July Lust List

It is summer and so I shouldn't really think about shopping, more about sunning and lying and reading. Why do more people not have outside beds? Anyway, this is a new series - the monthly Lust List. Basically, just things I want... a wide variety of things really.. Here we go

The Nether at Royal Court

I can't use a witty title for this one because honestly The Nether by by Jennifer Haley was one of the most disturbing yet absorbing plays I've seen in a while. Following the recent spat of celebrities, politicians and more who have been uncovered as paedophiles after years of cover-ups and enabling by "those who didn't tell"; this play's subject is right at the heart of the public conscience at the moment. 

Its subject matter however is not really paedophilia, though the most horrifying of crimes is the vehicle used to lead the audience to the questions it asks; namely, on the Internet and virtual reality and morality. 

In summary, the Nether is set in a future where the Internet or the Nether as it is now called is an entire immersive world where people can log in and exist (much like The Matrix) in a virtual reality with their own chosen persona or avatar. Here they can live out their fantasies as they cannot in real life, look like they want, be with who they want and create realities that are the most aesthetically pleasing to them; a virtual wonderland if you will. For the reality that now exists in the play's present time is a grey world with no trees or natural spaces. 

The play focuses around a character named Sims or 'Pa' in the Nether who has created a server that is unreadable by the loose authority that polices the Nether, yet they know what goes on there. In the primary scene he is being interviewed by a Detective Morris, unsure how he has been found out.

The action switches between the present interviews, with Sims and another character Doyle as Detective Morris questions them endlessly about the goings on in the Nether and in particularly "Pa's" Victoriana throwback, the Hideaway to goings on in the actual Hideaway.

Here is where the play becomes magnificent really, because the set design and lighting takes us into a truly beautiful world, where there's green and trees everywhere and hyper colours and lightness. The Hideaway is almost abnormally beautiful and the use of light displays that show the matrix beneath it are also impressive.

Here we meet "Iris" - one of four children who live in the Hideaway to service the needs and pleasures of those who visit; "Pa" and another visitor "Woodnut" who seems to fall in love with Iris. The play continues from here as the characters nuances are shown and we get to grips with the question of whether such virtual behaviour helps or hinders these type of people when they go about in their in-world (real) lives. Does it not cause them to want to behave like this more? Additionally, Jennifer Haley has made the adult behind avatar Iris, in-love with Pa... which confuses us further.

"I've read the studies. No one has been able to draw a conclusive correlation between virtual behaviour and behaviour in-world."- Sims/Pa

The Guardian* subtitle says, Does inclination pre-exist exposure? This is again one of the questions that has continuously reappeared when referencing online and gaming behaviour, but the influence, the influence though.. there must be some the papers shout. I would hasten to agree with this even though nothing has yet been concretely proved it.

I was uncomfortable throughout the play, with the subject matter, with the young girl actress who played Iris (Isabella Pappas on my performance) being so affectionate with these old men. The production forces you to confront this fear and discomfort. 

However, to me, what it is really about is philosophy - if you make a certain choice or do a certain thing that is wrong - even in a virtual world, you have still performed this act. The tree has fallen in the forest even if you do not see it or hear it. That is my opinion. That is all. Others would disagree. There's also always disagreement about what is right and wrong, so there's that too. 

I would give the production, script, acting and especially set and lighting five stars and fully recommended The Nether. Expect to be blown away though.. I think I came away from it a little more fearful, a little more aware and winded by our current world.

The Nether is at the Royal Court until August 9th 

Images are (c) Johan Persson 

*The comments on this Guardian article show how much the subject riles

What's Happn'd to Me? Another F***king Dating App...

It all started with a column in the Saturday Telegraph... A new dating app they said... From Paris they said... So so much better than Tinder they said. A tap and a click and an entering of my iTunes password (why when it's free BTW) and here I am reordering my pictures and waiting. Waiting to cross paths with someone.... 

The premise behind Happn is that it's for those lost chances in love. A man on the tube that you haven't the courage to talk to. A woman you admired whilst on your lunch break. It brings up on a feed everyone you cross paths with, as well as mentioning when and where you crossed paths with them. Once you click on your profile you can see further photos and anything they might have written a about themselves.

Like Tinder you can then cross or heart them and it only informs you if you have both clicked on the heart because the it's a crush and you can message each other. If you cross them they won't come up in your feed again nor you in theirs. Oh there's also charms which you can send or receive from people who you haven't hearted and it's basically like an old school Facebook poke. Hi I'm here, look at me! 

I'm quite enjoying the amount of quite beautiful men that I apparently pass every day. I have yet to see evidence of them if I'm honest... It also terrifies me that it has a function which ensures that it measures how many times you have crossed their path. I have crossed path with Marco, the bar manager at a pub v near work five times. Except I haven't, I've not been in, I've just walked past. 

Location accuracy is not my only issue with Happn, I'm a little worried about the stalking possibilities. People you've not even glanced at on your feed, yet not been disturbed enough to X could just longer there reappearing, working out your route as you happily go about life and basically stalking you..

So why is it still on my Home Screen after one week, in all its blue love hearted, irksomely spelt glory? Because basically I'm a romantic. I love the thought of someone admiring you from a far and you them and it all working out. 

Think about the potential. If Cinderella had Happn, she wouldn't need no glass slipper bitches... Plus I'm kinda addicted.. 

PS: The only person I've hearted ergo immediate crush was when I was on a weekend away in New Forest. He was 25 and farmery and unable to stalk me... clearly still got issues.

Where are All the Girls Going? In Praise of A First World Problem at Theatre 503

Do you ever wonder what really goes on in a girls' boarding school? Milly Thomas's new play, A First World Problem answered many of these questions in its 10 day run at Theatre 503.

Maybe it was so good for me because I recognised it. I'd been in one of those girls' boarding schools. Aged 11-18, packaged up with tuck box and hockey stick and deposited in the premier Krug (mine was more like Waitrose own brand) of women's educative establishments. Actually, that's unfair because I asked to go, yearned to go after I had read endless Enid Blyton novels as a child and I was lucky enough to be able to. But I saw endless girls that had been packaged up and left and it does the most wondeful things to some and the most terrible to others. 

I'm not saying this is typical teenage life in the UK today, it's obviously not. However, what you see in this production is a slice of upper-middle-class adolescence, a tiny microcosm of how things are in the modern day teenage brain. It's Lord of the Flies with Oestrogen and St Trinian's with anal.

We're white, we're westerners, we're girls and we're rich, of course we're fucking miserable. The standards are just too fucking high for us to be anything else.

Firstly I would like to iterate that the script is wonderful. The playwright and star, Milly Thomas has captured the bite and humour of privileged teenage girls' speech in its rawest form. Like Alan Bennett's The History Boys, no word is futile, it's pacy , shocking and laugh-out-loud fucking hilarious. 

The three actresses played the six characters with finesse and real physicality. I believed Molly Vevers sexy, broken-down, student-touching history teacher, Steve so truly that I almost fancied him myself, certainly understanding why Hebe (Milly Thomas), the protagonist wanted him. 

The general premise is this, three friends at school in their final year going through the confusion and angst of teenage womanhood with a bucket load of money, top class education and a impending pressure to get into Oxford as they are their parents greatest "investment".

Issues covered along the way include drugs (mostly ketamine), eating disorders, self-harm, pornography (including woman's enjoyment of it), masturbation, anal-sex, the female orgasm, bullying, racism, casual snobbery, lesbianism, Sado-masochism, friendship, abuse, student-teacher relations, depression and relationships. Yet none of it is too much. The script is so good that it makes valid, lucid observations on these issues without the audience feeling like they've stepped into a lesson/government lecture/gangster film. It doesn't glamourise, it plays with words so that you accept these things as normal and yet asks questions about why this is. And it's so witty (did I mention that) yet warming and soft at the same time. 

HEBE: It's like anything here. You're totally allowed to be depressed, bulimic, clinically anxious, anorexic, addicted to pornography, a binge-eater or a self-harmer or a card-carrying member of the BNP, you're like, totally allowed to be those things, but you just can't talk about it. You've gotta just. Ssh. 

You can talk about it with, like, one person. Maybe two. But you're pushing your luck with that.

When I got here I remember wanting to tell someone that I was unhappy and I wanted to go home but I cottoned on quick. Thank fuck. Not like poor Amelia. She'd be great fun if her very skin didn't weep issues. You see her walking around with a tear stained face, lugging too many books around that she's not going to read, trying to make people laugh, with superficial scars all up her forearms and when I see them it doesn't make me feel sorry for her, it makes me want to shake her. Like, bitch, don't you think we're all fucking miserable?..Could you not cut yourself on the scalp or the tops of your thighs or inside your vagina where no one can see like the rest of us? How can one person be so selfish?

It would not surprise me if Milly Thomas went all the way as a playwright. Certainly if she writes as well on anything else as she does on this subject, she will go far. As someone who is trying to write a play myself, I yearn for her succinctness.

Overall, I was left feeling positive at the talent displayed. If this is what these schools have given the artists in this piece, then perhaps it is worth the aching pressure and damage at the time.

The increase of pornography as a sex manual is worrying, as is the confusion and insecurity clearly felt by some of these young women, but really is it just like any other enforced same sex small society. The bitches and bullies may rule for a bit, but eventually life and/or their own humanity/insecurity has a funny way of outing them. 

What most worries me is that these girl-women are in some of the most privileged positions our country offers and if this is what they are experiencing in terms of sexism and moral-confusion, I dread to think what may be rife in educational establishments of their much less privileged counter parts. 

HEBE: Maybe, it's not normal.

HUGO: What? Anal?

HEBE: At our age. Maybe, it's not normal.

I would finish with, watch out for any of Milly Thomas's future runs or work. She is extraordinarily talented and I hope A First World Problem gets a longer run in a larger venue, because I want more people to see it and I for one, would see it again. 

A First World Problem was at Theatre 503, Latchmere Road 

*Thanks to Milly Thomas for sending through the quotes

On a Voyage to See George Ezra Live

 

So I'm not going to pretend I'm achingly hip and knew who +George Ezra  was a year ago when no one else did. I heard Budapest on the radio with everyone else. I bought it, then I bought the album, Wanted on Voyage, then I watched him on the TV at Glasto and knew I needed to see him live. 

I googled tickets and lo and behold...

Last Thursday, I got on the train to Kingston (WTF  haven't been there at night since I frequented Oceania) with my younger, musically more forward friend RB having purchased tickets to see George-ous at a student, live music nightclub called McClusky's. 

We obviously drunk too much rose before, slightly intimidated by the brash sun-worshipping, cider-swilling students that sat around us - not a care in the world - on the Kingston riverbank. 

The gig started at what time, 1040! That's late for a school night and how would we get home to SW11 when the trains stopped running at half-eleven... Night bus it seemed. 

Once George came on stage though, everything stopped. I had known that the album was great... song after song after song that had an addictive riff, a poetic lyric and Mr Ezra's deep, haunting yet joyful vocals powering throughout. But live was a different story... 

The room shivered as he played through his set, with just enough wry, mischievous chatter between. And what a treat to be so close, a mere four people back, we saw him in all his pretty, blonde, cheekboney glory adjusting his guitar strings, his voice enfolding us. 

Favourite songs of mine including, Blame It On Me, Leaving It Up To You and Cassy'O - about a watch by the way - were all played as well as obviously Budapest. The one everyone knew. 

It wasn't a long set, but it was perfectly executed. Consummate professional he is. "I'm leaving straight after this," he said, "straight on the road". Touring the UK, Festivals and then continental Europe towards the end of 2014. I did get the sense he was a little weary...not of the playing but the travel. 

Ne'er mind because the music makes up for it. Ezra reminds us of Dylan crossed with a 60s soul singer. He's folk with a dirty, dark edge in the lyrics. I fucking love him.

Buy the album (or stream it) and see him before he books the big venues. This boy needs a field or a small gropey club with a sticky bar.

We loved it all and happily got the night bus home when he finished, leaving the students to their shots and sex-searching...

georgeezra.com 

In Praise of Americana

Friday was the 4th of July, Independence Day, a celebration for Americans across the world. Generally as a fastidious cynical Brit there's plenty of things I like to criticise about our friends over the pond notably language, faux-positivity an geographical ignorance. However really the United States of America is a complex and astounding country that has given the world a lot of impressive objects, laws, celebrations and notable figures. In honour of the 4th July, here is my personal and current top 10 brilliant Yank things or people:

1) Attitude

Yes, yes, yes. Well done. You can. Congrats. The yanks are streets ahead of us in celebrating success. The clichéd and much maligned American dream is still woven into the fabric of the country. Every small town gal and guy can make their dreams come true and America praises them when they do. They're proud of their countrymen's success. 

Whilst there may be a lot to criticise about the American attitude towards various things, they rarely tear down and scorn the successful as we often do in Britain. Surely success should be encouraged (ungrit your teeth).

2) Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Country Music and Hoedowns

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, the man in black, drug addict, lover, prison reformer and epic songwriter and singer. I pine for his dark tones and languid lyrics. I do not recognise his world and yet I lap up the emotion he conveys. I want him.

Dolly Parton and her hoedown contemporaries are part of a genre that we will never have in GB, despite our recent bout of nu-folk bands. Oh how I yearn to journey to Nashville and dance in cowboy boots all night...

3) Denim

Levi's were the first, hard wearing clothing for the workers which have since become an international unform for hipster teens, weekend dads, chic oligarch wives and everything in between.

God bless America for making our lives easier...

4) Teen Drama TV

Not sure if I would have got through the relative vanilla-mess of my Home Counties adolescence without Dawson, Jen, Joey, Pacey, Ryan, Marisa, Brooke, Lucas, Chuck and Blair. Well in to my early twenties these kids had my heart and the wardrobes I wanted. Why did public school boys from Guildford not have the rippling abs of Ryan or the deft wit of Seth, the sexiness of Chuck. Why didn't we have jocks and keg parties and incredible vocabularys...

In "teen-drama" land if you drunk a few drinks every Saturday, you were probably an alcoholic, the boys next door were cute (they NEVER are) and it was quite normal for close friends to die or have sex with your boyfriends...I bloody miss them and their prematurely 30-year-old acerbic wit...

(*side note: also weird how the actors playing their parents were probably about five years older than some of them)

5) ScarJo

Yes, I know her parents are Danish and Russian or something similar, but she is seen as the modern classic American sex symbol, and she is. At the top of my #girlcrush list... there are little who rival that blonde bombshell look. She makes some good films too... but to be honest I just stare at her face.

6) Hollywood and Films

This could be seen to be a tad wide perhaps.. but the USA is the centre of the film industry, the championer of the Talkie, the location of the famous Hollywood Hills. Some of the best movies in the world ever have been made there.. and some more of the best have been funded by money that comes from there.

I can't really write too much about films without being terribly sweeping and I love too many. So I'm not going to, but you get my point.

7) Martin Luther King

 “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”

8) New York City

  There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless. Simone Beauvoir

I lived in New York when I was 19 in 2005 for three months with one of my best friends. 

We had a tiny apartment in East Village that was infested with mice, we had no TV and lived on Chips Ahoy and Reeses Pieces. By day we interned at an advertising company and a photography studio. At night and at the weekend, we walked and shopped and explored. We only walked though, we had no idea how to use public transport.. occasionally at night we'd shell for a taxi. We blagged our way with terrible fake ids and the most British accents we could manage into clubs: Duvet, Marquee, Bungalow 8 and then stood silently staring at everyone, impossibly glamourous American everyones. And there we were in our peasant skirts and coin belts weighed down by beads, as was the way.

We snuck into gallery openings and drunk all the free wine. One time we stayed up all night dancing in the W Hotel basement and then later in The Coffee Shop with some boys from New Jersey who bought us club sandwiches and champagne. 

Us in NYC, 2005

We stalked the Olsen Twins, devouring US Weekly and the like to try and guess where we could run in to them. We bought so many clothes that we couldn't afford. We stared at ground zero sadly. We watched live music in little dive bars in Greenwich Village and skipped down the street at midnight singing Downtown by Petula Clark..

The thing is... we just weren't aware. We knew we were lucky, but we weren't aware how lucky.

New York is beautiful city, an impossible city, a city that deafens you and hurls you around. It is in your face you see, but it's also layered and witty and clever. And small enought to really know. And big enough to hide. And you can just walk everywhere, which I love.

9) F Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries

20th Century American literature has always been one of my favourite eras. I just loved what they were searrching for, Fitzgerald, Williams, Salinger, Miller, Walker, Kerouac, Lee and then later, Palahnuik and Morrison etc etc etc. It was so different to everything I ever read before when I started reading it at 16. It was so about the now and the future and little to do with the past... It was so about the pressures of success and who belonged. What made one acceptable or a decent person. Racism, Sexism, Capitalism it was all so exciting it burned me up inside and kept me searching for more from over-the-pond.

This may be another too-wide reaching paragraph. But it's true.

10) Computers and Social Media

Bill Gates; Steve Jobs; Marc Zuckerberg; Jack Dorsey... I salute them all...