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It's the ThisWeek London Podcast, our weekly magazine programme - available to download or stream - championing the best comedy, cabaret, theatre, music, musicals and spoken word in London, and featuring interviews with and performances from some our favourite performers and creators.
This week Chris Cooke and Tom Bragg are joined by Juliette Burton, ahead of her appearance at the ComEDy Gala fund-raiser at The Comedy Store, and Chris Sheridan from the play 'Odd Shaped Balls', an Edinburgh Fringe hit that is returning to the Etcetera Theatre. Plus Tales From The MP3 (Unicorn Theatre) and Axis Of Awesome (Leicester Square Theatre).
Click here to download or stream this edition, and click here for details on how to subscribe to the ThisWeek Podcast feed.
Teatro Vivo are a company who have become renowned for their performances in unusual, often outdoor spaces, and have been producing quality work for nearly a decade. Their 2014 autumn season includes two separate productions, one of Brecht's classic 'Mother Courage', performed at Woolwich Arsenal, and 'The Hunters Grimm', which will be staged on the streets of Deptford in a few weeks time.
I put some questions to Teatro Vivo's founder Sophie Austin, to find out more about the company, as well as the upcoming new shows. You can read the interview here.
'Mother Courage' is on until 21 Sep at The Royal Arsenal Site, Woolwich, see this page here for more info and tickets. 'The Hunters Grimm' runs from 22 Oct until 8 Nov, info and tickets here.
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COMEDY: Joseph Morpurgo – Odessa | Kings Place | 12 Sep (pictured) A 5/5-caliber hit at this year's Edinburgh Fringe, Joseph Morpurgo's "silly, sinister and screwball" one-man show is posited like an investigation into a slightly shady chemical plant fire in the Texan city of Odessa. A real bright light in theatre with a blackly comical twist, Jo-Mo mans the whole cast of the story, from cops to co-conspirators, building an intricate narrative arc around a blurry half-minute TV clip from 1983. Details and tickets here. MUSIC/VISUAL ART: John Cale & Liam Young – Transmissions From The Drone Orchestra | Barbican Centre | 12-13 Sep Oh look/listen; it's only the world's first sighting/sounding of 'LOOP>>60Hz', a collaborative AV work by John Cale and 'speculative architect' and designer Liam Young. Cale and his band will play a live set of selected tracks, specially adapted "to durational forms, unusual tunings and unorthodox audio delivery", whilst Young provides a flock of drone-like 'disembodied instruments' circling the the auditorium and making noises. Weird, no? Details and tickets here. THEATRE: Doctor Scroggy's War | Shakespeare's Globe | 12 Sep – 10 Oct Having collaborated on The Globe's award-winning 'Anne Boleyn' in 2010, playwright Howard Brenton and director John Dove reconvene on this new script giving a sideways glance at the First World War. In it, nineteen year old Jack Twigg joins the London Regiment and meets life-saving medic Harold Gillies, though also notices a strange character named 'Doctor Scroggy' who visits the hospital ward at night and gives champagne to the patients. Details and tickets here. |
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COMEDY/MUSIC: The Axis Of Awesome – Viva La Vida Loca Las Vegas | Leicester Square Theatre | 13 Sep The very apex of all that is excellent in irreverent singing and viral video-making-based entertainment, ThreeWeeks cover stars Axis Of Awesome are over from Oz to airmail-in their usual mix of titillating original songs and formulaic-pop-hit spoofs. Preview the band's material right here on the ThisWeek Podcast. Details about the show and tickets here. FESTIVAL/MUSIC: OnBlackheath | Blackheath | 13-14 Sep (pictured) Come one, come all, and have a dance to the likes of Massive Attack! Grace Jones! Aloe Blacc! Young Fathers! And Slow Club! (and Frank Turner) at this good-looking music/food hoopla situated on top of South East London's most fun and family-suitable mass burial pit (of old). In addition to all the cool acts playing, OnBlackheath also offers live cooking demos by Michelin-starred chefs and Gizzi Erskine, cocktail mixing classes and craft ale tasting. Details and tickets here. FILM: Welcome To Busseywood – African Cinema Festival | Bussey Building/CLF Art Cafe | 13 Sep Programmed by local know-alls (in a good way) Orville Kunga and Vashti Henry, this free-entry celebration of African cinema gets into gear at 12.30pm with Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu post-apocalyptic short 'Pumzi', and later features screenings of the brilliant 'District 9′, Zanzibar-based fishing fantasy 'Jonah', surreal classic 'Touki Bouki', folkloric action movie 'Oya – Rise Of The Suporishas' and, to close, the Thandi Newton and Chiwetel Ejifor-starring 'Half Of A Yellow Sun'. Details here. |
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COMEDY: Carly Smallman – Made In Penge | Kings Place | 14 Sep Appearing by the grace of this year's Kings Place Festival, Ms Penge herself, née Carly Smallman, presents a happy 60 minutes of jokes, love songs (with a twist) and laughs. Details here. COMEDY: Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown + Do The Right Thing | The Phoenix, Cavendish Square | 14 Sep The irrepressibly sketchy Pappy's team knocks heads with rival panel game 'Do The Right Thing', with Adam Buxton and Joel Dommett as the night's inept guest flatmates, whilst Katherine Ryan and Mike Wozniak aim to free themselves of tricky dilemmas in 'DTRT'. Tickets are available for either show, or as a 'combi' package giving access to both. Details and tickets here. THEATRE: War And Peace – Gaza | Rich Mix | 14 Sep Marking the launch of an Arabic adaptation of Tolstoy's philosophical saga, this event finds Palestine-based ensemble Theatre For Everybody re-creating 'War And Peace' within the conflict-ridden Gaza Strip, linking up live via satellite with LDN's Az Theatre to screen the still-in-development show at Rich Mix. As well as the main event, writers Hassan Abdulrazzak, Caryl Churchill, Ahmed Masoud and Haifa Zangana have written modern responses they've written to Tolstoy's timeless text, which will be recited by actors David Calder, Jennie Stoller and Harriet Walter. Details and tickets here. |
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COMEDY: ComEDy Gala w/ Katherine Ryan + Patrick Monahan + Nat Luurtsema + Juliette Burton | Comedy Store | 15 Sep Sweet-comedian-with-bite Katherine Ryan takes a bow alongside co-stars Fringe mainstay and TW Editors' Award winner Patrick Monahan, Jigsaw piece and TW letter-writer Nat Luurtsema and forthright comic Juliette Burton (who, by the way, headlines the latest ThisWeek London Podcast) at this smartly-billed A* gala in aid of a great cause. Details and tickets here. MUSIC: Carter Tutti Void | Oslo | 15-16 Sep A hybrid of Throbbing Gristle's Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti with Nik Void of disco infiltrators Factory Floor, Mute signings Carter Tutti Void's main sonic schtick, a la their admirable 2012 LP 'Transverse', is a niche line in dark, pulsing noise-pop with a strong rhythm and synth contingent. Details and tickets here. OPERA: Xerxes | London Coliseum | 15 Sep – 3 Oct The Coliseum hails Nicholas Hytner's Olivier Award-winning take on this light, fizzy and flirty opera by the one and, in fact, the only, George Frideric Handel. Based in part in Vauxhall's pleasure gardens (as they were in the 1700s), 'Xerxes' dives right into a love triangle between two brothers who love the same woman. Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote mans up to play the male title tole, whilst counter-tenor Andrew Watts voices his/her sibling Arsamenes, and Sarah Tynan sings Romilda. Details and tickets here. |
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ART: Yayoi Kusama – Pumpkins | Victoria Miro | 16 Sep – 19 Dec The Victoria Miro shows a timely (given it's almost nearly Halloween) body of pumpkin-based paintings, large-scale mosaics and big old bronze castings by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama; each one dedicated, with great love, to the natural world's knobbliest orange gourd. Bang into the pumpkin as a motif since as early as 1948, Kusama is known to use the plant as a means of selfportraiture, attracted to its "charming and winsome form", "generous unpretentiousness" and "solid spiritual base". Details and tickets here. CIRCUS/DANCE: 7 Fingers – Séquence 8 | Sadler's Wells Theatre | 16 Sep – 4 Oct Québec-based circus clique 7 Fingers flex their way into this sequence designed for eight performers, who'll be twinning lithe acrobatics with light-hearted dance bits, doing so against bold lighting and an original soundtrack. Details and tickets here. OPERA: Third World Bunfight – Macbeth | The Barbican | 16-20 Sep (pictured) Radical playwright Brett Bailey adapts Verdi's 'Macbeth', moving the base threads of the plot over to modern-day Congo, and bringing in a South African cast to voice a rearrangement of the original opera. In his and Third World Bunfight's version of events, a group of refugees find an old trunk full of sheet music and gramophone recordings of Verdi's score, and are inspired to tell their own story; that of a warlord, his power-thirsty wife, and Congo's conflict-ravaged landscape. Details and tickets here. |
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ART: Marina Abramovic – White Space | Lisson Gallery | 17 Sep – 1 Nov Art-world royalty Marina Abramovic, who's still the toast of London following the close of her massive '512 Hours' show at the Serpentine, is here celebrated in the early phases of her career, with 'White Spaces' giving erm... well, space to a range of rare and remastered audio pieces, videos and newly-discovered photos representing her very first experiments into performance art based on 'time and the immaterial', themes central to her present-day practice. Details and tickets here. FILM/MUSIC: Nick Cave – 20,000 Days On Earth UK Launch | various cinemas nationwide | 17 Sep (pictured) So rock n roll grizzly man Nick Cave is gracing the Barbican tonight to chat and play live at a special gala screening of his part-real, part-surreal 'day in the life' film, the widely acclaimed '20,000 Days On Earth'. Whilst every last ticket to the main event shifted a long while back, Cave fans can instead go to one of 150 British/Irish cinemas to catch a live-stream of the set and screening, which will feature Nick speaking beside Bad Seeds men Warren Ellis and Barry Adamson, as well as '20,000 Days' directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Details and tickets here. THEATRE: Teh Internet Is Serious Business | Royal Court Theatre | 17 Sep – 25 Oct Writer Tim Price debates the timely topic of 'hacktivism' in his new play, in which a pair of teen boys meet online and pick a 'David v Goliath'-style digital fight with the FBI, recoding the limits of internet espionage for all time. Former Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivists Mustafa Al-Bassam and Jake Davis, on whom the script is based, will speak alongside experts on the 'deep web' at an 'in conversation' event on 29 Sep, having had a legal ban on communicating with each other lifted only earlier this month. Details and tickets here. |
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COMEDY: Will Franken – The Stuff They Put In Sleep | Museum Of Comedy | 18 Sep (pictured) Extra-terrestrial characterisations and stories are the 'stuff' of American surrealist and ThreeWeeks Editors' Award winning Will Franken's "enjoyably dreamlike" latest show, which finds him acting 'bit' after bit based on art, politics, and all the filling that's in between. Details and tickets here. Check out interview with the man himself in the ThreeWeeks post-Fringe podcast from last month. MUSIC: Rustie 'Green Language' Release Party | Oval Space | 18 Sep Beat-heaving Glaswegian Rustie is back in a big way with his jagged new LP 'Green Language', which, apparently, features mixed traces of trance, My Bloody Valentine, Scottish electronica and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And, hence, he's arranged this release party in its name; inviting the brilliant Sampha to DJ, and D Double E, Logan Sama and Gorgeous Children to play live. Details and tickets here. THEATRE: Odd Shaped Balls | Etcetera Theatre | 18 Sep Actor/writer Chris Sheridan's 'Odd Shaped Balls' – a one-man play – follows a gay rugby player forced into the spotlight after someone 'outs' him. Sheridan plays all the parts, on and off the sporting field, in this "stirring and captivating" (said ThreeWeeks on seeing the show at this year's Edinburgh Fringe) piece of theatre. Find out more in this week's ThisWeek London Podcast, where we chat to Chris about the show. More details and tickets here. |
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