LONDON CITY NIGHTS

A successful historian must play psychoanalyst to their period. Entire societies are gently laid on the couch, their ambitions, paranoias, pride and history intelligently probed in an effort to get at what made them tick. You could look at what they say about themselves, but this strays into the realm of propaganda, neither individual nor civilisation wants to look like a chump.

You can approach this understanding of the past through many prisms, each refracting the past in their own way. Professor Andrew Scull has chosen the processes and understandings of mental illness: the understanding of cause, processes of diagnosis and treatment shedding light into the minds of our ancestors.

This interrogation is the subject of the 2015 Roy Porter lecture, hosted by the wonderful people at the Wellcome Collection. Prof. Scull, a former colleague of Porter, is Distinguished Professor if Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His new book, Madness in Civilisation: The Cultural History of Insanity has just been released and provides the raw material for this lecture, which zeroes in on the nascent science of mental illness in the 1800s.

George Cheyne

Our introduction to this world is the pioneering work of physician George Cheyne. His publication, The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers (1733) was a huge influence on popular conceptions of mental illness and depression. That title, with the English laying proud claim to mental disorders, initially feels a touch odd. Why would an proud, patriotic nation hurry to 'own' these conditions?

As a point of comparison, Prof Scull explains the shifting colloquial names for syphilis, which in England, was called 'The French Disease', in France 'The Italian disease', in Italy 'The Neapolitan disease' and so on, with the Turks throwing their hands up and simply calling it 'The Christian disease'. These pejorative names are reflections of nationalistic spite: after all, nobody really wants to be 'the syphilis country'.

George Durer's Syphilitic Man

What this reveals is that far from being a negative, 'nervous disorders' were proudly incorporated into the English psyche as a point of patriotic pride. The explanation for why is based around comparing 'primitive' and 'modern' man. The primitive has their mind occupied with acts of survival, a daily life and death struggle for food and shelter. Whereas the modern man, with his refined sensibilities, sharpened mind and rarefied talents, is akin to a precision-tooled piece of machinery - with many more components able to fail. Or, as Cheyne put it:

"those of the liveliest and quickest natural Parts...whose Genius is most keen and penetrating were most prone to such disorders. Fools, weak or stupid Persons, heavy and dull Souls, are seldom troubled with Vapours or Lowness of Spirits." CHEYNE (GEORGE) The Natural Method of cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind depending on the Body.

So, the more Britain succeeded economically, scientifically and culturally, the more 'nervous disorders' we should expect to see - with mental illness an unexpected herald of social success.

This period of history, with luminaries like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley and Christopher Wren et al defining the boundaries of the universe and identifying hitherto unknown invisible forces like electricity, gravity and magnetism must have been an astonishing time to live through. Finally the nuts and bolts of the universe were being revealed, the role of God gradually moving towards to absent caretaker rather than a being that intervenes in the lives of men.

Anything must have seemed possible, an outlook that gave rise to the success of one Franz Mesmer. He invented the concept of 'animal magnetism'; that energetic transference takes place between all objects, animate and inanimate. By manipulating this process he claimed to be able to cure nervous illnesses. Word soon got around, and before long crowds rich and poor were clamouring for a taste of mesmeric therapy.

A mesmerist using his 'magic finger' to cure a comely woman.

It was all bunkum of course, Prof Scull inferring that a decent portion of his success came from providing erotic experiences for buttoned down society women. With scandal constantly nipping at his heels, Mesmer hopped between European cities, eventually coming a cropper at the hands of a scientific dream team that included Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Benjamin Franklin. They conducted tests, concluding 'biomagnetic fluids' to be a load of cobblers. Mesmer soon vanished into obscurity, the last 15 years of his life large unknown.

Though firmly discredited, his therapies acted as a seed in treated conditions of the mind. Mesmer's animal magnetism therapies evolved into hypnosis therapy (from which we get the word 'mesmerism'). We later learn that Sigmund Freud began his therapeutic career as a hypnotist, the interaction of patient and clinician eventually formalising into psychoanalysis.

It's here that Prof Scull links the behaviour of the past to the present. His examples outline the broad strokes of the 18th century 'personality': nationalism, scientific progress and a belief in progress. Mesmer's popularity inevitably leads the mind toward modern pseudo-scientific therapies, arguably more popular now than they've ever been. Similarly, the ownership of mental disorders feeds into identity politics: in an increasingly homogenous world everyone wants to stand out, with internet self-diagnosis leading to the rise of 'disease/allergy/mental illness as fad'.

What will future historians think of us when they examine these trends? What rationale can be given for masses of people running to alternative therapies when faced with the myriad miracles of modern medicine? Why are increasingly large amounts of people desperate to find 'their' disorder?

Perhaps it's only with the hindsight of history that the answers can really be theorised. Nonetheless, Prof Scull's lecture leads us down fascinating intellectual paths, subtly nudging us towards applying historical analysis to modern trends. It was a real treat watching him speak, I'll have to get hold of his book.

Prof Scull's book, Madness in Civilisation: The Cultural History of Insanity is available here.

DBC Pierre's Booker prize winning novel Vernon God Little was first adapted by Tanya Ronder for Young Vic in 2007. Critically acclaimed, the production was hailed for its humour, ingenious staging, speedy pacing and impressive scope. Now, Ronder's script has been revived as the inaugural production of Burn Bright Theatre.

Vernon God Little, with nearly 50 characters spread over ten actors, multiple locations, multimedia elements and a narrative that never stays in one place too long, is an impressive ambitious theatrical undertaking. Unfortunately, ambition is about the only positive quality present here.

Our teenage hero, Vernon (Callum McGowan) appears to be the butt of a cosmic joke. After his best friend shoots up their school, suspicion falls on the awkward Vernon, who was caught clutching a bag of ammunition nearby. As a hungry media descends on in the town, our hero becomes a pariah, every aspect of his life sifted through and sensationalised. With a town populated by grotesque caricatures, things snowball towards comic unpleasantness. Soon Vernon's on the run, heading towards Mexico with the authorities in hot pursuit.

This is an basic overview of an extremely convoluted plot. Having neither read the book nor seen the 2007 staging I spent large portions of the show not knowing what the hell was going on. Characters would arrive on stage, yell at each other in random accents and then disappear, sometimes there'd be a musical number, maybe a bit of slapstick and then onto the next thing.

Not knowing what was going on quickly transitioned into not caring what was going on which itself soon transitioned into a simmering annoyance that I was losing a whole evening to this rubbish. As my arse gently fell into numbness, I endured gales of unconvincing accents, repetitive jokes and scenes that just. would. not. end. Perhaps I'd be a tiny bit more generous if the production at least had brevity on its side, but I felt every one of its painful 150 minutes. Beginning at half seven we don't get out of there until we're nearing half past ten and, considering that The Space Arts Centre is down in the Isle of Dogs, means anyone living North or East probably won't be getting home until nearing midnight.

After an hour and twenty minutes we were granted the small mercy of an interval, during which I seriously contemplated hopping on a bus and getting far, far away. I've never, ever, done this during a play I was reviewing (it's wrong to judge something you've only seen half of), but my god I was tempted. As I retook my seat, despair curled in my gut, sure that I was making a decision I'd regret.

If I didn't know that this script had already been successfully staged I'd probably blame its overambitious scope and confused tone for this production's many problems. Sadly, given that it has, blame must fall on the company. Simply put, Burn Bright Theatre have wildly overestimated their abilities. I can't fault their ambition, but tackling a show like this as a low budget fringe production proves to be foolishness.

Even given all that there are a couple of performers who emerge mostly untarnished. Callum McGowan's Vernon is probably about as good as it can be, at bare minimum you can empathise with his confusion and annoyance as to what's going on around him. Bart Edwards' slimy would-be investigative reporter is also largely fine thanks to his strong physical performance. Everyone else is mired in overacting, their performances limited by their dodgy Jamaican/Eastern European/Spanish etc accents.

I don't take any particular pleasure in doling out criticism as negative as this, no doubt blood, sweat and tears have gone into making this show happen. But the end result is lumpen, boring and godawful.

★

Vernon God Little is at The Space Arts Centre until 11th April. Tickets here.

I love it when art and science climb into bed together. There's something thrilling about the friction of rigorous objectivity of science rubbing up against the subjectivity of art. Over the 2013-14 term I followed the progress of the Central St Martins Art & Science group, which combined the two brilliantly (articles here, here and here). These exhibitions stoked my curiosity, and I hungered for more in the same vein.

I found it at Arebyte Gallery's Wired Up "exploring social, neural and bacterial networks through art and science collaboration". Working as part of the University of Westminster's Broad Vision project, teams of artists and scientists have been devising work centred around the idea of being 'Wired Up'. In 2015 we're all wrapped up in network cabling like a fly in a spiderweb; every person a node in a hundred different networks, which are themselves networked together. It's a dizzying train of thought, one that proves the seed for some fascinating work.

Internet

The most initially eye-catching was Internet by Alex Cottrill, Francisco Sajara Vidinha and Mary Woolf. A bamboo model of a telecommunications tower stands in front of a projected map of London. The map has been coloured to show the 'heat' of wireless signals in the capital. As can be expected from a major modern metropolis, this is a blister of angry red activity, only the very edges showing some lull. These shifting colours reveal London as a pressure cooker of electromagnetic activity, watched over by gigantic masts that we've quickly trained ourselves not to notice.

The piece also works on a straightforwardly aesthetic level. The organic bamboo tower works as a counterweight to its steel real-life counterpart and the illumination of the projection against it creates beautiful shadows and patterns. Also, quite simply, the shifting colours of the heatmap pop off the white gallery walls, making for an eye-catching display.

Living Wires

Nestled up against it is a similarly neat piece: Riccardo Branca's Living Wires. The artist explains that he's really working in collaboration with Physarum Polycephalum (a slime mould), to create an interactive exhibition that reacts to your presence. This consists of a box upon which a branch rests, terminating in a heartrate sensor. This is hooked to a projection that displays a closeup of the slime mould, which throbs in time with you. I've always dug slime moulds; they famously display a weirdly alien intelligence - able to puzzle out the optimum routes through mazes and (apparently) escape containers. Pretty impressive for a mould, and this one proves to be an excellent partner for Branca.

In Living Wires, the participant 'makes contact' with this inhuman world, giving us a taste of what it might be like to be part of a distributed plant consciousness. It's a teensy-weensy taste of course, functioning more as thought experiment than simulation, but in terms of provoking ideas it more than succeeds.

This is the best I could do in low light with my phone.

These pieces border the edges of a darkened box in the centre of gallery. This is The Room, by Mateusz Gidaszewski, Camila Gaspar, Shin-Young Wiz Choi, and Charlie Dixon. After being blindfolded, you enter a darkened space and are presented with softly glowing jars of liquid. Shake them gently and they glow brighter. Once you have them all glowing, the mirrored walls of the room place you within a spooky constellation of ever-dimming and growing lights, with squirts of peppery scent combining to create a strangely religious atmosphere.

The glowing fluid are cultures of Dinoflagellate (nocticula) and photobacterium phosphoreum. The action of shaking them, which introduces oxygen to the bacteria and makes them glow, proves extremely compelling. There's something magical and primordial about the gentle movements of the glowing liquid, the infinity of the reflected mirrors giving the illusion that we're in the boundless ocean, or perhaps floating through the interstellar void. I could have stayed in there for hours.

Most fun was Sensory Interfaces, by Coral Hermes, Pippa Ischt, Dagamara Rutkowska and Patrycja Wilosz. This comprised three interactive stations that combine our senses (vision/taste, touch/sound, vision/sound) and a fourth that explores the future of our senses. Devised no small amount of humour and imagination, this was straightforwardly fun. A highlight were two boxes, one containing cotton wool and one containing rocks. Place your finger in the former and you get soothing classical music, in the latter you get Slipknot.

It's a clever joke, and this light-hearted sense of exploration continues with the experiment that links taste and vision. Presented with a series of coloured liquids, you're invited to taste them and then sort them by flavour. The twist is that they're not the colours you'd expect them to be; for example, the lemon/lime flavour is dark orange and black cherry is bright yellow. It's curious how our brain fools us with expectations - I could have sworn that the bright yellow liquid was lemon flavoured...

The vision/sound station is slightly less inspired next to the other two, but then these are two senses every human being knows to combine anyway. Finally the future headset, as represented by a faux-VR cardboard headset constructed from a mobile phone gives us a faintly endearing look at the future. There's something indefinably pleasant about this installation, which is geared - Science Museum style - to ensuring participants enjoy themselves while learning.

This is but a taste of what was on offer, though unfortunately this was a two day exhibition so your chance to see it has passed. But I'll be keeping an eye on work of this ilk, science and art perfectly dovetailing into one another to create exciting new hybrids.

Top picture from Dysfunctions by Andrea Fachini and Christopher Verhauwart

Bloody pavement greeted me as I left Peckham Rye station on Saturday afternoon. Moments before I arrived, some guy had his hand chopped off by unknown assailants. Now, with the street festooned with POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, forensic detectives swabbed blood off the concrete. Twenty minutes later everything was back to normal; smiling shoppers wandering down the street, over the rapidly coagulating bloodstains. It was a dislocating experience: I'd come for art, not mutilation.

Tucked away in the shadow of the attractively crumbling Bussey Building, between warehouses that ship goods to sub-Saharan Africa and optimistically affluent pop-up cocktail bars, Bosse & Baum isn't the easiest place to find. I'm helped when, as I'm wandering around, I'm accosted by a silent Romanian-looking woman wearing a leering mask of Nigel Farage.

There There (from their website)

Discombobulated, I was led into a warehouse and into a small tent. Shoved inside, the door was zipped up tight. Within sat a similarly dressed woman, this time wearing a David Cameron mask. She popped some headphones on me, from which burbled a robotic drawl. She then performed a silent palm reading before instructing me to clap my hands like a seal, then ushered me from the tent. My initial reaction? "What the hell was that?!"

Later research revealed this to be There There, performing a piece called Text Home to 78070 (the name taken from the famously crap Home Office campaign of the same name). Jamming together a stereotypical Romanian outfit with the faces of the politicians who'd use their presence for political gain, this work aims to jolt its audience into a new mindset. There's something quietly terrifying about being snatched off the street, shoved somewhere confusing and being given an obtuse lecture, the experience giving the tiniest of tiny tastes of the worst fears of illegal immigrants.

Best of all is the conflation of monstrous, Daily Mail cartoon-ish visual stereotypes of Romanian-as-monster and the actual monsters of Cameron and Farage. Their smugly satisfied faces peering out from patterned headscarves chill the viewer to the bone; eyes like sharks and jaws locked in mock humour. This is my kind of performance; aggressive, ragged and intensely political.

Charlotte Law

After a quick pop out for some dinner, during which I unfortunately missed Ana Mendes'Self Portrait, I returned just in time for Charlotte Law's Ode Action. I'm friends with Charlotte and have attended a number of her performances over the last few years. Judging from what I've seen she's locked in a neverending loop - rigorously reconfiguring and reworking ever more worn materials.

From within a crinkled space blanket emerge what I'm pretty sure are the remnants of a burnt piano. This together with other junkyard ephemera, is placed on bungee cords suspended from the ceiling. Soon a row of gently bobbing Blair-Witch-a-like mobiles is improvised, weird new structures created from trash. Law continues this across the space; new shapes popping up, things being speared on one another or carefully balanced, before collapsing with a wooden clunk.

She's accompanied by another performer, who contributes apparently random barks of noise, before bending over to twiddle with a variety of gadgets, all of which emit ominous sounding voices. By way of reply, Law occasionally vocalises a stream of guttural sounds in a language I either don't recognise, or that's made up. There's a quiet aggressiveness to this that borders in nihilism, as if Law is playing in the ashes of a burnt world. Here form, language and architecture have deteriorated to their base elements, being cut up into jagged and unfamiliar new shapes.

Following that was Justyna Scheuring's Didn't you know that. Scheuring, with a drawn expression, bags under her eyes and a dead-eyed stare, looks like she really needs a good night's sleep. Wearing a superhero-styled black body suit and silver top she stands atop a small step and says either "Yes. Yes." or "No. No.". As she does this an assistant activates a smoke machine, sending polite plumes of dry ice into the audience.

Justyna Scheuring

Two things can happen after this. If Scheuring says 'Yes', she will find a place to pose in the gallery space, often imitating the body language of action of someone in the audience. If she says 'No', she will find a spot and let out a bloodcurdling scream. She's got a deadpan poker face throughout, the ridiculousness of what we're watching eventually sending rippled giggles around the hushed crowd.

Easy highlights are the held moments when she picks on someone and maliciously eyes them, conducting a clinical dissection with her gaze alone. Next is when she's stalking the room looking for a space to scream. At one point we hear a timid knock on the gallery door. Like a shark scenting blood she makes a beeline for it, and presently we hear her yelling into the Peckham dusk. After this she dons protective pads, thumping herself around on the floor and walls before tottering about in heels with a piece of tinfoil in her mouth.

I have no idea what the hell this means - but I'm guessing this is a catharsis that can only be achieved with the hungry eyes of an audience upon the artist. I really hope the baleful expression and generally doomy presence was an act. If so, it's an impressive one. If it's not I hope that the performance - whatever it meant - helped in some way. Either way it was a pleasantly baffling experience.

A pretty neat evening of performance art in a pretty neat place. And, vicious street amputations aside, a wonderful time was had in Peckham.

Hosting an exhibition in an old morgue bodes well for what's inside. The windowless room, tucked away in the bowels of the former Royal Army Medical College (now the Chelsea College of Art and Design), still bristles the the memory of the corpses that passed through. Gently crumbling plaster reveals cork insulation which, together with the dirt flecked white walls and a low-level subsonic hum adds up a disconcerting atmosphere that induces mild paranoia.

This is Bright Shadow, "a video art exhibition that explores how contemporary mass media can manipulate the perception of truth with moving image". So, in place of the rapidly cooling dead we have rows of screens, each displaying the work of artists. It's a wonderful setting, the dim light illuminating room and visitor alike with shifting patterns of cold electronic colour.

The first piece that caught my attention was Thomas Galler's American Soldiers. This is a collage of appropriated YouTube videos of people lip syncing to Toby Keith's sick-making hymn to the US military. There's a Lynchian atmosphere to these participants; some are hunched over in the darkness, jaws resting upon swollen chins as they bleat out the lyrics; some pose with cool-eyed detachment, their shop-new 'rugged' outfits projecting illusions of masculine confidence; most intriguing are the teenage girls, posing in American flag bikinis and crop-tops. Here sexual desire and nationalism are perversely knitted together, and not by a mass media, by individual internet users.

That creepiness is underlined by the surroundings and the medium through which it's presented. Alone amongst the other exhibits, American Soldiers 2012 is played through a chunky old CRT. There's something odd about seeing digital media played on old analogue technology, the work neatly out of step with the firmly 21st century stuff surrounding it.

Similarly impressive is Vasilis Karvounis'I Sell My Portrait. This comprises of a still, looped shot of the artist, with subliminal messages sporadically overlaid on top. It's a frustrating watch the microsecond-long messages slightly too quick to be able to fully read. Instead, fragments of words are briefly comprehensible; "sell", "best", "art" etc. Despite being widely discredited as an effective advertising method, the very idea of the technique still sends a chill up the spine.

We'd all like to think we're immune to advertising, that we're able to intelligently pick our way through the thicket of consumerist desires and wants. Yet subliminals suggest a sinister programming of us, not just making us want things, but making us think we've spontaneously decided to want them. This is what Karvounis plays with, quietly selling himself and his art to audiences, all the while boring holes in us with his powerful stare.

Easily the most eye-catching was Carla Chan Ho-Choi's Snö. Nestled at the back tunnel of the gallery, the piece is a constantly shifting sphere that emits eerie sounds. Confession time: I know Carla pretty well (she was the reason I was at the exhibition in the first place), so I made a point of deciding what I liked most before I read who'd done what, so trust me, it's only a happy coincidence that I liked hers the best.

As a big Tarkovsky fan, I couldn't help but be reminded of Solaris. There, a giant psychedelic planetary intelligence wreaks havoc with the minds of cosmonauts. Snö visually echoes this, the pulsating surface looking organic and supple - it's motion looking like an effort to communicate with the observer. It's aided in this both by its relative scale - occupying far more space than the rest of the exhibits - and it's location. Being at the end of a narrow corridor invites the audience towards it, as if we're caught in its gravitational field.

It all adds up to a sensation of religious awe, the sphere/planet some abstract, alien object of veneration - like some unknowable Lovecraft god. I dug it is what I'm saying.

Bright Shadow is at the Morgue, Chelsea College of Art 10-6pm until 4th April 2015

Outside we hear the sounds of rioting. Credit has, according to the front page of a newspaper, finally crunched too hard. The masses are burning the banks, demanding their share of what's rightfully theirs. In the lobby of an apparently deserted hotel sits the artist Adolph (Tice Oakfield). He's waiting for his beloved wife Tekla (Rachel Heaton) to return, eager to show off his new creative direction, brimming over with affection and a manic, barely controlled happiness.

But there's a snake in the garden; Tekla ex-husband Gustav (Paul Trussell). With Machiavellian precision he slips poisonous doubt into Adolph's ear, word by word curdling the artist's mind against his wife. Soon Adolph is convinced that Tekla is draining his soul away. As the play progresses these three characters wind around each other in increasing unhealthy ways. Adolph collapsing into suicidal panic, Tekla's poised world shatteing and Gustav gloating, taking psychopathic pleasure in watching the world collapse.

The play, adapted 'after Strindberg' by Neil Smith intelligently, satirically and viciously excavates bourgeois values. The three characters, artist, author and businessman, exist in an insulated bubble. Adolph's art is increasing (and somewhat literally) navel-gazing, self indulgent bullshit, Tekla writes crappy books about 'sex vampires' and the predatory Gustav explains "when everything's going to shit there are always ways to make money". Both Tekla and Adolph like to pretend they're good people - Tekla doing charitable work and Adolph indignantly (and hilariously) exclaiming "I'm a liberal!".

So we are watching the elite fiddle as Rome burns; the psychic reverberations of the rioting outside penetrating their cosy world. This adds up to a gleefully sadistic portrait of the rich, finding themselves with nothing left to devour, turning on each other. Neither Adolph nor Tekla are particularly likeable; Adolph self-obsessed to the point of wanting to crawl back up the birth canal to the mindless security of the womb, Tekla shallow and unimaginative, wallowing in celebrity, luxury and sex.

Paradoxically it's the diabolical Gustav who captures most of our sympathies. Sure he's a monster, but at least he's relatively open about it. In comparison to Adolph's lily livered pliability, Gustav's strongly dominate personality marks him as the dynamic force in the play. Tekla even admits that Gustav, horrible though he may be, exudes animal magnetism - able to seduce with the sheer force of his presence. Occasionally he feels as if he's the manifestation of Adolph and Tekla's deeply buried class guilt - they know what's going on outside but are firmly 1%ers.. Rooting for the villain - especially a horrible Randian ubermensch - is an uncomfortable feeling, yet I suppose you find your forces of revolutionary change where you can get 'em.

Then again, when he's played so compellingly, perhaps its not such a leap. Trussell injects every single motion of Gustav with serpentine grace, his eyes and tongue flickering cruelly behind the mask of his face. I think Trussell has shaved his eyebrows off for the part and this, coupled with his severe features, combines for a Voldemort-ish inhumanity. In the notes I took during the play I repeatedly Gustav's reptilian qualities, and then Tekla herself exclaims "You slithered inside him, didn't you? Snake! Slither, slither."

Ticeman and Heaton are no slouches either. From the moment we meet Adolph we can tell he's as malleable as the clay he sculpts. Ticeman's pale complexion, skinny frame and wide-staring eyes make him look like a man-child, his tantrums and gullibility pathetic, yet sympathetic as well. He plaintively exclaims that "he showed promise in his early work". It's this promise that has ruined him, forever trying to live up to an imagined ideal of what he should be. Ticeman plays him almost as the caricature of the fragile artist, an individual secure in the knowledge that if he feels this confused there must be something within he can work with.

Heaton's Tekla is somewhat more likeable, though her insistence on referring to herself in the third person as "Pussy" is just on the wrong side of sexually uncomfortable. Adolph and Tekla's marriage appears to be a warped mother/child relationship, directly symbolised by the always present sculpture of Tekla emerging from a grossly engorged vulva. This, combined with her 'sex-vampire-lit' professional work, means Tekla drips eroticism, something Heaton ably conveys. She's all gently pouted lips, cat-like body language and teasing poses, nearly literally wrapping poor Adolph around her little finger.

It's a hell of a good time, well performed, smartly staged and with an utterly nailed down tone. Refreshingly, Creditors isn't afraid to dabble in histrionics and ridiculousness, things eventually spiralling to a conclusion as barmy as it is satisfying. Wonderful stuff.

★★★★

Creditors is at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre until April 11th. Tickets here.

Almost a year ago I attended Cerebellum, my friend Charlotte CHW's performance art evening. Now, Cerebellum returns! Split between Hastings and London, I'm sure the place will witness all manner of imaginative, odd, profound and mind-bending examples of cutting edge performance (and other) art. So check it out! I'll be at the Stag's Head tomorrow, 7pm.

Here's the press release:

Cerebellum 2015 Relaunch Press Release

Cerebellumis Latin for “Little Brain”, the part of the organ responsible for motor functions, fear and pleasure responses. Cerebellumis a cross-country live and interdisciplinary not-for-profit arts platform established in May 2014 by artist and curator Charlotte CHW in London. Cerebellum is now hosting events and exhibitions in London and Hastings, provoking dialogue and collaboration between experimental and innovative practitioners in London and the South East.

This April, Cerebellum will re-launch with a week of events in both locations and an exhibition featuring live art, sound art, film and video, sculpture, participatory installation, ceramics, spoken word, live drawing, workshops and more. Some artists will feature in London and Hastings events presenting the same work at both, others 2 different pieces of work. Certain artists will only appear at one event. Affordable work will be for sale at both events.

Advance entry only to the events only includes a limited edition mini-print by Charlotte CHW to be collected on the night or those unable to attend are welcome to buy an eticket and have the print posted to their address for no extra charge.

Programme and Tickets

London

8^thApril, Stags Head Hoxton, 55 Orsman Road, 7pm, £3 advance www.wegottickets.com

Hastings

10^thAprilLive Event with Performances, screenings, sounds and more plus DJs and visuals Rock House (2^ndFloor, Art School), 49-51 Cambridge Road, Hastings, 7pm, £3 advance www.wegottickets.com

11^thApril Exhibition continues 11am-5pm with an experimental and collaborative drawing workshop with Marie-Louise Miller at 2pm

12^thAprilExhibition continues 11am-5pm with an artist’s roundtable at 2pm

Featured artists (please check sites for location):

Blue Tapes, Christine Binnie Justyna Burzynska, Charlotte CHW & Maike Zimmerman Sadie Edginton, Glenn Fitzpatrick, Eleanor Fogg, Sharon Haward Hysteresis, Jasmine Lee, Michelle Lewis-King & Sumie Kent, Emma Louvelle, Samuel Reynolds, Ilia Rogatchevski, Eleanor Sparrow, Layla Tibbe, Samuel Hailey-Watts, Mark Scott-Wood, Sebastian Melmoth (sound installation) Jason Williams Maike Zimmerman

For more information see facebook.com/cerebellum_arts or @Cerebellum_arts

"Jauja isn’t for everyone. This is an art western that revels in cryptic, languid surrealism, giving short shrift to conventional narrative and characterization. In short, you’ve got to have an appetite for watching a forlorn man painstakingly stumble up a rocky hill, and then down the other side. Then up another hill. And back down again. A dog shows up. More clambering. That’s Jauja, folks

Wait! Come back! It’s actually really good! Despite director Lisandro Alonso’s disregard for propulsive storytelling and snappy dialogue, Jauja is a gripping, beautiful experience, complete with a magnetic lead performance by Viggo Mortenson."

Read my full review at We Got This Covered.

★★★★

Jauja is released 10th April 2015

From minute one Dorian Gray is at pains to expose its own artifice. Another Soup pride themselves on their use of 'Brechtian Immersion', drawing us into Wilde's luxuriously amoral fiction while constantly reminding us that we're watching a play. From the moment we enter we're hurried by the cast to find a place to sit, the space dotted with armchairs, comfy seats and steps. I end up sitting practically in the middle of the stage, resulting in the play becoming a minor act of contortion as I crane my neck to follow the cast as they swirl about me.

At a shade under 90 minutes the script takes extreme liberties with the source material, essentially condensing it down to a series of vignettes. So we see the angelic Dorian's (Samuel Woodham) introduction to polite society, during which he's hungrily eyed by the diabolical Lord Henry Wotton (Thomas Judd). With Wotton's clawed hand comfortably resting on his shoulder, Dorian's soul begins to rot. All too soon he's a hardcore aesthete, gazing at a portrait of himself and casually selling his soul on a wish to remain forever young.

As time ticks on Dorian's corruption becomes self-sustaining. In this condensed form the night descends into a whirlwind of fragmented sin. One minute he's callously leading his would-be fiancee towards suicide, the next he's half-hearted seducing and murdering people - flicking a knife between his victim's shoulderblades as casually as he might flick a mote of dust from his suit jacket.

Much of this is conveyed through some rather Sondheim-ish songs. With Felicity Sparks on piano (with violin accompaniment by Isaac Lusher), the jagged, lightly satirical lyrics paint a portrait of an cruel world where words are lethal weapons and reputation is everything. These lyrics are spiky and fun, the entire cast (but especially Judd) taking obvious pleasure in each mannered enunciation and rhyme.

Though it's a happy coincidence, the face that Dorian Gray shares a space with In Your Face Theatre's excellent Trainspotting ends up giving this adaptation a dab more relevance. At first glance, you'd expect the heroin squat marker pen knobs and exhortations to 'Listen to the KLF!' to mildly spoil the audience's immersion. In fact, in an appropriately Brechtian twist, the artifice reminds us that the amorality of Dorian Gray isn't a Victorian aberration, more part of a continuity of cruel decadence that extends to the modern day. In Thomas Judd's opening monologue we're lectured about vice, explaining that for all our modern MDMA and heroin, the Victorians did it first (and better). Both Trainspotting and Dorian Gray take vice's destructive effects as a starting point, each exploring the corruptive influences of solipsism.

Another Soup's adaptation is at pains to emphasise the class differences between Dorian, Wotton and the working class Londoners he exploits. Most moving is the plight of Felicity Kerwin's music hall star Sybil Vane, moving amongst the audience and distributed faded flowers. Entranced by her Prince Charming, she's used up and spat out, dying an ignominious, barely regarded death. Indeed, Dorian leaves a path of destruction in his wake, and who'd suspect a face like his?

Who indeed? Filtered through the beautiful yet sphinxlike face of Samuel Woodham, Dorian appears utterly bored with both virtue and sin, blankly staring at us with dead-eyed unenthusiasm. Given that Wilde's book can easily be enjoyed as a supernatural power fantasy that lets us imagine what we might do if we were given life both eternal and free of consequences, his joylessness is disarming.

I think Another Soup are aiming to deconstruct the idea of Dorian as prototypical Nietzschean ubermensch, connecting his predatory urges to modern day upper class sociopathy. In the high collars, tailed jackets and smug smiles there's visual echoes of the famous Bullingdon Club photos of the current government, both they and Dorian preying on those lower down the social scale and never suffering the consequences. Making Dorian beautiful but genuinely unpleasant, the audience not even allowed the sop of vicarious pleasure in his crimes, distances us from him. The effect that we examine Wilde's story coldly and critically, resisting the urge to be seduced by the beauty and glitz.

Also, this is simply a damn fun way to spend 90 minutes. Rumbling along at whipcrack pace, we're tossed like a pinball between humour, melancholy and sexual kink. My only real criticism is the mystifying decision to have Dorian's portrait remain identical to when we first see it. The characters react to it with horror, as if it's changed beyond recognition - but it's exactly the same. Maybe there's some wider point being made here, but it feels a bit cheap to build up anticipation for no reason. Still, aside from that - good times.

★★★★

Dorian Gray is at the King's Head Theatre until 12 April 2015. Tickets here.

As I watched a man beat himself over the head with a cymbal, I wondered just what the hell I'm doing here. Most people are probably tucked up on their sofas watching Masterchef or something, while I'm stood in the back room of a pub watching listening to a cacophonous atonal din punctuated by minor acts of mutilation. This, combined with beetle-ish paper scluttings, biorhythmic koto projects, lectures on injection moulding and freakshow prawn-stars (among many other things) comprises Cerebellum, a live art project that straddles London and Hastings.

Packed behind the red curtain of The Stag's Head was an tonne of fascinating art, not just the performances, but self contained exhibits and a plethora of displayed art on the walls. With this much on I can't cover everything - so here's my favourites.

Taking the prize for most cryptic use of materials was Sadie Edginton with room-spanning creative performance. Working with plastic wrap, a roll of paper, charcoal, water and a Styrofoam buoy her dog found on the beach, she explored the idea of 'artist-as-implement'. Dividing the crowd in two she rolled plastic wrap down the middle of the room and sprinkled water on top. Then she affixed a sheet of paper to her back and scuttled across the room, the white paper looking like an insectoid carapace as it unfolded behind her. Following that she worked back and forth, chipping charcoal on the floor, gradually creating a series of smudged black lines across the paper.

It reminded me of a performance of hers that I participated in about a year ago - I was wrapped up in paper and rolling around back and forth on the floor, repetition gradually destroying raw materials. A similar process happened here; the paper becoming torn and ripped, the charcoal ground into dust - even the artist herself getting grimy. I also enjoyed the idea of visually revealing a person's impact on their environment, grooves and erosion that could take years to be revealed happening in the space of a couple of minutes.

Next up was Hysteresis, who are event organiser Charlotte CHW and Jason Williams. The performance began with Charlotte emerging from a paper chrysalis while singing a creepily off-key cover of Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown. As weird as that was, it was nothing compared to what was to come. Taking to the stage, the two began viciously assaulting a variety of instruments and objects. An electric guitar got the worst treatment, emitting steady shrieks of pain as it was brutalised every which way by first Charlotte, and then Jason.

Things got increasingly more demented from then on. A gigantic lump of clay thudded rhythmically into the stage, knobs were twiddled and boxes were beaten. Some kind of gigantic home-made stringed instrument was produced from backstage and first played, then thwomped onto the stage in a clatter of bolts. It was at this point that heads began poking through the curtain, the pub locals wondering what the fuck was making such a din. This was capped off with Charlotte stumbling off stage, a hypnotic daze in her eyes. Jason had some part of a lamp attached to him and was beating his head with a cymbal - leaving a solitary trickle of blood down his face.

Despite all the mayhem, I found this performance quite relaxing. As with Sadie's performance, creation/destruction neatly dovetails into one another. Even as the objects on stage (and the performers) undergo violent transformation, fresh sounds and motions poke through like green shoots. It's also a pleasantly honest performance, both performers quickly transitioning into a reflexive, instinctive processes that're completely ego free. It got a deservedly impressed round of applause.

My favourite of the night was Eleanor Fogg's facial projection performance. Sat in front of a three panelled makeup mirror, she placed a miniature projector on the table and invited the audience onto the stage. To the sounds of what (I'm told was) a warped, time-shifted version of No Doubt's Don't Speak, we shuffled around, looking at the illuminated face in the mirror.

Then her features melted, shifted and rearranged before our eyes. It was an astonishingly effective and hallucinogenic performance: eyebrows becoming bushy, lips plumping to engorged redness, eyes sprouting from the side of her head, a beard morphing out of her cheeks. Using a projector in this fashion is a deceptively simple idea - a concept that must have been done before. But to see it done with such precision and artistry blew my mind.

At the core of the piece is an exploration of identity and gender in the digital age. As we blankly stare into our 'black mirror' screens we can become whoever we want - sultry vixen, bearded philosopher, old man, immature child, violent psychopath - the list of possible personae limited only to our imaginations. Here we see this process visualised; versions of the artist swimming in fluid motion across her face. Beautiful, moving and so damn good.

Those three were my favourites, though it'd be remiss of me not to mention Pulses, Michelle Lewis-King and Sumie Kent's collaboration. After taking pulse readings from six members of the audience (including myself) they were interpreted as beautifully improvised music by Kent. Watching someone so skilful at work is pleasure enough for me, the intense concentration and creative skill a pleasure to watch in a pub backroom.

Similarly enjoyable was Jasmine Lee's prawn performance.This cocktail of maternal/cannibalistic love is precisely as enjoyable as when I saw it at What the Fuck Is Love?"a month or so ago. Samuel Hailey-Watts also gave a masterfully dull slide-based lecture on injection moulding, achieving an almost transcendental level of perfect boredom.

By the time the night was up I knew exactly why I come to nights like this; because they're cool as all hell. Who on earth would want to be slumped over a ready meal, hoovering up crap TV when they could be out watching awesome people do awesome things? Boring people - that's who. And they were in mercifully short supply at Cerebellum.

Cerebellum continues in Hastings with:

12th April Exhibition continues 11am-5pm with an artist’s roundtable at 2pm

Info here.

With the General Election just 23 days away, it's time to meet the candidates. And so, to Bentham Community Centre. Tucked away off Essex Road, the place is far from the oak-panelled opulence of Westminster, coming with a clickety-clack wooden floor, a stage covered in donated children's toys and the sweet smell of marijuana wafting through the open windows. It's in this pleasantly community minded setting that those desperate for our vote were greeted out into a sea of sceptical faces.

The hustings, organised by Islington Private Tenants, focused on housing, an issue that we're told anyone looking to represent this constituency will have to learn a lot about awfully quickly. Islington South & Finsbury is ground zero for London's housing crisis: skyrocketing house prices have made the ownership a pipe dream for all but the richest inhabitants, leaving the rest of us easy prey for predatory landlords with a penchant for raising rents whenever possible.

Not only that; we have to deal with the ever-shrinking pool of social housing; having whatever social housing does exist falling apart; new build developments having a laughable amount of 'affordable' flats; corrupt officials squirrelling away funds; housing associations behaving more like property developers; and a spate of unlawful evictions.

Here we have those that want to represent our interests on the national stage. They are; the incumbent Emily Thornberry for Labour, Mark Lim for the Conservatives, Charlie Kiss for the Greens, Terry Stacy for the Lib Dems and Pete Muswell for UKIP. Surely this ambitious, aspirational gathering can present us with some solutions. If not, maybe they can at least point us in the right direction? If not even that, then maybe a smidge of hope that one day things will get a tiny bit better. R-right?

The candidates can roughly be separated into two groups. Half of them have spent their political careers elbow deep in the morass of housing issues, eventually realising, with faint exasperation, the limits of their powers. Emily Thornberry and Terry Stacey land firmly in this camp, with Charlie Kiss of the Greens shortly behind them. These three at least appear ed to have comprehensive first hand experience of what's going on in this constituency.

But, like King Canute in front of the oncoming tide, they're powerless in the face of national trends. It's as if their power is limited to political Whack-A-Mole, bashing individual problems as they poke their heads up. Theirs is a frustration borne of knowing precisely what the problems are, but being unable to address the root policies and economic trends that cause to them. That said, the three do make vaguely promising rumblings on repealing the bedroom tax, limiting rent increases to the rate of inflation and bolstering tenant's rights.

On the other side are Mark Lim and Pete Muswell, although to be fair to the Conservative candidate lumping him in with UKIP feels a bit unfair even to me. The obviously bored Lim, knowing his chances of winning this seat election are zero, plays it safe and keeps his mouth shut. As he gives us a dead-eyed stare you can imagine his hopes that, after suffering the slings and arrows of a doomed Islington campaign, Conservative Head Office may deign to put him forward for some cosy seat in the English shires.

But Lim looks positively statesmanlike in comparison to Pete Muswell of UKIP, an out and out moron. When he's not playing with his mobile phone he's spouting rambling, half-baked rhetoric with little or no relation to the question asked. Displaying open contempt for the audience from the moment he arrives (late, natch), he spins a xenophobic narrative that lays all of Islington's ills at the feet of the dreaded immigrant. Why, if we could only somehow cleanse our constituency of these freeloading outsiders our problems would be solved! Muswell's nadir comes when he describes rent controls as the gateway to a "Communist state", drawing titters from the entire room. He's later seen trying to hand out UKIP literature to the crowd, dismissively accusing anyone who turns him down of having a closed mind.

Mixed in with the interesting questions are some passionate arguments and one or two genuinely moving stories, in particular Carol (@MeMyMouldandI), who's fighting a desperate battle against a moldy basement flat. After suffering a myriad of health problems, nothing appears to be done about her problems. Both Emily Thornberry and Terry Stacy appeared aware of her case, but the fact that the mould still grows is a sad indictment of bureaucratic incompetence in Islington's housing.

Carol's case is a symptom of wider issues, but the winner of this election will at least have the power to beat back these symptoms. But, from what I gathered last night, no matter who wins, the root causes of Islington's myriad housing problems are likely to remain (and let's face it, probably worsen), for the foreseeable future.

So an interesting, but not particularly optimistic, night of politics.

Thanks to Islington Private Tenants for organising the night.

The greatest crime that The Three Lions commits is lodging Baddiel and Skinner's song of the same name firmly on my head. For three days now that earworm has been munching its way through my brain, showing no signs of the same name. But this song, hailing British sporting accomplishment and massaging patriotic fervour, is the perfect accompaniment to this satirical play that examines a puffed up and pompous Britain's place on the world stage.

Set behind the scenes of England's abortive bid for the 2018 World Cup, we follow the bizarre trio of David Cameron (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart), Prince William (Tom Davey) and David Beckham (Sean Browne). These three titanic egos, equally uncomfortable with the other's presence, are forced to combine their talents on (what we know to be) an utterly doomed venture. They're aided by obsequious hotel aide Ashok (Ravi Aujla) and unassertive PA Penny (Antonia Kinley).

Along the way lie trouser malfunctions, indignant Australians, greedy FIFA officials, imaginary corgis, hilarious pranks and, overseeing everything, the spectre of Rupert Murdoch - the bane of all three men. Knowing that their frantic efforts to secure the bid are pointless makes this a study in failure; our pleasure coming from watching these three rub up against each other in increasingly ridiculous ways.

There's a strong whiff of The Thick of It in The Three Lions. A typical plot in Armando Iannucci's wonderful TV show sees high profile men running as fast as they can to stay in the same place, their efforts to contain the situation only making it worse. It's classic farce, with the acidic edge that these men are purportedly the cream of Britain's elite and run our lives. Another similarity is The Three Lions dogged avoidance of ideology. While Cameron, William and (to a lesser extent) Beckham are political figures, they're presented first and foremost as fallible, clumsy and rather dim human beings.

In concert, they very faintly resemble the Two Ronnies famous 'class' sketch. With his ancestry of Lords and Ladies it's a stretch to paint David Cameron as a representative of the middle classes, but he's bumbling, self importantly incompetent, so the shoe fits. Bruce Lockhart's Cameron is the type to be constant rolling his sleeves up, deploying carefully considered dynamic body language, over-enunciating each word and using knackered management techniques on the two men. He's man torn in two, caught between the twin poles of William's ultraestablishment injokes (the two perform a sickmaking Eton schoolboy dance) and Beckham's enviable popularity and celebrity.

Davey's William is slightly less complex, essentially an embryonic Prince Charles. He's eager to be seen as 'one of the lads', but ends up as a kind of embarrassing Dad-to-the-country. Acutely embarrassed that his status in society is entirely founded on his relatives, he tetchily defending himself by exclaiming that flying a helicopter is "really hard!" But lurking under the surface of his everyman act is snippy pedantry - he constantly corrects both Cameron and Beckham on their speech, as if he can't resist displaying superiority over them.

This makes Beckham, uncannily played by Browne, as the most likeable of the bunch. Sure he's a shallow moron, but at least he's a harmless shallow moron. Key to Brown's performance is the mastery of the Beckham eyebrows, teased and taut as if directly connected to the cogs in his head. His frequent pauses to process new information give him a doglike aura, practically cocking his head with curiosity as he struggles with basic maths. This open idiocy exposes the concealed idiocy of Cameron and William, dragging them both down with him.

It's Beckham that gets most of the big laughs in the show, one of the best simply being the first time he talks. Browne is possessed with uncanny comic timing and good looks that fall just on right side of silly, imbuing Beckham with a weird vulnerable nobility. It's as if he knows he's not too smart, yet has turned that negative into a positive. Compared to him, the other two are somewhat less dramatically chewy. Davey's William compares badly with Oliver Chris' portrayal in Prince Charles III earlier this year, recognisable but blurred. Meanwhile, Cameron is suitably detestable, but the portrayal is a bit one note.

Worst of all is Aujla's hotel attendant Ashok, who spends the entire play talking in a cringeworthily broad comedy Indian accent. Whenever the character is on stage the laughs drain from the room as he painstakingly picks through slow monologues that takes for-goddamn-ever to get to the point. That he's clearly intended to be annoying doesn't make his presence any more pleasant to be around.

This lands The Three Lions firmly in 'pretty good' territory. There are moments of subtle cleverness like the expanding/contracting hotel rooms that signify each character's status, and at least ten really great jokes. But there's a sense that something is imperceptibly amiss in the way the three performers mesh together, together with a script that goes for the easy laugh a couple of times too many. Far from a disaster, but not exactly must-see material either.

★★★

Three Lions is at the St James Theatre until 2 May 2015. Tickets here.

Animals has a curdled heart. The play peeks into a dystopian future where anyone over 70 is ruthlessly terminated by the state unless their surviving relatives pay a hefty 'sentimental attachment fee'. Children are kept in a state of arrested development until their 18th birthday, spending their ignorant days literally swaddled in bubble wrap. Adults don't have it too much better, segregated by their economic utility and encouraged not to think - problematic individuals relegated to the level of 'comfort boys/girls' - or state sanctioned prostitutes.

Emma Adams' play follows a small group of people scratching out an existence in this nightmare world. The majority of the action takes place in the mouldy flat of Norma Pratt (Marlene Sidaway). At 77 she's a prime target for the deathsquads, surviving through a combination of self-confinement, incompetent officials and forged paperwork. She's a canny, domineering woman, easily cowing her 59 year old live-in helper Joy (Sadie Shimmin). Together with their next door neighbour, Helen (Cara Chase), the three make an uneasy trio - each conscious of their own impending execution by economics.

Outside this dingy little bubble there's bubbly Maya (Milly Thomas), who we're shocked to realise is just one day away from her 18th birthday. Despite her age she behaves as if she's about ten, dancing around like a hyperactive child. Her father, Noah (Steve Hansell), works as an inspector within the Utility Force, filling forms and checking boxes that dictate life and death.

L-R: Steve Hansell, Cara Chase, Sadie Shimmin and Marlene Sidaway

Each of these characters comes bundled with clearly laid out motivations - for the young it's to successfully graduate to adulthood and 'have fun'. For the adults it's to ensure that their child develops into a productive member of society with a full complement of happy memories. For the elderly it's to simply live another day. When they're thrown into the mix together, the result is a deeply funny and dark-as-all-hell exploration into life in an ultra-commodified society.

Adams' future Britain is the logical conclusion of the current Coalition government's propaganda. Their language of strivers and scroungers cuts ragged gashes across the whole of society, not only making implicit moral judgments on a person's worth vis a vis their contribution to the economy, but encouraging infectious divisions between the haves and have nots. Being told you're a striver is the political equivalent of a soapy titwank: "You work so hard, you should be so proud of yourself! You deserve everything!". Compare this to the demonisation of those on benefits, caricatured as feckless lumps of flesh.

This terrifying society is what happens when the economic rules of the market are applied to everyday life, something that's an ever-growing trend in the neo-liberal dogma that runs right through mainstream politics. What's being taught is an insidious lesson that you are a product to be marketed, other people are products to be acquired and our personal value is dictated to us by the slippery intangibility of the marketplace.

Milly Thomas

As Animals explains, this leads to a homogenised society where headlines read "Fact! Thinking Causes Cancer!", negative words are banned (with consequent impact on crosswords) and empathy and ethics have been replaced with bovine submission to authority. In the casually murderous Utility Inspector we're confronted with the 'banality of evil'; the jobsworth who'd shoot a syringe of air into an old woman's veins for a paycheque.

In this world the social infection is so far gone that there can be no heroes. Everybody has absorbed the system of treating other human beings like chattel to such a degree that the most obscene acts become possible. These elderly women aren't heroines or freedom fighters, their story a lesson that to thrive within a monstrous system one must become a monster.

So yeah. It's a pretty cool piece of theatre. The entire cast acquit themselves well in the roles, with particular credit to Cara Chase and Milly Thomas. Chase cooks up a devilishly fun character in Helen; at first pleasant and upbeat, but then displaying a stone-cold survival instinct. I've seen few more memorable sights in theatre this year than Chase feverishly hoovering up a bag of 'billy' in an attempt to energise herself. Milly Thomas also impresses with her manic bundle of sweetness and light. Her Maya is adorable, but it's a skincrawlingly awkward adorable with a gross core of paedophilic just-plain-wrong right at the centre. She manages to pitch the character somewhere between sympathy and sadism - the audience basically wants Maya to be alright, but we don't mind too much if she gets traumatised along the way.

The only criticisms I can muster is a slight sagginess in the final act. Throughout the first act things are gradually building to some grotesque reveals, but once the cat is out of the bag there's a some unnecessary wheelspinning before the curtain. Similarly, despite the performances being uniformly great, the cast haven't quite gelled yet - though I'm confident this will happen as the run continues.

Animals is as funny as it is relevant, with a malevolent streak a mile wide. with its willingness to get weird, creative and disgusting it hit all my critical bases. A winner.

★★★★

Animals is at Theatre503 until 2nd May 2015. Tickets here.

The idea of miniature people picking their way through our lives is seductive. From the fairy circles of folklore through the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man to Mary Norton's The Borrowers, audiences thrill to the idea of another world hiding in plain sight. It's also experienced a small renaissance in urban art, with Slinkachu, Marcus Crocker and Roy's People all creating miniature dramas, comedies and tragedies right underneath the noses of unsuspecting Londoners.

Little Heroes proves to be an exhibition of two halves: one informed by politics and punky satire, the other by superhero poptimism. The latter is familiar territory for the artist, subverting the urban landscape by hiding tiny, pointed messages in plain sight. Here discarded bottle caps are repurposed as umbrellas, drug dealers and their clients haggle over the price of a gigantic ecstasy pill and a man aims his rifle at a gigantic Twitter symbol.

Recyclapool 1

A decent chunk of the appeal comes from their positioning. Roy periodically creates these tiny models and hides them across London (and other cities and towns), including a little note that explains what they are. This gently subverts the urban space into a creative one: even though the chances of discovering one are minimal, the knowledge that they're out there is a thrill. Even within the gallery there's rewards for the eagle-eyed observer - men sat cross-legged on power sockets, pursuing each other across picture frames or strutting along the skirting board.

Killer Heels

In the iconography there's a strong street art influence; repurposing corporate iconography to create bitesize political statements. This dovetails beautifully into a view of the individual dwarfed by corporations. As they clamber over crumpled drinks cans or vainly try to shove a pair of colossal Louboutin heels off a body, the traditional relationship with trademarks, style and brand is subverted - the public revealed less as consumer and more as victim.

Obama's Bandits

This is best exemplified in my favourite piece here, Obama's Bandits. Here we see the President and First Lady perched atop a crumpled Budweiser can, with three machine-gun wielding cops in front of them. They're facing off against an angry crowd of protesters, with one man bleeding out on the ground in front of them, his fallen placard reading "Stop Racist Police". It's almost too blunt, but that just amplifies the indignation, the piece bristling with commentary on race, violence and the sinister entanglement of business and politics.

That's all great stuff, so it's a shame that the superhero themed works that give the exhibition its title aren't quite as good. These show tiny figures casting giant silhouettes of DC and Marvel heroes - Spider-man, Batman, Superman, Catwoman, Hulk and so on. The implicit message is that no matter how downtrodden you may feel, you have the spirit of a superhero lurking deep you. It's an unabashedly optimistic outlook (one I can't really disagree with), yet feels at odds with the rest of the work.

We Are Heroes - Batman

As noble and benevolent as these characters are in their fictional universes, they're as much corporate symbols as Coke cans and McDonalds restaurants, elements that the artist is eager to satirise elsewhere. In deifying them like this there's the uneasy promotion of assimilating corporate IPs into our psychology. Also unexamined is the adolescent power fantasy represented by the superhero. There's just something a bit shallow about the implied positivity of a man imagining himself as Batman - presumably fantasising about being a billionaire vigilante assaulting the poor in dank alleyways.

I guess it boils down to the simple fact that superheroes are incredibly popular right now and that works featuring them are more likely to sell to apolitical customers. After all, the artist has to put a crust on his plate, and going a bit commercial is hardly the worst crime in the world. Still, there's the sense that this is ever-so-slightly the easy way out: riding on the coat-tails of Warner Bros and Disney's intellectual property rather than subverting it.

Even though I didn't much like those, there's still more than enough crammed into Curious Duke to make Little Heroes a more than worthwhile visit. Throughout there's a clean, clear and attractive aesthetic sense which, in combination with heaping dollops of creativity and an anti-authoritarian streak make it easy to recommend. Check it out!

Little Heroes is at Curious Duke Gallery, Whitecross Street, until 9th May. Information here.

It's difficult to take a ghost seriously after it's deployed haunted image macros. This cuts to the core of Unfriended: an interesting formal experiment but a crap horror movie. Essentially I Know What You Did Last Summer via online culture, the gimmick is that it takes place entirely on a Macbook screen.

Excitement is created by watching a cursor flip between windows, navigate between Facebook pages, chat on Skype and fiddle with computer settings. Though not entirely original (sitcom Modern Family did the same thing recently), this at least sets the film apart from damn near everything else in multiplexes.

Plotwise we're in pretty hoary horror territory. One year before the events of the film ersons unknown posted a YouTube video of a highschool girl named Laura drunkenly passed out on the floor, having shat herself. Humiliation dutifully followed, salt being rubbed into the wound by anonymous online comments instructing her to "KILL URSELF BITCH". She did, the grainy mobile video winding up on LiveLeak to be rubbernecked at by online hordes.

Cut to the present day and Laura's former schoolmates are having a typical night in. Our lead, Blaire (Shelley Hennig), is Skype teasing her horny boyfriend Mitch (Moses Jacob Storm). They're soon joined by their friends: Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead) and Ken (Jacob Wysocki). The five gabble on dumbly in a five way Skype conversation, but soon notice that there's a silent, sixth person in the conference. Increasingly spooked out, they try and fail to boot them from the chat. Could it be... a ghost?!?

It indeed could be. And, it soon transpires, is. The dead Laura has returned to haunt their laptops and get her unearthly revenge on those that wronged her. She does this by taking control of Spotify, sending rogue Facebook IMs, opening browser videos that playing YouTube videos and eventually possessing people and making them off themselves. Aside from the last one, this makes it a haunting roughly on par with a particularly annoying computer virus. You inevitably think "why don't they just put down their computers and do something else?". The film scrabbles for various reasons why they shouldn't, but this central issue singlehandedly drains a lot of fear from the movie.

Not helping matters is that these characters are all absolutely horrible people. Slavering for the death of annoying teenagers is horror boilerplate, but usually there's at least one character we can root for. Not here - this is a shooting gallery of gormless, self-centred chumps who absolutely deserve the supernatural revenge that's being visited on them. This puts the audience firmly on the ghost's side, the only brief moments of pleasure watching these morons jamming their hands into blenders or deepthroating straightening irons.

That we don't care (and indeed, actively dislike) these characters quickly translates into a vague boredom. You're silently urging this ghost to hurry the hell up and do something nasty. Things aren't exactly helped by the visual flatness of the film - confining the action to a laptop screen makes for an aesthetic that's as conceptually bold as it is visually dull. Thing is, Unfriended is impressive if only in that it exactly simulates watching someone's desktop, right down to the clutter, file names and browser history. That this electronic environment is so familiar gives rise to the few genuine thrills - for example the 'close window' button mysteriously disappearing.

But those are few and far between. Unfriended feels like a slog even at 83 minutes; the characters are horrible, the ghost is dull, the gore is crap and the jump scares are trite. It's a pity, on paper the idea is sound but in practice it simply doesn't work. Weirdly, Unfriended might work a bit better if actually watched it on a laptop. Perhaps it might even make an ambitious ARG videogame. But as a film? Don't bother.

★★

Unfriended is released May 1st.

If you crave the sight of superheroes bashing apart robots then Avengers: Age of Ultron will not disappoint. Within these glossy 141 minutes an armada of CG robots are beheaded, exploded, sliced apart, crushed, electrified, melted and disarticulated. Buildings are reduced to rubble, cars are tossed about, extras run every which way screaming and gigantic floating ships buzz around in the sky. Everything is happening at once! But also, puzzlingly, nothing is happening.

The film continues right where Avengers Assemble left off with our heroes mopping up the dangling plotlines of that film. After that in the mood for celebration; but these spirits are dampened when Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) accidentally creates Ultron (James Spader) an evil robot that wants to wipe out humanity. The rest of the film involves the familiar faces of Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Lia, Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) tracking down Ultron and foiling his nefarious scheme.

Along the way they pick up a couple of new recruits, the Maximoff twins Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and zen robot Superman-a-like The Vision (Paul Bettany). Rounding out the cast are a smattering of supporting characters from the Marvel franchise and a couple of character actors who look happy to collect a paycheque.

What's most vexing about Age of Ultron is that there's nothing thunderingly wrong with it. The action is competently shot, the script gets to the point with a minimum of fuss and there's a big action scene about every half an hour. Joss Whedon has delivered a summer superhero blockbuster that ticks every box required of it. I've always approached criticism on the maxim that I'd much rather watch an interesting failure than successful mediocrity, but the latter describes Age of Ultron to a tee.

Part of the problem is that, very quickly, the film defines itself as an interstitial chapter leading up to the future Thanos/Infinity Gauntlet films. Entire scenes are devoted to setting up this future threat, leaving us in no doubt that the 'real' peril is still to come. The consequence of this is that the narrative we're actually watching feels increasingly sidelined. This also means the tug towards the status quo is irresistible to the point where, as the credits roll, we are almost in precisely the same place as we began.

This applies to the increasingly repetitive character arcs as well; so the Hulk learns to control his rage a bit more, Black Widow comes to terms with her history a bit more, Captain America gets over the past a bit more and Thor worries about Asgard a bit more. Theis repetition is especially egregious in Tony Stark, who by my count for the fifth time in a row learns an important lesson about hubris. Maybe this time it'll stick, but given his vaunted presence in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War I'm guessing probably not.

That lack of forward momentum even extends to developments within the movie. The crowning moment of the trailers for this film is the promise of an upgraded 'heavy' Iron Man duking it out with the Hulk. This fight plays out exactly as loudly as you'd expect, the destruction broadly quoting the climactic scenes of Man of Steel. Problem is, the fight is of so little consequence to the plot that it could be cut from the film with little to no impact to the narrative. It's an action sequence for the sake of an action sequence in a film that exists because an Avengers movie was scheduled for 2015.

Even a contractual obligation with hooks for future instalments dug into it like ticks could say something with it's narrative. Age of Ultron doesn't. In fact it almost aggressively resists being about anything. The closest we get is a repeated motif where the characters idly ponder whether they're monsters or not, complete with a couple of basic visual references from Frankenstein. Symbolically it's about as deep as a puddle, believe me I tried to find something to grip onto here - but that's the best I could manage.

Pressed for something to recommend, I enjoyed James Spader's villainous turn as Ultron, who reminded me of a somewhat toned down version of Bender from Futurama. Rarely have I seen such a moustache-twirlingly evil robot on screen. Sure his motivations and intentions are kinda confusing, but he's never less than amusing to watch, dancing around the frowning superheroes like an refugee Disney villain.

That's about all there is to say about this. There's a crushing inevitability to Age of Ultron. It will make a ridiculous amount of money. It will be hoovered up by mewling nerds who're happy with watching things happen. It will successfully spawn sequels ad nauseum. Honestly, it's a dull and pointless experience and you shouldn't bother with it.

But come on, let's not kid ourselves. You'll go anyway.

★★

Avengers: Age of Ultron is released 24th April.

The most perceptive line in Dead Royal comes when Diana Spencer is hunting for the 'Windsor Pearls'. She muses on the appropriateness of the pearl as symbol of royalty: a piece of dirt gradually encased within multiple layers of luxury until there's a perfectly glistening sphere. Yet deep within the dirt remains.

Chris Ioan Roberts' one-man play is an attempt to winkle out that dirt, to try to understand the psychological and social pressure exerted on an individual as they're crowbarred into the royal mould. He takes on two subjects; the elderly Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson; and Diana Spencer, fiancee to Prince Charles and angelic media darling.

We meet Simpson living in parasitic, Parisian stasis. With her husband dead, her life apparently consists of watching Gone With the Wind and gobbling down luxury truffles. But novelty is on the horizon; the fresh-faced Diana has been dispatched to the Simpson residence in advance of her wedding. Ostensibly there for her hen night, she's also on a secret mission to recover jewellery 'stolen' by the Duchess. Though two never meet (as they're played by the same person), both extemporise at length on what it's like to sacrifice your personality, ambitions and social freedom for a life of "expensive trinkets".

The pastel shades, dodgy wigs, 80s powerfrocks and diva mannerisms drive Dead Royal inexorably towards camp. But this isn't some preening exercise in aristocratic fetishism, more a critique of corrosive privilege. His portrayals function as an autopsy of these two women, peeling back the calcified public image and revealing the pissing, shitting and puking human being underneath. This drags us towards John Waters-ish trashiness; so the stage floor quickly being coated in a gross layer of goopy neon pink puke, and his Diana explains how she had to urinate in the back of a limousine.

Eventually Royal life begins to sound like a straitjacket, the slightest deviation from conformity resulting in a barrage from the press and disapproval from those higher up the ladder. The most obvious demonstration is Wallis Simpson's life in exile, shuffled out of the picture and supported on a stipend. Throughout, Diana's future woes lurk at the back audience's minds. She fantasises about hurling herself down the stairs at her wedding and, given the Paris setting, we can't help but think of her violent death.

Even so, it's a hard to muster up too much sympathy for two women who spent their lives living it large at our expense. Their Marie Antionettish fixations on style, sugary treats and image quickly begin to rankle, as does the low-level bitching about their incompetent servants. In a neat bit of staging, Roberts casts the audience as these underlings, Simpson in particular yelling orders out at us in a practised, privileged nasal drawl.

By the end of the play, the dresses, wigs and body language gave me vaguely insectoid creeps. Wallis in particular dresses in a carapace of thick black designer material, crowned with an imposing Imelda Marcos beehive. She's the endpoint of this process, yet we detect the first inklings of it arising in Diana. The insect comparisons make you think of a Queen Bee. Bloated and immobile within her birthing chamber, a life is devoted to squirting out offspring - a chilling endpoint for these ambitious woman.

This meaty little psychological tangle is never less than enjoyable to watch. Roberts' performances tiptoe between caricature, drag and sincerity. They're grotesques, but grotesques we can just about empathise with. There's also a breezy brevity - at about an hour long each line of dialogue and motion feels important.

As a committed republican I'm no fan of the Royal family, but as with the recent King Charles III and The Three Lions I confess to curiosity as to what's going through their minds; how they justify their life of luxury, the limits they place their behaviour and what life inside the Royal bubble does to a person. In Dead Royal you get a tantalising peek behind the curtain - and it confirms every dark suspicion.

★★★★

Dead Royal has three more performances, the 23rd, 24th and 25th (returns only).Tickets here.

Just when did the salt of the earth become the scum of the earth? That question, paraphrased from Owen Jones' excellent Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, powers No Milk for the Foxes. It's not accurate to say that working class voices are absent from the London stage (as the excellent Trainspotting, Marching on Together and Lardoprove), but, let's face it, these are the minority.

This co-production, by new company Beats&Elements and the Camden People's Theatre kicks back against this. This is about zero hours contracts, financial insecurity, crushed ambitions, social snobbery and the death of working class dignity. Set over one night at a nondescript factory in the outer limits of London, we meet two security guards, Mark (Paul Cree) and Sparx (Conrad Murray), watching over the site. There's little of value to any would-be thieves, and so they sit in Beckettian limbo, stuck with each other.

As they count down the minutes until the shift is over they chat. We learn that this is Mark's first job in two years. He and his partner still live at his parent's house and with a child due very soon this job (crappy though it is) is a lifeline to an independent life and the start of the long road to freedom from debt.

Sparx, the younger of the two, has fewer worries. He just wants to clock off, smoke a spliff and save up for some new trainers. He's caught in a no man's land between adolescence and adulthood. Though he can't see it himself, you see that he's slowly sinking into a quicksand of mediocrity, this 'stopgap job' a dangerous tedium that will eat up decades of your life if you're not careful.

That drama is melded with beatboxing musical numbers, the two performers rapping over each other's beats and loops. It's a curious and idiosyncratic choice; naturalistic drama rubbing up against the more fantastical music. Though the two talk at length; they're not to truly express their own feelings for fear of breaking the shell of uneasy matey masculinity. In the musical numbers though, their innermost paranoias, desires and frustrations bubble to the surface.

The best bits are the moments of genuine anger. There's a particularly affecting description of a City party that Mark is invited to. He's enjoying the food, the drink and the conversation - taking pleasure in being accepted by these people as an apparent equal. Then someone makes a casually classist comment that cuts to the bone. The illusion shatters and his class status is underlined: he can fake it but will never truly belong. Later we see the vulnerability of life on a zero hours contract; the worker powerless and impotent against the whims of his boss.

This kind of exploitation was fought (and the worst instances curbed) over the course of the 20th century; workers unionising to protect their livelihood, dignity and future. But now, post Thatcher, Blair and Cameron, the power balance has once more shifted to the boss. Dancing to the tune of the free market, the worker is a pure unit of economic activity, working conditions and rights eroded on the basis that no matter how shitty a job or boss is, there'll be someone in dire enough straits to gobble it up.

It's a fine message for a play, this desperation leaching through the carefully coloured scenery and the performer's baleful gaze. But a right on message isn't the only thing you need for a piece of drama. Though there's occasional pathos, this is a touch too didactic; the two men often feeling like devices through which the writers' politics are explained - like characters from an educational film. Sparx in particular could use a bit of fleshing out, Murray replaying the same facial and physical tics over and over again.

This leads to a tangible slackness in the on stage chemistry. While their comic timing is adequate, the two don't bounce off one another as satisfyingly as you'd hope. It's hardly a show-stopping flaw, more something that should (and by all appearances can) be ironed out over the course of the run.

I liked No Milk for the Foxes, but then anything that speaks with clarity, anger and forthrightness about class issues is instantly in my good books. If it were married to a more rigorously constructed piece of theatre I'd be in hog's heaven. As it is I'll just settle for straightforward enjoyment.

★★★

No Milk For the Foxes is at the Camden People's Theatre until the 9th of May. Tickets here.

The Daily Mail pumps out an neverending torrent of venomous shite. Whenever I'm in the unfortunate position of reading it I can't help but wonder just who's manning the valves. Taking the paper at face value would mean an office populated by paranoid fuckwits who crave celeb-daughter preteen flesh when they're not furiously quivering at the sight of a minaret.

Then you see something so impossibly dumb and realise that the journalists can't possibly take this seriously. You reassure yourself that they must just be after a paycheque, swallowing their dignity, suppressing their morals and turning their talents to evil to get in the world. Why, they're just following orders. After all, if they actually believed this drivel they'd be monsters. Right? R-right?

This is the riddle that Mark Jagasia's play sets out to solve; popping the collective consciousness of the right wing press on the autopsy table and spilling its guts. Set in a Britain one parallel universe over from our own, we enter the offices of The Clarion. This paper, with it's neverending anti-immigrant rhetoric, gothic typeface logo, contempt for their readers, porn baron proprietor and hankering for some imaginary racially pure British golden age, is a Frankenstein's monster of the worst parts of the Mail and Express.

With the newspaper industry gradually dying on its arse times are tough, though editor Morris Honeyspoon (Greg Hicks) is doing his level best to shore up sales. His sole tactic is to crank the anti-immigrant rhetoric to maximum volume, plastering every front page for a year with: "Gypsies swarm into UK like ants", "Bubonic plague fear from asylum kids", "Whites in minority by 2020", or "Nine out of ten ethnics praise honour killings".

Crewing this ship of the damned are dopey word-mangling news editor Albert (Jim Bywater), booze-soaked foreign affairs veteran Verity (Clare Higgins), spineless twenty-something hack Josh (Ryan Wichert) and work experience celebrity columnist Pritti (Laura Smithers).

Over the course of two hours we'll see triumph slowly morph into paranoia. With scandal brewing and the industry teetering on the edge of oblivion, a situation arises that could kill off this venerable newspaper for good. Individual journalists undergo crises of conscience, each having to deal with their involvement in a newspaper that they know full well makes the world a shittier place to live in.

Greg Hicks as Morris Honeyspoon

Most obviously eye-catching is Greg Hick's megalomaniacal editor. With ramrod straight posture and flesh stretched drum-skin tight around his skull he's a genuinely intimidating presence. There's a terrifying self-confidence to the way he carries himself, borne of a lifetime spent learning the precise ways to intimidate and bully those around him. Worse, he's risen to a position where he can effortlessly get away with almost anything he wants.

Morris is cut from similar cloth to Armando Iannucci's Malcolm Tucker, combining towering, foul-mouthed rage with an unexpected sincerity. Of all the characters in Clarion, Morris is the one true believer, devoted to his ideal of an unspoilt, paradise Britannia and determined to use The Clarion to restore it. The play gradually builds up his marvellously bonkers, Hitler-esque rant:

"Who's right about multiculturalism? I am. It's torn this country to pieces. Who's right about pornography? I am - we're a bloodless land of spermatically depleted masturbators. The liberals betrayed England. And immigration, oh God, yes, immigration, who's right about immigration...?"

He's a caricature, but one with a nugget of truth lurking in his core - a kind of 'essence of Dacre'. The other characters are similarly well-defined; with the gradual physical and moral decline of Claire Higgins' Verity portrayed beautifully, but Morris Honeyspoon is a gift of a character and Greg Hicks dominates throughout.

Clarion never stops being funny; the dialogue nimble, all the performers possessing enviable comic timing. It's a far superior play to Richard Bean's Great Britain, which covers similar territory to lesser effect. That said there's still a couple of flies in the ointment: in the climactic scenes the plot throws out a few too many soap operatic revelations, gently descending from excellence into mere greatness.

There's too much weight on the shoulders of these characters, simultaneously represent ing trends in British journalism, referencing and paroding individual newspaper personalities and stoking our interest as people in their own right. The first two are achieved effortlessly, the last is where we stumble - it's difficult to care who impregnated whom and so on.

Quibbling aside, Clarion is a superior piece of drama, almost scary in the methodical way it picks apart the Daily Mail's psychology. Greg Hicks is superb, though supported by a wonderful cast with no weak links. My personal cherry on the cake was my home town of Pontypridd getting a name check early in the play - an inclusion that proved to be a portent of gret things to come.

★★★★

Clarion is at the Arcola Theatre, Dalston until 16th May. Tickets here.

All photos by Simon Annand.

Tony Benn died a national treasure. An impressive achievement for a radically left-wing politician who spent much of his parliamentary career demonised by the press. But, when all's said and done, what did Benn actually achieve? His brand of democratic socialism stood starkly at odds with the now dominant free market philosophy of Thatcher and her ideological children. At the end of Benn's life, with David Cameron's government openly preying on the vulnerable and portioning off the state to his chums, did he feel like he'd failed?

Benn's Last Tape explores that through a sideways reinterpretation of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. We find Benn (Philip Bretherton) recording what he intends to be the final instalment of his exhaustive diaries. Surrounded by piles of books (almost all about him) he sits in a dressing gown and 'STOP THE POLL TAX' t-shirt sipping from a gigantic 'HP sauce' branded mug, snugly fitting into a space that feels like an extension of his personality.

The one man play is a rambling monologue that covers every major part in Benn's life; his personal life, his experiences in World War II, his ministerial philosophies for energy and technology, assessment of political developments, his health, trips to Russia and China and the legacy that he's leaving. Vibrating under all that is an undimmed sense of socialist indignation, even as his candle flickers he's able to summon up the booming rhetoric that 'shook the plaster' of Union halls, party conferences and protest marches.

I saw Benn speak a number of times, and Bretherton's mimicry is often uncanny. Sat in the front row I can practically feel my hair being rustled by the force of powerful speeches, underpinned by rock-solid political conviction. Thing is, it's one thing to see the man himself give a speech to a receptive, cheering audience and quite another to see a rather frail, bathrobe wearing old man ranting to an empty room. Gradually we understand that his invective is directed inwards, Benn trying his hardest to convince himself of his own importance.

For all his fire and passion Benn's political career was ultimately one of noble failure. From the electoral (but not philosophical!) disaster of the 1983 Labour manifesto, to the privatisation of the industries he sought to keep state-owned, to his futile campaign to stop the Iraq War, to (more broadly), his vision of Britain as a socialist-democratic worker's utopia - all came to naught. Even his successes like overseeing the development of Concorde were gradually dismantled. It's telling that it was only when he was at his most politically powerless that he reached the heights of popularity.

Bretherton's Benn is pleasant enough company in a curmudgeonly sort of way, yet he's battling a deep sense of frustration and suspicions of worthlessness. This knits Benn with Beckett's Krapp. Very quickly, we realise a weird synchronisation between fiction and reality has taken place. Krapp, like Benn, records his thoughts onto tape, endlessly rewinding and replaying in order to gain ever-elusive perspective. The two characters also share a love of bananas.

Bananas aside, the two characters thematically fuse together too. Krapp, like Benn, desired to change the world (Krapp with art, Benn with politics), yet the thrust of Krapp's Last Tape is how confidence and certainty are eroded by doubt. The endpoint is the nihilistic conclusion that the world will trundle on the same as ever and all his efforts have amounted to zilch. Krapp and Benn are both men possessed of vision, but Beckett's conclusion is that his character wasted his life in pursuit of the unattainable.

Fortunately, Tony's Last Tape isn't quite as doomy. Writer Andy Barrett is clearly a fan of Tony Benn, his script possessing an obsessive level of knowledge about the man's life. To end a play about the recently deceased Benn on as cynical a note as Beckett does with Krapp would leave a bad taste in the mouth. So it's nice that, even in the midst of failing health and relevance, Barrett allows his Benn to go out on a note of triumph, albeit a muted one.

For those of a political bent Benn's Last Tape is catnip; working as a dual study of Benn and an overview of postwar British politics. For old socialists in the crowd, Bretherton's passionate oratory will stir the blood, his excellent performance more than doing credit to the memory of Tony Benn. The flipside is that anyone unfamiliar with recent political history will find themselves lost in a morass of obscure references and namedrops. I'd like to consider myself pretty up on this stuff, but even I had the odd moment of confusion trying to pick through the intricacies of internal Labour squabblings in the 60s and 70s.

But on the whole I had a wonderful time. At 75 minutes the show is nicely pacey and surprisingly dynamic given the single-setting and age of the lead character. Well worth a trip down to the depths of Penge West.

★★★★

Benn's Last Tape is at the Bridge House Theatre until 17th May. Tickets here.

'Madness in Civilisation' at the Wellcome Collection, 25th March 2015

'Vernon God Little' at The Space, 26th March 2015

'Wired Up' at Arebyte Gallery, 28th March 2015

'Heckle: A Series of Perfomances' at Bosse & Baum, 28th March 2015

'Bright Shadow' at the Morgue, Chelsea College of Arts, 30th March 2015

'Creditors' at the Brockley Jack Studio Theatre

Cerebellum Relaunch - 8th April 2015

'Jauja' (2015) directed by Lisandro Alonso

'Dorian Gray' at the King's Head Theatre, 7th April 2015

'Cerebellum' at The Stag's Head, 8th April 2015

'Islington South & Finsbury Housing Hustings' at the Bentham Community Centre, 9th April 2015

'The Three Lions' at the St James Theatre, 11th April 2015

'Animals' at Theatre503, 13th April 2015

'Little Heroes' by Roy's People, at the Curious Duke Gallery

'Unfriended' (2015) directed by Levan Gabriadze

'Avengers: Age of Ultron' (2015) directed by Joss Whedon

'Dead Royal' at the Ovalhouse, 22nd April 2015

'No Milk for the Foxes' at Camden People's Theatre, 23rd April 2015

'Clarion' at the Arcola Theatre

'Tony's Last Tape' at the Bridge House Theatre