Pure Gold....

The latest show at Soho is Pure Gold by Michael Bhim. It’s co-production between Talawa Theatre, Britain’s premiere black theatre company who celebrated their 21st birthday this year, and Soho.

It’s tells the story of Simon, a black bus driver who wants to give his girlfriend Marsha and son Anthony the good life, but can’t accept that the colour of his skin means he faces a life of continual prejudice whenever he tries to get his head above water. Having lost his job he needs cash quick so he turns to his dodgy cousin Paul and finds himself involved in the murky world of driving illegal immigrants into the country from France.

There’s a couple of subplots about Marsha wanting an education and curmudgeonly pensioner neighbour George demonstrating the true value of friendship, but the crux of the story is whether Simon will take Paul’s money and sell his soul or whether he’ll return the money and realise that wrong isn’t right whatever the motivation.

Clarence Smith’s performance as downtrodden everyman Simon holds the evening together and even when the script gets clunky he remains engaging. Mark Monero and Leonard Fenton are superb as dodgy rogue with a heart Paul and nosey neighbour with a heart George, Golda Rosheuvel is OK as Marsha (even though it’s not a particularly sympathetically written role) and 12-year-old Louis Ekoku is excellent as the son torn between his mum’s morality and his dad’s aspirations.

Sadly it’s not an extraordinary play in any way. It’s a kitchen-sink drama set on a London sink estate (a sort of kitchen-sink-sink drama if you like), and even though it’s pretty tightly written and much of the dialogue is sharp and brisk it’s not anything more than a superior episode of EastEnders made flesh. And that's a shame because there's much here to suggest Bhim can write something stronger.

Other Woman News...

The Other Woman is a very worried Other Woman...

Our martial arts teacher has told her she has to 'exercise her glutes' so she can sidekick with more power and somewhere along the line in the Other Woman's head of comedy reviews, shoes, snooker and handbags this got translated as 'Your arse is flabby and you really should do something about it...'

So consequently I spent several hours last night telling her how wonderful her arse is. To be fair she does have a very good arse and how anyone on the planet could accuse it of being in any way unshapely is totally beyond me. But she obviously can and it's getting her down...

In fact her arse worries are currently even over-riding what many saner people would see as her more pressing concern, namely that several religious nuts are out to get her after she did a TV review and made a gag about the Catholic church.

The latter prompted letters of complaint to her editor and has made her something of a celebrity in her office.

If any of these religious nuts do finally get hold of her, though, she could always disarm them by getting them involved in a conversation about her arse. If they made any disparaging remarks I'd back her to take the lot of them out.

And I don't mean to a restaurant...

Philistines...

See... Told you so... You clueless imbecile idiot fucks... What have you done?

Well if you're not keeping up with the story so far I'll tell you what you've done. If you thought the Cadbury's drumming gorilla advert was really funny you're to blame because I flicked on the TV a few nights ago to see a TV advert for the Best Of Phil Collins on CD.

And it wasn't some satellite channel that no bugger watches. Oh no... it was ITV1 that several million hapless fucks watch. Then I switch on XFM, usually a bastion of decent music, and even they're discussing how Phil Collins may be cool again.

Well let's clear a couple of things up:
i) He is not cool. Never has been. Never will be.
ii) He is not good. Never has been. Never will be.
iii) His music is middle-of-the-road shite that would even make fellow mediocrity Chris 'One Eyebrow' De Burgh wince.
iv) He was even shit by 1980s standards and pretty much everyone else was shit then too.

So don't buy his records. By buying his records you are vindicating a no-talent zone and subliminally convincing everyone else to aspire to mediocrity like it's a good thing. It's not, he's not.

So pretend you're on Grange Hill if anyone offers you a Collins record and just say no. The man in worse than Sting and Ross Kemp all rolled into one. And he wrote Another Day In Paradise which makes Lady In Red look like a Beethoven symphony.

Saint Joan...

George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece about Joan of Arc is having a stunning revival at the National Theatre.

The play may be 80-odd years old but its key theme of religious zeal (in the shape the holy-voice-hearing dressmaker, turned warrior, turned scapegoat, turned eventual saint) versus the state (in the shape of England, the Catholic church and the rival French barons) is perhaps even more relevant now than when it was first written.

Because in a modern age of Muslim suicide bombers and aggressive right-wing Christianity in the White House it begs the question: how does society react to religious fervour when it threatens to undermine the law – even when that religious fervour is devout?

The play itself is simple enough. A dressmaker named Joan hears messages from God and wins over the French barons, the church and the Dauphin in order to drive the English out of France. But when the French people begin to love her rather than the state and its apparatuses she becomes a problem and is eventually betrayed by those who once supported her and sold to the British, where she is burnt as a heretic.

Anne Marie Duff is superb in the title role. The Missus always rated Duff in Shameless (and pretty much everything else she’s been in) while I preferred her Shameless co-star Maxine Peake. But after seeing Duff live I think the Missus is right and Duff is the next Helen Mirren while Peake is probably a more talented version of the next Babs Windsor.

Paterson Joseph and Paul Ready are also good as the treacherous Bishop of Beauvois and the Dauphin but nobody puts a foot wrong. In fact it’s a testament to the entire ensemble that they manage, with some help from a spartan set and haunting music, to fill every inch of the huge Olivier stage.

It is three hours long but the time flew by. It’s one of those shows that makes you believe in the power of theatre again and makes you realise why the National is still a vital cultural institution. Go see…

Gorilla advert…

Somebody was extolling the hilarity of the Cadbury’s gorilla advert yesterday and I had to stop them.

I didn’t stop them because I had anything I actually wanted to say to them. I just wanted them to stop talking. Fortunately they did. Because if they didn’t I would quite possibly have ripped their heads off and shat in the gaping, blood-seeping hole that was their neck just to really ram the message home that it is NOT FUNNY!

It’s a soul-less corporate approximation of something ad-hoc and raw dreamt up by some Armani-suited advertising fuck who thinks he’s hit the marketing equivalent of the g-spot.

Even worse, every time that piece of shit is played on TV it generates royalty money for Phil Collins, that irksome, stage-school, smug, talent-free, Tory-supporting wankwipe who already has more cash than he’ll ever need. It also runs the danger that the balding, least-talented member of Genesis may contemplate a comeback if he actually believes he is hip again.

So the next time somebody tells you this advert is cool shoot them. At least two or three times to make sure they can never rise again – or procreate any future idiot oxygen thief children to rob the planet of its much-needed resources. The revolution starts here…

Other Woman News...

The Other Woman invited me and the Missus to a School Disco a while ago...

For the uninitiated these are nightclub events where adults dress in school uniform and dance to hits from the Eighties and get pissed. The Missus was none too keen to don school uniform and even though I was up for it I felt it politic to decline.

I forgot all about this until last week when the Other Woman told me of her plans for the weekend and reminded me of her impending uniform-based fun with Saucy Sirvan (one of our mutual hapkido friends), her sister and a Toxic Slut.

Weekend over and the Other Woman and Sirvan sent me a link to pictures of their night out.

So, there I was, flicking through about 50 of these shots when a work colleague came up behind me to discuss something... while on-screen was a picture of the Other Woman and three lovelies cavorting around dressed as schoolgirls.

He looked at me, looked at the pic and smiled.
'It's OK. She's a friend...' I said by way of explanation.
'Yeah...'
'No. Really...'
'And I suppose you were "really" writing a play about Victorian prostitutes too?'

I remember back and the last time he approached me like this I was researching Meat, my play about Victorian prostitution, on the web and discussing it with him.

So I try a different tack...
'You know something. Hands up. I am busted. You're right... I love porn. Women-dressed-as-schoolgirl porn particularly. Can't get enough...'

He looks at me conspiratorially.
'It's OK. Me too...'

He walks away. I have a new friend in the office pervert...

Elling...

He’s a bright bloke that John Simm… He does cult films like Human Traffic and 24-Hour Party People, acclaimed TV dramas like State Of Play and Life On Mars, and he’s so cool he even pops up in Dr Who as the Master.

He has a knack of picking the right projects at the right time. And the Missus fancies him too. In fact if he was any sharper he’d cut himself. The multi-talented little Manc shit...

So what of his latest foray on the London stage?

Well for a start it’s an unusual project so he gets points for that. It’s an adaptation of a Norwegian absurdist comedy, which was a novel, a stage play then a film. The English stage version is adapted by Simon Bent, whose own plays include Goldhawk Road and Wasted, and it was first shown at the Bush Theatre before transferring to Trafalgar Studios where it’s currently running.

Simm plays the title character, an uptight mummy’s boy with a compulsive mental disorder who is let out of his asylum to try and adapt back to ‘normal’ life in Oslo. Back in ‘normal’ society he shares a flat with his former room-mate at the asylum and it’s basically their story of finding a life beyond the walls of their former institution.

There’s a love story of sorts, several odd-couple comedy turns and a plot about Elling becoming a poet who hides his work in sauerkraut boxes in supermarkets. There’s also the obvious gag about ‘normal’ people sometimes being more nutty that the people who are incarcerated.

Simm proves he’s a capable stage actor with a gift for comedy, his wide-eyed odd-couple partner is affectionately played by Adrian Bower (the desperate-for-a-shag games teacher in Teachers), and Ingrid Lacey, Keir Charles and Jonathan Cecil are all good value too.

But with the likes of Simm and Bent onboard you could be forgiven for expecting better. Sadly it’s not the sum of its hippest parts and you also have to wonder if it would have got half the glowing publicity it’s received without Simms’ involvement.

Having said that it’s still an enjoyable enough evening and if you fancy a laugh with its heart in the right place it’s worth a look.

New Words...

The Missus is away on a business trip so my mind is wandering and today I've invented a new word...

The word is 'flonked' and it is made up of 'plonked' and 'flopped' and it describes the action of a man (usually drunk) in a pub or a nightclub taking out his penis to try and impress his friends or potential partners.

It is a verb and it should be used in the following manner:
'Did you see the look of horror on that girl's face when Rentboy flonked his Toby on the bar?'

I should probably get a proper hobby or something...

Nigella Express...

It may come as no surprise to anyone who's ever spent any time in my company, but I have very little shame. I'll quite happily admit to all manner of breath-taking stupidity and sexual shenanigans from my drunken (and even my sober) years...

In fact two of my favourite 'self-as-idiot' stories involve one spectacularly unimpressive sexual performance and one gruesome sexual injury. But even my worst in-bed behaviour has never been anywhere near as flagrantly pornographic or erotic as Nigella Lawson in front of a TV camera.

Take Nigella Express on BBC2 for example…

In last night's episode the curvaceous one winked, smiled and fluttered her eyelashes through some recipes… for some people… she was probably friends with… at some point in her life...

To be quite honest I wasn't paying much attention to the cooking. But that’s because I am a man and as such I was instantly seduced by her lilting, suggestive tones and the soft-focus lighting as she did her thing in the kitchen. It was like an episode of the Red Shoe Diaries (soft-porn series narrated by David Duchovny while talking to a dog) populated by food fetishists.

Because the sad truth is Nigella Express and pretty much every other one of her cookery shows is all about a posh bird getting flirty and making everything sound just a little bit suggestive and even slightly dirty. And it's got to the point where even she's so bored of the joke now that she’s become a parody of herself.

Fortunately I am on hand to sort the matter out. So here’s the plan…

I suggest she ditches the cooking altogether and just makes porn. Or failing that she sticks to the cooking but does one episode where she's banged every which way that is humanly possible while she's cooking. Then she'll have got it out of her system, the TV producers responsible for her shows will have seen what they've been after all along and the viewing public can watch her make food instead of being titillated by a bored posh bird making food sound suggestive because they’ve seen all their fantasies acted out in full technicolour anyway.

Sadly if she doesn't do either of the above it won't be long before she's so bored that any suggestion of coquettishness goes out of the window and she'll be delivering scripts exactly like the one below:

NIGELLA (Bored and monotonal):
‘When I’m feeling ravenous and I want something really satisfying I long for my husband’s special sausage. It’s big and it’s meaty and it’s something I feast on whenever I can. God how it fills me up. But my husband’s big, meaty sausage doesn’t come looking good enough to eat straight away. Oh no… First I have to work it between my fingers to make sure it’s the right size and shape. I also have special equipment to make sure it’s hot and steamy, then to finish it off I cover it in my special juices before gorging on it. I particularly love the way the juices dribble down my chin when I’ve got too much in my mouth and it’s nearly hitting the back of my throat…’

This will happen. You’ve been warned…

Ani Di Franco...

Hurray! The little folk singer is back touring the UK this year after a lengthy lay-off because of medical reasons and because she's also recently become a mum to daughter Petah.

But thankfully she's now back gigging in Europe and and as well as doing a big gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire she's also doing a much more intimate show to kick off her European Tour at the Bush Hall.

So me and the Missus are off to both. The Missus is not massively keen as she always gets dragged along to see Ani and we've experienced both brilliant and mediocre gigs, but I'm uncommonly excited about this as Di Franco is one of the few artists I've really stuck with through her ever-evolving style and ever-widening political gaze.

She's also released a new album called Canon which is out in October. Part retrospective and part greatest hits, it also has re-imaginings of five of her favourite songs. One of these, Both Hands, is featured on her MySpace page.

Happy listening!

Present Tense...

The Missus celebrated her birthday yesterday and I splashed out big-style on presents.

But the thing that impressed and fascinated her most was not the very expensive theatre tickets, or the limited addition Tintin book, or the CDs by an old punk band she once loved. Oh no...

It was a wooden pop-up toy of Gilbert and George that I bought her as a joke for £12. It's the equivalent of buying a child an expensive Xmas gift only to see them discard the gift then play for hours in the empty box.

I may never understand women...

Venus As A Boy…

I went to Soho Theatre last night to see their latest show Venus As A Boy, a touring production by the studio of the NTS (National Theatre of Scotland).

I’ve seen a few shows by the NTS at Soho and I’d really liked their work so I had high hopes for this too. Based on a novel by Luke Sutherland and adapted by actor Tam Dean Burn, it tells the ‘true’ story of a young boy from Orkney and his bizarre and at times moving journey of sexual awakening from his home island via Glasgow and finally London, where he ends trapped as a transsexual prostitute until his death.

In many ways it’s a bit of a bizarre piece. It was introduced as a monument-cum-epitaph to its ‘real-life’ central character and it was also a piece of theatre that touched on the borders of performance art. But was it any good?

Well yes and no. It was essentially a one-man show with Tam Dean Burn playing the lead role of the boy-turned prostitute, nicknamed Cupid, and about 10 other characters too and his performance was quite compelling. It was obviously a project he’d crafted with much love and his compassion for all the roles he played really shone through.

Author Sutherland was also on stage to provide accompanying music and this was quite haunting and really added to the atmosphere and the intimacy of the evening. The staging was quite Spartan and the use of props and costumes was inventive too.

But the story had a few too many plot holes (a fleeing Cupid’s pimp magically turning up in Orkney to bring him back to London), a few too many bizarre coincidences (a raped skinhead managing to again find his attacker Cupid in the whole of London within eight hours of their first meeting) and some unconvincing emotional switches (Cupid betraying the transsexual prostitute he loves in a fit of jealousy).

Perhaps these issues are better explained in the book but even as a piece of gritty magical realism they stretched the credibility of the tale a bit too much. That said it’s an interesting and at times compelling piece and the performance of Tam Dean Burn was worth the admission price alone.

It’s a play that certainly deserves to find its audience in London. I just don’t think I was it, even though it’s more creative and heartfelt than most of the schlock currently on stages in the capital.

MP Watch...

Q. How many MPs does it take to reply to a letter from one of their constituents?
A. Fucking millions if the name of that MP happens to be Dawn Butler from Brent.

I wrote to Dawn as she's my local MP to ask her about her position on EDM 595 (Serious Fraud Office Investigation into the Al Yamamah Military Contract) five months ago. I got no reply so another letter then an email followed. And still no reply.

So I contacted CAAT (Campaign Against the Arms Trade) to ask if any other of their supporters in Brent had contacted her on this issue without success.

And apparently I'm not the only one. CAAT have records of two other supporters contacting Dawn Butler and her not bothering to reply or even acknowledge their letters either.

If it was a chance to get her face on the front page of the local newspaper I bet she couldn't reach the postbox quick enough. It's no wonder people think all politicians are worthless, untrustworthy, uncaring fucks when they can't even be bothered with the simple courtesy of answering a letter.

You'd almost think they don't care about the issue of big-business corruption in the country they are part of governing... D'oh! There's the answer!

Bill Hicks…

I’ve just finished reading a book entitled Love All The People… which was given to me by the Other Woman last year.

As I’m now cycling into work I am bereft of Tube time to read so I’m devouring less literature than usual, but I got round to reading this last week and I’m glad I did.

The book is a compendium of comedy routines, interviews, lyrics, articles and letters by Bill Hicks and it offers a fascinating and entertaining route into the world of one of the US’s most influential comedians.

Hicks had been a stand-up comedian since his early teens but in a very successful gigging career of 15 years he never got the big TV breaks in the US. This was essentially because American TV executives considered his material, which included routines on the hypocrisy of far-right Christian zealots, corrupt US politicians, the pro-life lobby and the evils of a corporate-led and consumer-driven society, too risky for Middle America.

But as Hicks pointed out when one of his guest spot routines was infamously pulled from the David Letterman Show for this very reason, he’d played shows in Middle and every other part of America for 15 years so he knew they understood jokes there too.

Hicks did, however, find instant fame and acceptance in the UK where he could deliver his material and his views uncut on TV – and unmeddled with by the raft of TV executives who caused him so much trouble on the Letterman show.

Sadly the show he was working on with Channel 4 never saw the light of day as Hicks died in February 1994 at the age of 32 from cancer – and, to paraphrase a famous Hicks joke, we have proof that injustice exists in the world when John Lennon, Martin Luther King and Bill Hicks are dead and Coldplay, George Bush and Ben Elton are still going strong.

Hicks may have been something of an outlaw comedian with a dark side in his time, but his book is a life-affirming, thought-provoking and entertaining read.