Tag: Neil McPherson

Scrounger by Athena Stevens, Finborough Theatre, 17 January 2020

Almost certainly not the actual wheelchair involved in the story
Stephen B Calvert Clariosophic [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

What a story.

Athena Stevens, playwright and performer, was born with athetoid cerebral palsy.

And she is ballsy.

But in 2015 she suffered a devastating incident at the hands of British Airways, when the airline accepted her as a passenger on a plane that was too small for her motorised wheelchair, despite having been informed of the chair’s dimensions, causing Athena extreme humiliation and severe consequential harm. Worse yet, her wheelchair was destroyed in the incident.

This play, Scrounger, is a two-hander which makes light and dark in equal measure about this incident and its aftermath; a dramatised true story.

Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

In type, it reminded me of Rohan Candappa’s candid piece about being made redundant unfairly by his company.

How I Said ‘F*** You’ To The Company When They Tried to Make Me Redundant by Rohan Candappa, Z/Yen Offices, 28 January 2016

Athena Stevens starts the piece by “calling the audience out”, as she puts it in the playtext, reproaching us for our enlightened, left-leaningness.

It’s an interesting start.

Then she reproaches a “late-comer”, who the audience might be forgiven for taking at face value. Smug me, I realised this must be the other member of the cast, whereas Daisy, bless her, was taken in until the deceit was made obvious.

A rollercoaster piece ensues. The sense of injustice in the way that Athena was treated is palpable.

Yet, there is something about Athena’s immediate full-on social media and then media attack on BA which seemed, to me, counter productive.

I have only ever been driven to complain about relatively trivial or minor issues. I was reminded of my extensive correpsondence with Garuda Indonesia 25+ years ago:

A Dreadful Journey Home From Bali, Via Jakarta, Bangkok & Abu Dhabi, Worthy Of Complaint, “Courtesy” Of Garuda Indonesia, 12 & 13 December 1993

My method in such circumstances, as indeed was Rohan’s in his rather Kafkaesque situation, is to threaten the faceless bureaucracy with public exposure of their jobsworthiness.

Athena Stevens, by contrast, went straight to the social media (and then the regular media), which I think was always likely to result in the unjust bureaucracy digging its heels in and taking its time over its responses.

Perhaps Athena’s is the modern way with social media and in any case I do sympathise with her very specific and difficult situation. But one part of her story, which adds to the darkness of it, is the way this matter caused a breakdown in her relationship with her boyfriend. She wanted to seek legal advice as well, whereas he wanted her to stick solely with the media campaign; he felt that going to the law was (I paraphrase) “too aggressive”.

My view, for what it is worth, is that a media camapaign is at least as aggressive, if not more so, than asserting formally that the other party has been negligent.

But as a piece of drama, the story unfolds wonderfully well, with some clever devices of deisgn and trickery along the way. Athena Stevens is a very good writer and she wrote this story with great gusto.

There are some great lines in the play. After her humiliation at Heathrow, BA Uber Athena (Scrounger) home.

I wanted the ride home to be quiet, but the driver turns on LBC.

There is no level of hell, which cannot sink further…with the addition of an LBC broadcast.

Athena Stevens’s performance is also something to behold, as indeed is the performance of Leigh Quinn, who played a plethora of other parts with great energy and skill.

Janie and I thought this a superb piece and a great start to our 2020 theatre-going. It’s been well received and quite widely reviewed. So you don’t need to take our words for it – click here for the reviews and stuff.

Booby’s Bay by Henry Darke, Finborough Theatre, 9 February 2018

Oh dear.

We found this one a real dud. Both the play and the production.

The subject matter really interested us. The housing crisis and the notion of a protester taking on the establishment…

…but this play missed the mark for us in so many ways. The protester was not only a flawed hero (that’s a good idea for such a play) but is in many ways a shirking beneficiary of the housing crisis. It is hard to buy into the conceit of a play when you find the moral hero at the core quite so conflicted and irritating.

Click here or image below for a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

The production had ideas beyond its ability to deliver too, with several long interludes of singing and movement that were almost embarrassing in their amateurishness. Janie struggled (failed) to avoid laughing in inappropriate places at times – the good news being that those were such noisy times, few if any other people would have noticed.

Another scene that really didn’t work for us…let’s call it the shark scene…had us laughing at the artlessness of the performance rather than at the material itself, which was meant to be comedic, but not in that way.

The good news for us was that we were both in a pretty relaxed mood on that Friday evening; this lemon of a play/production was so poor it almost entertained us to share that sorry experience and chat about it afterwards. Had we been in a stressy-end-of-the-week mood, having rushed to get to the theatre on time, we might have been far less amused.

Also, as we were just around the corner from Mohsen, we had a very tasty Persian meal to look forward to and then enjoy in Noddyland after the show.

Here is a link to the reviews, which have not been brilliant although some have been much kinder than ours.

We really do think it is a shame that this one was such a flop for us. We’re becoming very fond of the Finborough and we also both think that the subject matter – the housing and inequality crisis in our society, is a very relevant topic for theatrical treatment at the moment. Just not this play/production.

Here is a link to the trailer:

BOOBY’S BAY Trailer 1 from Henry Darke on Vimeo.

The Melting Pot by Israel Zangwill, Finborough Theatre, 3 December 2017

This was a very interesting Sunday evening at the Finborough.

Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

The playwright, Israel Zangwill, sounds like a fascinating character in his own right. To some extent the story in the play mirrors his story, although the play is set in New York, not Zangwill’s native London. Also, the play’s young hero is a composer, rather than an author.

The young hero of the play, David, is a refugee survivor of the Kishinev (Chișinău) pogrom, inspired to compose music to celebrate the cultural melting pot he finds in New York. He falls in love with a beautiful Russian Christian radical who is running a settlement house in New York and who turns out to be the daughter of an anti-semitic Baron from Bessarabia. How culpable is the Baron for the pogrom that took place on his watch? And how is the young love going to go down with him and with David’s traditionally orthodox but loving kin?

If that all sounds a bit melodramatic to your taste, I can understand the sentiment. Yet somehow Zangwill manages to avoid those excesses, at least in the hands of this Bitter Pill/NeilMcPherson/Finborough production. The play isn’t quite Ibsen, but it is even less like a melodramatic Yiddish Theatre monstrosity.

Indeed the play seems hugely pertinent today, with many minorities being persecuted across the globe still, plus swathes of refugees and migrants on the move. Zangwill includes both sides of the assimilation (or perhaps I should say acculturation) and ethnic tolerance argument, although you are left in no doubt that you have been in the hands of a liberal enthusiast of the melting pot.

Grandpa Lew, sitting, with his musician brother, Great Uncle Max, standing

Of course I cannot help this piece bringing to mind my own family – in particular my mother’s musical family, who came to London from the Pale of Settlement in the early 1890s.

I wondered briefly whether Israel Zingwall might have taught my Grandpa Lew at the Jews’ Free School, as the programme says that Zingwall taught there, but a little on-line research indicates that Zingwall quit teaching at that school a few years before Grandpa Lew made his fleeting appearances there (between periods of survival-oriented child labour truancy).

Returning to the Finborough in December 2017, the place was deservedly full on a cold, wet Sunday evening. In the bar and audience we saw Michael Billington, with Mrs B making a (now rare/occasional) appearance at the theatre. The Billington’s dedication to high-quality fringe theatre over the decades is exceptional.

Reviews, if/when they appear, should be covered by this search term – click here.

Janie and I highly recommend this production.