'Pick Me Up' at Somerset House

Now in its fifth year, the annual festival of the best new graphic design and illustration talent is firmly embedded on the London calendar as a must see event. With its goal being to avoid the stuffiness and corporate attitude of many other art fairs, Pick Me Up prides itself on being informal, fun, interactive and, most of all, affordable.

Located in the Embankment Galleries at Somerset House, alongside the 16 artists profiled in the Pick Me Up Selects gallery, there is also an upstairs space for collectives and galleries, as well as a changing daily schedule of different events and performance pieces for visitors to get involved with. And if you leave without first printing your own postcard at Lesley Barnes’ stand, then you’ve really missed a trick.

In the Pick Me Up Selects gallery, personal highlights included Scottish illustrator Lynnie Zulu’s bright posters, Bristol graduate Edward Cheverton’s collages and characters (which evoked the spirit of Button Moon), and London-based comic artist Isabel Greenberg with her painted plates, layered box collages and posters all based around the themes of gods, monsters, love and strife.

Upstairs with the collectives and galleries, there was a strong theme throughout most of the groups of rebellion and mockery. And there were a lot of ways to get involved – whether you had your portrait painted in the alternative photo booth, or took on the Punch and Judy-esque puppets in their booth. But it also meant that the stand-out artists were those who were less confrontational or angry in their stance. The letterpress work by Sort and Catherine McGinniss was fantastic in its simplicity and strong messages (especially the poster calling to mind the famous suffrage logan ‘Deeds Not Words’). I also loved the work of Lesley Barnes (mentioned above), who invited everyone to get involved with printing their own unicorn postcard.

Over in the events spaces, I caught Grid Forms by Melvin Galapon – an interactive game where five members of the audience are invited to don white boiler suits and then follow the instructions by choreographers Marquez and Zangs for a grid-based dance/formation game. The idea was to show how grids and patterns could be used as a tool for creation, but while it was fun to watch I didn’t envy the hectic moves asked of the performers.

Pick Me Up runs until 5 May at Somerset House, London. For more information, please click here.

"Pretty Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics"

When women in comedy are still judged for their looks before their jokes, you know there’s a long way to go. While male comedians clog up the panels on TV and radio quizzes, the token woman is usually only there because she’s a pretty TV presenter or a giggly pop star – she’s rarely there for her wit alone, and she’s almost never there if she’s not conventionally beautiful.

In her new book Pretty Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics, Linda Mizejewski – professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University in Columbus – rips apart the notion that there are no funny women, and pours scorn on the idea that funny women should be judged only by their appearance.

Pretty Funny is very accessible for the non-academic reader, and is an enjoyable stomp through the sexist battlefield of the comedy circuit. With chapters focussing specifically on five of the finest acts currently working in the States (Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Wanda Sykes, Ellen De Generes and Margaret Cho), Mizejewski also includes  fantastic chapter setting the scene and placing all of this in context. Because of course those five comedians don’t stand in isolation – they follow in a long tradition of funny women that includes too many people to name, but would include Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers, Fanny Brice and Carol Burnett.

All of these five women are producing excitingly feminist comedy in a world that traditionally sees feminists as ugly man-hating hags with no sense of humour. And they’re coming through at a time when there’s a surge in opportunities for women who not only perform comedy to some man’s script and direction, but now invariably also write, produce and direct the comedy – meaning they’re in full control. By deliberately including lesbian and black comedians in her five profiles, Mizejewski is also drawing a firm line under the fact that what is assumed to be ‘pretty’ is a long way from the Disney princess definition of the word.

Pretty Funny is a really engaging, fun and enlivening book. It’ll make you see your favourite comedians in a different way, and will also widen out the vision with which you look at the world of pop culture in general. We’re living in an age when women are finally starting to be taken more seriously – and in what better industry to show how serious women are that in comedy? Exactly.

'The Tinderbox' at Bristol Old Vic

This reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s seven-page short story The Tinderbox into a two-hour 16-strong ensemble theatre piece is certainly ambitious. Grand in scale, vision and cast, The Bristol Old Vic Young Company has left no stone unturned in its quest to produce a meaty production worthy of the illustrious footsteps they are following in.

The story of The Tinderbox has classic fairy tale fare – a princess locked in a tower, a cruel king and queen, anthropomorphic wolves, magical objects and forests. In a nutshell, when the king and queen (Lorenzo Niyongabo and Beth Collins) learn of a prophecy that their treasured baby daughter will be assassinated by a common solider (Fennar Ralston), they are so horrified that they engineer a war that can never be won so that all the young men of their country are permanently on the battle fields killing each other. But after the war has raged for 17 years, some of the soldiers start to grow disillusioned and rebel… and where you have dissent, you will find strength. In this case, through the discovery of a magical tinderbox.

In many ways, the story reminded me of the recent production of Arcadia at the Tobacco Factory – with the genius daughter closeted away and protected from the salacious evils of the world by overbearing and foolish parents, and the emphasis on gardens and woodlands to the narrative.

Directed by Lisa Gregan, with a script adapted by Silva Semerciyan, this new production of The Tinderbox shows great promise, but in its enthusiasm it felt rather crowded with plot devices, convoluted dialogue and heavy symbolism from the use of wooden chairs – which were intended to represent a huge manner of different objects and emotions throughout the whole show. Within about 15 minutes of The Tinderbox starting, I knew the perpetual clattering of the chairs (oh, the chairs!) was going to grate on me…

However, there were some lovely moments within the performance. For instance, a beautifully choreographed scene where blindfolded ladies in waiting dress the princess (Krista Matthews): although it was unclear why the ladies needed to be blindfolded, as an isolated scene it was delightful to watch. As an aside, I remain confused as to why the princess’ dedicated lady in waiting was played by a man (Dale Thrupp) since there was no shortage of female actors in the ensemble cast.

The use of masks to represent the three wolves was impressive, and the wolves themselves provided a genuine air of menace and magic to the whole piece, which moved the production up a level. The masks themselves were well crafted, and the movements by the puppeteers was impressive.

While The Tinderbox was a powerful and fun play, this production would benefit from some hefty script editing. One side effect of the overloaded script was that some of the actors garbled their words, and several speeches by the princess lost their effect as her words were almost inaudible – when sadly these could have been very effective plot devices as the speeches were to underscore her muted intelligence.

The moral of The Tinderbox? Be careful what you wish for!

The Tinderbox is being performed at Bristol Old Vic until 26 April. For more information, please click here.

Sadie Jones – ‘The Fallout’

There have been quite a few novels wafted under my nose recently set in London’s glamorous yet seedy past… A Vision of Loveliness by Louise Levene (published in 2011, about an aspiring model in 1960s London), Ask Alice by DJ Taylor (published in 2010, about the secrets of a 1930s nightclub hostess), to name just two that I’ve read recently. And Sadie Jones’ new novel The Fallout (2014, set in 1970s theatreland) adds to this popular canon.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. I love these sort of novels. They conjure up a romantic notion of a past I’m too young to remember but that I like to fondly remember in a way that was probably never true for those who lived through it. London’s Soho is one of those areas that may be geographically small but has such evocative history running through it – the seedy sex industry, the glamour of nightclubs and theatres, the romanticism of it regurgitated in the memoirs of pop stars and artists who spent their time drinking and taking drugs in it.

Sadie Jones’ new novel is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s in London’s burgeoning fringe theatre world. Our protagonist Luke – an aspiring young play writer - has decamped to the capital to escape his depressed family life up north, where it really is grim. He teams up with ambitious theatre producer Paul and his stoical girlfriend Leigh, and the trio set up a radical theatre group. Blighted by Luke’s insatiable sexual appetite, and his torment over his anger and regret about his abandoned parents, the trio freefall into a spiral of longing, lust and ambition.

Luke’s story is contrasted with that of hopelessly unhappy actor Nina Jacobs, whose beauty overrides her actual talent. While we see Luke moving from a part-time job as a dustman to a full-time post as acclaimed writing genius, we watch Nina move from being hen-pecked by her unsympathetic mother to being abused by her homosexual husband.

The Fallout is a compelling read and I was gripped – caught up in the romanticism of the era and the characters, willing them to pair up with their apt other halves, and feeling their frustrations when they let themselves down. Genuinely unable to put the book down, I swept through it in two days – reading it in the bath, over lunches and on buses. 

Sadie Jones recreates the stifled atmospheres of impoverished but hopeful London with (I can only presume) precision, and you completely feel yourself enveloped in the cramped flats, listening to the characters through the bedroom walls and inhaling the stench of stew in the kitchens. The squalid sensations of Luke, Paul and Leigh’s flats contrasts with the extravagant flaunt of Nina and Tony’s sham house, and it was easy to imagine where you’d rather hang out if you really knew these people. Although that said, only Leigh comes out of The Fallout as the character you’d want to spend any time with – the others being spineless, selfish creatures.

After devouring The Fallout, I’m pushing Sadie Jones' back catalogue to the top of my ‘to read next’ list.

Sadie Jones is speaking about The Fallout at Foyles in Bristol on May 20 as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Tickets are £4 in advance. More information is on this link.