The Plastic Bag Awards 2016

The awards season has arrived again so it's time for the Plastic Bag Awards for 2016. The judging panel has been locked away scrutinising the nominations and they're ready for the big announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Baggies 2016!

Best Theatre - Shakespeare

2016 was the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare so there was lots of Shakespeare all over the place, not only productions of his works but also exhibitions and a host of events. I saw quite a few and saw big productions at The Globe but it was productions at the small Sam Wanamaker Playhouse that got the most nominations. The nominations are:

Cymbeline @ Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Richard III @ the Almeida
The Winter's Tale @ Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
The Tempest @ Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
King Lear @ The Old Vic

The judges were split between 'Lear' with the astonishing performance from Glenda Jackson and 'Richard III' with Ralph Fiennes in the title role but it came down on the side of Richard for the instant menace he seemed to be able to turn on at the drop of a hat. He was scary!

Best Theatre - Drama

There doesn't seem to be much 'drama' in the West End at the moment - or, at least, drama the appeals to me to buy tickets, so these nominations span the far east and west on London as well as the Southbank.

The Philanderer @ The Orange Tree Theatre
Kenny Morgan @ The Arcola Theatre
Ivanov @ The National Theatre
The Plough and The Stars @ The National Theatre
Amadeus @ The National Theatre

The Orange Tree Theatre at Richmond is doing a good job of introducing me to old plays that are rarely performed and the Arcola came up with a gem of a play in 'Kenny Morgan'. The National Theatre's short Chekov season was worth a visit over the summer and it's another National Theatre production that wins the Baggy - 'The Plough and The Stars' at the Lyttelton. The Sean O'Casey play was hard work and emotionally exhausting and I regret only seeing it once.

Best Theatre - Musical

There were lots of musicals on in 2016 and it looks like there'll be more in 2017. I could easily have added 'Kinky Boots' to the list but I think that was nominated last year. This years' nominees are:

Billy Elliot @ Victoria Palace
Showboat @ The Crucible
The Threepenny Opera @ The National Theatre
Titanic @ Charing Cross
She Loves Me @ Menier Chocolate Factory

'Billy Elliot' has been on for a decade or more but I finally saw it in 2016 shortly before it closed in Victoria. The other four nominees are much older and that makes me wonder what's happened to the modern musical (but not too much). I loved 'Showboat' and 'She Loves Me', both classic musicals, and 'Titanic' is a show that should be on in the West End at some point, it really is that good. But the Baggy goes to 'The Threepenny Opera' for it's songs and plot, it's menace and threat and all the rolls of brown paper used in the sets - well done people, I loved it!

Best Entertainment

An 'entertainment' is something that doesn't really fit into any of the other categories and this year we have one-woman shows, poetry readings and walks up and down the Southbank and Bankside to see short videos of all Shakespeare's plays. And mad juggling and acrobatics, obvs.

Ellen Terry With Eileen Atkins @ Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Poems That Make Grown Women Cry @ The National Theatre
The Complete Walk @ Southbank & Bankside
Barbu by Cirque Alphonse @ Wonderground
Longing Last Longer by Penny Arcade @ Soho Theatre

The award goes to Penny Arcade for her latest show, 'Longing Last Longer' at the Soho Theatre. Challenging, scary and familiar as Penny paints a picture of modern living I recognise and, in parts, abhor as she leads us through her urban jungle with words and performance. Well worth seeing.

Best Gig

I only went to four gigs this year and all were 'oldies':

Pet Shop Boys @ Royal Opera House
Petula Clark @ Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
Suzanne Vega @ Cadogan Hall
The Human League - Royal Festival Hall

Pet Shop Boys and Suzanne Vega were promoting their new records and it's nice that they're still recording. However, the Baggy must go to the Pet Shop Boys for a truly spectacular show at the Royal Opera House with lasers shooting all over that grand old building and me wondering if the balconies would survive the bone rattling volume.

Best Live Performance

This award is for an individual performance that leaves you feeling 'wow!' Spoken word, song, dance... anything that moved me.

Eileen Atkins as Juliet in 'Ellen Terry With Eileen Atkins' @ Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Petula Clark singing 'I Can't Live Without Your Love' @ Drury Lane
Rebecca Trehearn singing 'Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man' in 'Showboat'
Itziar Mendizabal as Paulina in 'The Winter's Tale'
Victoria Serra singing 'Lady's Maid' in 'Titanic'
The Human League singing 'Love Action (I Believe In Love)'

Eileen Atkins playing a 13 year old girl and making me believe she really is Juliet and the sheer elegance of Itziar Mendizabal as Paulina were both astonishing. The sad truth of Rebecca singing about love and the simplicity of Victoria as she throws her arms wide in joy at the prospect of becoming a maid were heartbreaking moments. Petula and the Human league singing their classics were a joy to behold. There has to be one winner however and, after  tie-break, the panel awarded the Baggy to Rebecca Trehearn for her marvellous and tragic performance in 'Showboat' and, in particular, *that* song.

Best Dance

This is only the second year for this award since I discovered the beauty of classical ballet and the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House. I was also lucky to see four productions by the Bolshoi Ballet that took over the Opera House for a three week season over the summer. The nominees are:

Giselle by the Royal Ballet @ the Royal Opera House
The Winter's Tale by the Royal Ballet @ the Royal Opera House
Jekyll & Hyde by the McOnie Company @ The Old Vic
Swan Lake by the Bolshoi Ballet @ the Royal Opera House
The Red Shoes by Matthew Bourne/New Adventures @ Sadler's Wells

I loved the drama of 'The Winter's Tale' and the freshness of 'Jekyll & Hyde' but the Baggy must go to 'The Red Shoes, the new Matthew Bourne production that I saw just before Christmas (and have booked to see it again at Wimbledon on tour). The sheer originality of the thing, the characterisation, the marvellous dancing and the great sets all make this an instant favourite.

Best Exhibition

I saw lots of exhibitions in 2016 due to having the time to visit them. From a fascinating exhibition about the history of Sicily at the British Museum to a small Punk exhibition at the British Library to a lovely little exhibition of the paintings of Caillebotte at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Exhibitions about all sorts of things so it's a little bit strange that all the nominees are exhibitions  about paintings.

Painting the Modern Garden - From Monet to Matisse @ the Royal Academy
Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art @ the National Gallery
Georgia O'Keeffe @ Tate Modern
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain
Impressionists and Moderns @ CaixaForum Madrid
A Thyssen Never Seen @CaixaForum Barcelona

The O'Keeffe and Nash exhibitions helped me to explore artists I wasn't particularly aware of and both were really good, giving me a glimpse into the artists in a way I haven't had before. The two CaixaForum exhibitions were excellent - brilliant paintings well laid out in light and spacious surroundings and I'll certainly keep my eyes on CaixaForum in future for interesting exhibitions. The Baggy, however, must go to 'Painting the Modern Garden', the best exhibition I've seen at the Royal Academy for years, gorgeous painting after gorgeous painting, a marvellous flower tent and Kandinsky in shorts tilling his garden. What more could you ask. I'll treasure memories of that exhibition for a long time to come.

So there we are, The Plastic Bag Awards 2016. Some of the winners are a bit of a surprise but all deserve it. Let's see what 2017 brings!

Penny Arcade at Soho Theatre

Penny Arcade says 'protect your authenticity' and I take that to heart. Penny has brought her Edinburgh Fringe show, 'Longing Lasts Longer', to London but has cut it down to only 60 minutes since that seems to be the rather odd policy of the Soho Theatre. To make up for that she came out 10 minutes early to start chatting and introducing the show as people were seated. I breathed a sigh of relief when she said that people didn't need to worry about sitting near the front since she didn't pick on people - she said she doesn't need to since she already has material and the show was written before we came in. Such a sensible lady! I saw Penny four years ago when she did her 'Bitch! Dyke!' show at the Arcola Tent in Dalston so it was nice to get re-acquainted with her.

I've said 'show' a few times already but is it really a show? or is it performance? is it dictat? is it social commentary? is it stand-up? It's probably all of these things and more, written by a clever woman with original thoughts in her head that she wants to share and poke fun where you least expect it.

She started off with damning the gentrification of New York and, by extension, London. That struck a chord since I'd been to the site of the Malaysian restaurant Melati on Great Windmill Street for dinner earlier in the evening to find it had closed and was replaced by some trendy-looking restaurant/bar. The originality is being sucked out of cities to homogenise them, the weirdness and danger is being tamed by money and that's certainly happened to Soho over the last decade with music venues and sex shops being replaced by coffee bars, offices and barbers.

One of the attractions of Penny's thoughts is that she's lived through interesting times from the late 60s onwards and been part of the underground for much of that time so she has a different take on social change. She has anecdotes for every circumstance and she is funny when she wants and a killer when needed. She hones in on PR and advertising and slays it by explaining it's background and what it aims to achieve. She gets young people in her sights because of the impacts of society on them that mean they live in a different world from older people, starting off life with enormous debts for student loans rather than just having fun. She kills the idea that she's nostalgic for the past by saying she was raped in the 60s, the 70s was a trashy decade, the 80s saw lots of friends die of AIDS - what's there to be nostalgic about?

Above all, it's important to be yourself, be the you that your secret heart knows you are. That's the difference between crowds and packs - people in crowds want to blend in and be the same, people in packs want to shout out their own wild ideas and develop them. Penny is definitely a leader of the pack.

At the age of 66 (as she remained us several times) there's a lot of life left in her fighting to get out and I'm pleased she shared some of herself with us tonight. I will certainly do all I can to protect my own authenticity. Thank you for the ride Penny!

PS: Penny no longer has the red hair in the pictures, it's more of a platinum blonde with purple highlights. Tasteful as ever.  

Three Nights of Art

For three nights in a row last week I went to see art. That's the way it happens, with weeks of no going outs at all and then they all come along together.

On Wednesday I went up to Sadler's Wells to see Matthew Bourne's 'Play Without Words'. I saw it on its original run at the National Theatre in 2003 and it's the same production that has been revived as part of Matthew's 25th anniversary celebration. 'Play Without Words' is exactly that - a play without words. It's easy to follow the narrative and you can follow the story as it unfolds in front of you. Or can you?

The thing I like about 'Play Without Words' is that there are multiple depictions of the characters on stage at the same time so you can almost choose which narrative you want to follow. The lead character is Anthony who moves into his trendy house (in Chelsea I'm guessing) and he's played by three dancers on stage at the same time so we get the authoritative Anthony, the weak-willed Anthony and the inbetween. They then react to their girlfriend in different ways (played by three dancers with different characters). It's fascinating watching the different couplings and how they interact together. It's a very clever mechanism.

The show is based on the film 'The Servant' from the early '60s so we have lots of swinging sixties dancing, covert homosexual liaisons and coyness about sex.  It's a very entertaining show and well worth seeing.

On Thursday I went to the Soho Theatre to see Geo Wyeth in the small cabaret space downstairs. I saw Geo at the Soho Theatre four years ago (with Justin Bond and Our Lady J) when he went under the name of Novice Theory and I decided he was someone to watch. Novice Theory was a little waif with an accordion but Geo has grown up and matured and is confident in his own art.

The show was a mixture of music and performance art. Geo came on with his shirt pulled up around his shoulders and his trousers round his ankles with a cushion tied across his face with a belt. He staggered round drunk and got down off the stage with his keyboards to serenade us with some sound. At one point he unfolded a large sheet of polythene that he then spread over us as a tent and kept moving the tent from one side of the audience to the other as he recited a poem.

Geo's words and music are often quite complex and he uses his body and voice to give them additional power. He's a bit of a fidgiter - he wasn't still for a moment. While playing the piano he kept moving to stand up and then sit back down and his legs couldn't keep still while he played the guitar sitting on a stool. He brought out some amazing sounds from the guitar.

He was only on for just over an hour for this show (there were two other shows after his finished, including one by Eddie Izzard) and it was well worth seeing him.  His new album, 'Alien Tapes' has just been released so it's worth tracking it down and giving it a listen.

My final show last week was Penny Arcade's 'Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!' at the Arcola Tent in Dalston. It's subtitled, 'A passionate celebration of sex, freedom and art' and has been on the go for 20 years in different cities around the globe. Penny is now 62 and unrepentant, free with tales of her past, people she's known, the tribulations of being a faghag and telling tales of the financial realities of being a whore. The four words of the title of the show punctuate the show to good effect.

The show started at 7:30pm with half an hour of erotic dancing from a group of dancers who could do amazing things with their bodies - my favourite was the pole dancer who just sat at the top of her pole without holding on at all. Clothing was in the style of skanty.

Penny came on at 8:00pm and was on stage more or less until about 10:45pm with a half-time break for a trip to the bar and dancing on the stage. I suppose the attraction of this show depends on your age and outlook. Penny is 10 years older than me and has lived the bohemian life - and still seems to from the sound of it. I liked her scene playing the receptionist in a brothel and then playing a prostitute discussing her motivations for embracing her trade. I liked her tirade against the 'Guardian' reviewer that dared to call the show old fashioned due to her section about HIV and AIDS in the '80s. That was part of her world in the '80s and shouldn't be lost simply because things have moved on. That seems to be something she's quite keen on, preserving the 'underground' landscape she grew up in and inhabited from the '60s till today. If you lose your shared history where are you? 

We were invited to dance on the stage and I didn't. In the last section Penny came on stage to dance and slowly remove her clothes while we heard and watched a video of someone quoting a Lenny Bruce sequence about censorship. When she removed her bra some of the gays behind me thought they were in an American talk show and started whooping so she silenced them with a wave of her hand and a thumb towards the screen - listen to what's being said, she signed. And her stripping continued till she was naked. It was at that point I thought, 'ok, I didn't dance. but if she asked us, would I strip?' and I'm not sure what my response would be.

I'm very pleased I saw this show.  It's not for everyone, I suspect, but it worked for me. I particularly liked the sequence when the lights were turned off and she gradually walked round the set blowing out candles as she told us tales and celebrated the freedom of all of us being equal in the dark. The show has now closed at the Arcola Tent but will re-open on 8 August in the Old Vic Tunnels. I think I'll go to see her again.

An added bonus was seeing @dawnamberharvey spin the choons for the show and get name-checked in the programme!