An international festival of contemporary theatre worth getting out of the hotel for
London is a city with a long theatre history – though to really enjoy the city, it’s worth forgetting all that Shakespeare stuff and instead focusing on the here and now.
From the city’s literary heartland in London Bloomsbury (no longer home to Virginia Woolf, but host to plenty of students and tourists keen to see the British Museum) to the borders of old Square Mile in Shoreditch, the most exciting theatre in London is not musical re-hashes of 1980s films.
It’s theatre but the kind that is very much alive and often not in English. This summer sees the return of the biennial international theatre festival LIFT, which was established in 1981 by Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal.
It’s a festival which brings together scores of international artists to share global stories, engaging with venues and audiences in ways which re-examine both the city of London and our way of interacting in it.
This year it has been much-lauded for bringing GATZ, an 8 hour re-telling of The Great Gatsby, called the ‘theatrical experience of the decade’ by the New York Times. However, this show is pretty much sold out and – dare I say it – the real treats of the festival are to be found elsewhere.
Most decisive and urgent is the production Minsk 2011- A Reply to Kathy Acker by the Belarus Free Theatre. Formed in 2005 by a husband and wife from the last remaining dictatorship in Europe, the BFT is an extraordinary company which has had to deal with imprisonment and exile due to its refusal to give up making theatre.
With the co-production of Fuel – a production company with its sights set on brave and exciting new works – BFT creates a ‘love letter to a home that exiles those willing to fight for it’. Performed in Russian, and travelling the city’s strip clubs and raves, it seems like the kind of theatre the world needs: something with a distinct message, a voice that needs to be listened to, right now.
That’s on at the Young Vic, on the Cut in SE1. I’m also intrigued by Lucien Bourjeily’s 66 Minutes in Damascus which takes place in cycles in Shoreditch Town Hall, to the east of the city centre. Here the audience members are ‘cast’ as tourists in Syria, taking a look at the capital only to be captured by the Syrian secret service: another delicately prescient piece of work which we hope will take a long, hard glance at the political violence in the news.
As well as works from UK companies such as dreamthinkspeak’s ‘The Rest is Silence’ and Sheffield’s maverick, hot/cold Forced Entertainment (who present new work ‘The Coming Storm’) there are also contributions from Brazilian performer and director Renato Rocha – the man who worked with the street children in acclaimed movie City of God.
Events are taking place across the city, from Notting Hill to Stratford – where Australia’s Back to Back company, working with actors with intellectual disabilities, put their work in the context of Hitler’s Third Reich, where such characteristics would have been brutally eliminated. Plenty of catch, plenty to plan!
