific male obsessions.
Quinn also covers how middle-aged cis women are perceived in culture, a fun bit she could lean into more. Somewhere inside Quinn is a subversive Karen persona waiting to leap out and make a very weird complaint to management.
Steph Aritone, who follows, is in work in progress, storytelling mode, and there is a reasonably diverting story about burglary, and some puns, but not much in the way of jokes. Donna Louise Williams, meanwhile, is lovely, self-aware, and charming, but her material about being gay and from the north feels over-familiar and slightly dated, as Williams is clearly a more complex, interesting and eccentric human than these template-jokes reveal.
Thank heavens for Martha Casey. She arrives to the stage as a riot of hair, swearing, and material about being banned from the Sealife Centre.
Casey has grown massively as a performer over the past year, adding gusto and higher status to her already memorable character and persona of hot mess who is absolutely right about everything. Frankly it doesn’t matter if the audience are on board or not, she’ll plough through anyway. Sensing the confidence, this audience absolutely love it.
There are jokes about nerd culture, curdled heroes (hi JK Rowling), polyamory, gender expectations, and navigating sex and dating in an increasingly complicated world. You get an immediate sense of who this comedian is, and what she stands for, and the added gusto in the delivery - Casey knows these punchlines are good - is the cherry on the strap-on, which she should definitely wear on stage one of these days.
**
BRIGHTON FRINGE: Kate Louis-Elliott: How To Belong Without Joining A Cult (WIP) - Artista Cafe
A Ted-Talk style guide to belonging which never delivers on its kool-aid promise.
Kate Lois-Elliott has had a fairly ordinary time of it so far. She has enjoyed a largely privileged upbringing in the English countryside, works in telly, and will soon marry her boyfriend.
Her parents, meanwhile, grew up in a Christian sect and via Scientology respectively. There is a story here: but Lois-Elliott never convinces us that it’s hers to tell.
As pegs for the canvas structure of an hour long show, the concept of what constitutes a cult is a fruitful one, with endless potential. This, though, is largely wasted.
Audience members are encouraged to share they own extreme, coercive, organisational ideas via an honest box, which are reached for whenever there’s an awkward pause.
But even with this crowd-pleasing gambit, Lois-Elliott never truly wins us over, or delivers on the show title’s promise.
We hear about things she feels are cult adjacent: gym membership; supermarket club cards; secondary school. But none of these really convince, beyond handy jumping off points for well-worn anecdotes and stereotypes about millennials, or that strange kid from the school over the road who seemed to materialise whenever there was a fight.
There is an episode of The Simpsons where a new character is introduced to Tom and Jerry style cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy.
This character - Poochie, a super-cool kung-fu rapper from gangster city - stops out heroes from reaching the fireworks factory.
The constant promises here that we’ll soon hear about the actual cult stuff soon feels reminiscent of this. When this material finally arrives, it’s pretty milquetoast; as Lois-Elliott herself admits, it’s more social awkwardness and sexual-sounding parts of a bird, rather than armed compounds stormed at dawn.
There are also some jarring references. A joke about the British Empire reveals a profound ignorance about… the British Empire. The character of the comedian’s boyfriend is introduced as a lovely, uncomplicated soul - so when it’s revealed he couldn’t be bothered to come to the show, it’s difficult to know whether this is a joke, a reversal, or just a statement of irritated fact.
There’s no doubt Lois-Elliott is a charismatic presence, and this is of course a work in progress. But presently there is little to recommend here, until her promise to lock the doors feels sincere, and the hints of rage and trauma become the compelling narrative about belonging at which is occasionally hinted.
**
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading as always.
More thoughts on this, when they come. It’s very good, though. You should buy it.
There’s some fun stuff on this in Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition. The fake and the real intertwine a lot more than Hobsbawn suggests, I would gently argue. But it’s a good read.
One of the reviews, I wrote on my phone on my way to Jack In The Green. My phone became smashed and soaked by my clumsiness and the elements respectively. I had to rewrite the review from memory on the way back, so it’s kinda a clumsy approximation of what I’d written before, and I’m unreasonably annoyed about this.
This review first appeared on Reviews Hub. Their house style of a summary sentence at the top is very strange to me.
Full disclosure: I know Martha, obviously. I’m going to occasionally know people I review, and I hope I can be fair with it. Both of the stars I gave for this particular show are for her!