Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) by Nassim Soleimanpour, Royal Court Theatre, 19 July 2024

To the Royal Court Theatre on a Friday evening. “Why Friday?”, I hear you cry. Because the Royal Court is now, in its wisdom, starting Saturday shows at 6:30, which is a bit early for us in the summer months, when we like to take advantage of the outdoors in daylight.

We fancied this, as we had seen one of Nassim’s previous works, the eponymous one…

…and loved it.

This sounded a bit more techie but a similar idea.

That’s exactly what it was.

When we booked it we had no idea who we were going to see. We discovered a week or so before our evening that our performer was to be Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem.

This is what she looks like when she does one of her more regular things – singing contemporary music:

It is hard to review a piece like this because I imagine every performer stamps their own mark on the piece – that is sort-of the idea. But certainly the evening we spent at The Royal Court was a gripping 80-90 minutes of theatre, using multi-media the way theatre can use multi-media best. It added to the live performance rather than making me wonder whether we should simply be at home watching a film.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this piece, including a list of other performers involved.

It seems to have had mixed reviews, but then different reviewers saw different performers respond to the piece in different ways. Here’s a link to reviews.

We found it moving and thought-provoking. We’re very glad we went and we’re very glad we saw Self Esteem. We could have done without the screaming groupies, but you can’t have everything…or rather you can’t omit everything that you don’t want.

Misty by Arinzé Kene, Bush Theatre, 17 March 2018

Janie and I both found this a very entertaining and unusual piece. A one man show written and performed by Arinzé Kene.

Friends who have seen my own little Mithras performance from earlier in the week – click here or below…

The London Mithraeum With The Gresham Society, 15 March 2018

…might expect Misty to be a sort-of jazz standards musical. You’d be so wrong.

So is Misty a play, a rap musical, an installation performance or what? It is sort-of all of those things.

Click here for a link to the Bush resource on this piece/production.

Below is a trailer showing one of the rap numbers from the start of the piece:

Below is a short “meet the writer” interview:

Kene explains that it is a piece about trying to write such a piece…

…which I suppose makes it a post-modern performance piece.

There’s some weird imagery too, with some orange balloon motifs acting as a recurring theme.

I don’t think this piece is aimed at the traditional theatre audience, but we were captivated by it.

We liked the poetry of Arinzé Kene’s language, we liked the music – both of the musicians, Adrian McLeod and Shiloh Coke (you can see them in the City Creature vid above) were excellent – I was especially impressed by Shiloh Coke, a young multi-instrumentalist – she should go far.

Arinzé Kene is a very talented rapper, along with being a talented writer and actor/performer.

At the time of writing Misty has only just opened, so you should be able to get to see it over the next few weeks – highly recommended as an unusual but entertaining theatrical, musical, image-filled evening.