Monthly Archives: July 2018

+3 Interview: The Delightful Sausage: Regeneration Game

Posted in *Written Interviews, EdFestivals 2018, Plus 3 2018 – Features by

“Last year went embarrassingly well. Reviewers and audiences liked it. We really weren’t prepared for that.”

WHO: Amy Gledhill and Chris Cantrill, The acts

WHAT: “Surreal comedy from Yorkshire’s finest, meat-themed double act. Join Chris and Amy in a gag-packed mission to crown their town the City of Culture. Find out what culture is, who’s been secreting it and why that stain won’t wash. A multimedia adventure for fans of economic recession, blue top milk and Bigfoot. The follow-up to the duo’s debut show which was recorded for NextUp and transferred to the Soho Theatre. ‘One of the best adverts for modern alternative comedy’ **** (EdFestMag.com). ‘Inventive and increasingly hysterical’ **** (Skinny). ‘Brims with ideas and creativity’ **** (ThreeWeeks).”

WHERE: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club – Monkey Barrel 2 (Venue 515) 

WHEN: 12:00 (60 min)

MORE: Click Here!

Is this your first time to Edinburgh?

It will be our second time up there as a duo. (Chris did a solo show in 2016 and the twelve people who saw it have never been the same since.)

Last year went embarrassingly well. Reviewers and audiences liked it. We really weren’t prepared for that. We were brought solidly back to Earth though when we got back to the confused grimaces of comedy clubs of the north-west.

What’s the biggest thing to have happened to you since Festivals ’17?

We had a run at Soho Theatre which was a huge deal for us. On the last night all four of our parents were on the front row, and Chris had a tiny cry on stage, which has never happened out of joy before. Amy’s dad shook everybody’s hand in the theatre bar and since then we’ve both had the confidence to complain in restaurants.

Tell us about your show.

Regeneration Game is a bizarre comedy show, loosely (oh so loosely) based around a City of Culture bid. It features trolls, unsettling illustrations and is packed tight with gags. We write (secrete ) and produce it ourselves with the overseeing, ever-twitching eye, of our agent.

We met whilst performing as solo acts in the Leicester Square New Comedian of the Year final and both of us ended up relocating to Manchester and needing someone to have a Cheeky Vimto with.

Regeneration Game will premier at the festival this year and if the friendship survives, it will be going on a small tour of the UK early next year.

What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?

We’d highly recommend having a day at The Monkey Barrel, their programming is innovative, often silly and of a really high standard.

Our other picks of the fringe would be;
Ross Brierley – Accumulator.
James Meehan – Gaz
Jack Evans – Work
David Callaghan – One for Sorrow, Two for Joy – Shoes.
Sleeping Trees – World Tour
Lazy Suzan – Forgive Me, Mother!
Harriet Dyer- Sooz A Prick
Lou Conran – At Least I’m Not Dog Poo Darren
Lee Kyle – Kicking Potatoes

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+3 Interview: KillyMuck

Posted in *Written Interviews, EdFestivals 2018, Plus 3 2018 – Features by

“I took last year off to pay all the credit cards and loans I took out to fund my work!”

WHO: Kat Woods, Writer/Director/Producer

WHAT: “Inspired by real events, Killymuck is a housing estate built on a paupers graveyard in 1970s Ireland. Niamh navigates life through the parameters of growing up, with the trials and tribulations of being a kid from the benefit class system. Lack of opportunity, educational barriers, impoverishment, addiction and depression are the norms as the struggle to escape the underclass stereotype becomes a priority. From school trips organised as cross-community excursions to unite a fractured post troubles town, to finding the humour within an estate crippled with misfortune. From award-winning, critically acclaimed writer of Belfast Boy, Wasted, Mule.”

WHERE: Underbelly, Bristo Square – Jersey (Venue 302) 

WHEN: 18:25 (60 min)

MORE: Click Here!

Is this your first time to Edinburgh?

In 2004 I went on a Hen party to Edinburgh and one of the only things I can remember was the Frankenstein bar and a very drunken open top bus tour!

This will actually be my fourth Edinburgh Fringe. My previous shows include BELFAST BOY in 2014 (Sold out and won; The Stage award for Excellence and The Fringe Review award for Outstanding Theatre), WASTED (Sell out shows transferred to New York and London) in 2015 and MULE in 2016 (Sell out shows transferred to London and Northern Ireland). I took last year off to pay all the credit cards and loans I took out to fund my work!

What’s the biggest thing to have happened to you since Festivals ’17?

I cleared my credit card, working a million Restaurant hours!

I signed with a fantastic writing agent, Alex Rusher at Independent Talent. Found my writing Mojo again and penned Killymuck. Mule went on tour to Northern Ireland. Belfast Boy took part in a producing showcase in London. Wasted premiered in Wales.

My company have been invited to Baltimore and Washington DC, at the end of August to present Wasted as part of a college campus tour.

Tell us about your show.

I am the Writer/Director/Producer. The show is a solo piece of theatre and will be performed by Aoife Lennon. I have known Aoife from doing a Drama Degree in Derry N.Ireland over 10 years ago and I have worked with her on a few pieces, most notably, our last EdFringe piece Mule.

Killymuck is an exploration of issues surrounding class, that I have experienced throughout my childhood and adult life. I am from a council estate, grew up on benefits. With the rise of unpaid internships, unpaid work in general and cuts to arts funding. I felt compelled to write something. We are in danger of the arts becoming solely an elitist playground. Yes, ‘Fleabag’ is fantastic but it is yet another middle-class voice. Where is the representation of the underclass, have we been forgotten? No one speaks of us. It’s time to change that.

What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?

I am always a little bias towards other Irish shows and in saying that, ‘My Left Nut’ by Michael Patrick and ‘Maz and Bricks’ by Eva O’Connor both look incredible.

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EIFF: “The Gospel According to André” (27 June ’18)

Posted in 5*, Books & Film, Other, Rated: Outstanding by

Gospel according to andre

“A captivating, unique form of ‘The American Dream’ that is both inspiring and honest.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars: Outstanding

I don’t think biographical documentaries get any more delightful than this. The latest unsung cultural icon to get the documentary treatment is gentle giant and “Black superhero” André Leon Talley, a true larger-than-life figure. Director Kate Novack has wisely just let Talley’s remarkable story tell itself, through a combination of interviews with the man, his friends, and his colleagues, and a period of simply following him around his daily life over 2016 and 2017. Along the way, The Gospel According to André reveals a captivating, unique form of ‘The American Dream’ that is both inspiring and honest, and not afraid to examine the darker, crueler sides of fame, success, fashion, and race. 

Talley is known the world over as a fashion writer with a flamboyant pen and a deeply knowledgable eye. He rose high in the ranks of Vogue magazine, at one point leading its Paris edition, and has in many ways come to represent the diverse possibilities of the fashion world. Talley is a tall, wide Black man from Durham, North Carolina, raised in a conservative household by his loving but stern grandmother. From an early age he was fascinated by accounts of the fashion world, such as John Fairchild’s novel The Fashionable Savages, and of course, the covers and contents of Vogue and its ilk. From there, his story just grows more and more awe-inspiring, as he climbed higher and higher in the fashion industry through his unique eye and captivating personality. Editor-and-chief of Vogue at the time, Diana Vreeland, took one look at the way he had assembled a vintage Hollywood costume for an exhibition and selected him to be her right-hand-man on the spot. He worked with Warhol at Interview Magazine, he befriended Karl Lagerfeld and just about every other designer and model since the early 70s with ease and charm. The film captures all this miraculous story with clever montages of clips, magazine pages, archival footage, and, best of all, long stretches where the film just lets the inimitable Talley talk. 

 

And talk he does. This may go down as one of the best individual-focused documentaries where the individual in focus tells their own story. Unlike the recent head-in-hands bore that was Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist, Novack’s film does not resort to hagiographic worship of the protagonist as if the viewers are automatically joining in from the off, but instead convinces you, remarkably quickly, that Talley is a figure worth exploring, understanding, and uplifting. The murderer’s row of stylish interviewees seem to agree: everyone from Anna Wintour to Marc Jacobs to Tom Ford to Fran Lebowitz to Whoopi Goldberg has something lovely to say about Mr. Talley, both about his work and his character – and his importance. These interviews and Novack’s framing, in a way that reminded me subtly of Mark Cousins’ The Eyes of Orson Welles, turns the spotlight on the societal implications of the subject’s life and work, and leans heavily into Talley’s groundbreaking achievement as a large, verbose, delightfully charming Black man who became widely beloved and respected by the usually homogeneous, cold fashion world. Though brief, the film’s revisiting of Talley’s progressive work within the pages of Vogue is utterly fascinating — I instantly made a note to look up his “Scarlett in the Hood” series from the 1990s, starring Naomi Campbell as Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara, which is brilliant and brave in multiple ways. 

The film achieves real gravity at times, in between the celebrations. Aside from the (slightly extraneous) discussions of the 2016 election, as Novack happened to be filming during the lead-up to it and its aftermath, many of the serious aspects are deeply, movingly personal. Talley has moments of great reflection and sombre reckonings with treatment he suffered in his life, from outright racism lobbed at him from ‘dear friends’ in the fashion world, to the overarching question of whether he was so successful simply because of his talent, or possibly because he was considered an ‘exotic’ ornament to keep around for amusement. Talley himself suggests this and more heartbreaking ideas that he has had to grapple with over the course of this remarkable journey, and he deserves immense credit for his honesty and heart.

It is clear that the filmmakers, the assembled guests, his legions of fans, and the majority of the fashion world absolutely love Mr. Talley, and by the end of this film, I expect you will too. See this film as soon as possible. 

 

outstanding

StarStarStarStarStar

Reviewer: Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller (Seen 27 June)

Go to The Gospel According to Andre at the EIFF

 

EIFF: “Flammable Children” (25 June ’18)

Posted in 4*, Books & Film, Other, Rated: Outstanding by

“A delight, if you can stomach it.”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars: Outstanding

What a ride! Rarely does a ‘family comedy’ pack this much bite and savagery, yet complement them so well with side-splitting dialogue and visual bedlam to boot. But the latest from Stephen Elliott does not beat around the bush — it is not for the whole family, it is about the whole family, and how depraved, classless and outrageous three families become during a period of adult idiocy, adolescent recklessness, and young love in 1970s Wallaroo, Australia. The film is a delight, if you can stomach it, but so heinous at times that I would not blame you if you can’t.

Elliott’s film is variably titled Flammable Children and Swinging Safari, depending on its different releases, but in this reviewer’s opinion the former is far better suited to its tone. At the core of the ensemble piece are Jeff Marsh (Atticus Robb) and Melly Jones (Darcey Wilson), the only two kids in this massive group that seem to have any morals — they are sort of in love, sort of best friends, sort of just clinging onto each other to keep themselves sane, and due to a freak accident when they were young, involving a match and their synthetic 1970s clothing, they are known as the ‘flammable children.’ The grown-up Marsh narrates the story, which is mainly led and constantly derailed by the parents on the block, played with breathless energy by a delightful lineup of Aussie icons. Proving once again that he is no one trick pony, Guy Pearce delivers in an off-the-wall turn as sunburnt but jacked encyclopedia salesman Keith Hall, patriarch of the Hall family, married to Kaye Hall, played by none other than Kylie Minogue herself. The Jones family is led by evil-grin expert Julian McMahon and catlike Radha Mitchell as Jo, whose motto for their sizable clan, much to the chagrin of neighboring kids/victims, is “If they’re going to experiment, they should do it at home!” Completing the unholy trinity is the Marsh family itself, led by lovable Jeremy Sims as Bob and hilarious Asher Keddie as Gale. As they intertwine and spar intermittently over the course of Flammable Children, the film makes amusingly and dishearteningly clear that people like this just should not be parents. 

If you are wondering just why the film deserves its ribald reputation, observe a brief summary of the goings-on within these 97 minutes: there’s an attempted orgy, infidelity, aggressive urination (albeit after a jellyfish sting), animal abuse, child neglect, child smoking, child drinking, underage sex, violence, partial immolation, and a phenomenally gory finale that I will not dare spoil. Despite what you might be thinking, it’s all just a blast. The film is ruthless with its humour, be warned, and surely depraved, but it somehow avoids being outright tasteless and having a good time above all — or perhaps it is tasteless, but in all the right ways. When Rick tells his daughter to “go play in traffic,” or Gale holds down Kaye’s daughter to pee on her, or when the titular burning episode happens and the parents seem more interested in finishing their card game than putting out their kids, the horrifying misbehavior is somehow far funnier than it is upsetting.

All the insanity is helped along enormously by the natural ridiculousness of the 1970s setting. As Jeff’s early narration quips, a small Australian town like Wallarroo is a town that “time, and taste, forgot,” yet it seems to fit right in with the cacophonous consumerism and colorful grandeur of the 70s aesthetic, and the grainy film stock look that Elliott has used fits the remarkable amorality quite well somehow. Not to mention, the natural beauty of the Australian coast is presented in gorgeous vintage tones, and even the shots of the rotting blue whale carcass that washes up on the local beach are aesthetically pleasing. 

Overall, Flammable Children is good fun, and a pleasure to watch, even though it will probably repulse you at least once a minute. Its frenetic editing, the surprisingly beautiful photography, and the crackerjack insane performances make this possibly my Festival top choice for viewers at home — if you are looking for a funny, crazy, unique midnight watch, Elliott has the film for you. 

 

outstanding

StarStarStarStar

Reviewer: Nathaniel Brimmer-Beller (Seen 25 June)

Go to Flammable Children at EIFF