Category: ARTS (2022)

Writer Ed King / Production Photographer Mark Senior

“The world’s biggest movie star,” Tom Cruise is back in Birmingham saving Great Britain six nights a week, with an A-list ensemble of do-gooders including Ru Paul, Tyson Fury, Stormzy, Idris Elba, and Greta Thunberg.

And he’ll need all the help he can get, facing a quack team of super villains led by schoolboy Rishi Sunak, a suitably orange jumpsuit wearing Donald Trump, and an elongated Jacob Rees-Mogg grasshopper.

But don’t worry mum, I’m not back on the blotter acid.

The Birmingham Rep stage is currently set for Idiots Assemble – Spitting Image Saves The World, as the live production of Luck and Flaw’s ground-breaking puppet based political satire TV show enjoys its world première until mid-March.

Written by Matt Forde, Al Murray, and the Rep’s own Sean Foley – the latter also sitting in the Idiots Assemble director’s chair – the colloquially called ‘Spitting Image Live’ is laugh out loud funny from start to finish.

My apologies for the cliché but that is precisely what I did. From the moment a diminutive Sir Ian McKellen stood in the spotlight to open the show, and probably much to the annoyance of those to my left and right. Pun intended.

Hanging on to the time honoured tradition of good versus evil, the Idiots Assemble narrative is that simple. Tom Cruise and his cohorts are called upon by King Charles, a cocaine fuelled Paddington Bear, and a Carling can swigging Camila to save Great Britain, which a TV mounted Hugh Edwards eloquently informs us “…is fucked. Really fucked.”

But for every yin there’s a yang, with Rishi Sunak joined by such lovely foam folk as a tousle haired Boris Johnson, clunky transformer Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch (evil enough, right?) who are all hell bent on ensuring their pernicious turpitude goes undefeated.

And worthy of a line all to herself, there’s Suella Braverman… whose Linda Blair based caricature is so gloriously perfect it’s in danger of making the worst thing to hit the Home Office since Covid almost endearing. If it ever comes up for charity auction, I’m selling a kidney.

Plus, we welcome back a few stalwarts from the original Spitting Image. And if you need a clue, think suits and cigars. And who might complain: “but fuck one crazy egg lady…”?

Set as a theatre within a theatre, the two halves of Idiots Assemble are watched by both the flesh and blood audience and more foam made familiar faces in boxes on each side of the boards – Harry and Meghan stage left, with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping opposite.

There are also a few noteworthy cameos, from Birmingham’s own Jess Phillips and Alison Hammond, to a larger than life Liz Truss lettuce – who is only on stage for a matter of seconds, which in itself I desperately hope was deliberate. And an increasingly angry Nicola Sturgeon highlights just how hard it is to keep political comedy current these days… dear deity, you just can’t put your pen down for a second can you.

Despite a relatively thin on the ground plot, the story rolls wonderfully along as Tom Cruise & Co rally together to fight off the forces of modern day evil – with the Achilles heel of each character, good and bad, teased out of its shoe and mercilessly stamped on.

Some of the gags are woefully predictable or pantomime, such as Harry’s repetitive reference to Spare and Keir Starmer’s desperate search for “a simple yes or no answer.” And some are just puerile, with a song and dance routine centred around parts of Angela Rayner’s anatomy that would be embarrassing for an attention hungry five year old.

Then there’s the occasional wince and crawl back in your seat moment – call me a prude, but I’ll never clap a rendition of ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ no matter how many free drinks are at the press reception.

But that’s Spitting Image for you, and the Idiots Assemble satire is astute enough to carry us confidently over the theatre threshold – with a well deserving standing ovation to the absurdly hard-working cast of puppeteers who should be subject to scientific investigation once the run is over.

There were even some moments of mature sensibility; whilst no one is (or indeed should be) out of the line of comedy fire, the war in Ukraine was neither skipped over nor ridiculed. As Mr Cruise reports back, President Zelensky was just “too busy” to play.

I remember the original Spitting Image, sitting comfortably at the other end of the TV political satire rainbow to Yes Minister. And maybe it’s my age, or maybe it’s the current maelstrom of current affairs, but Idiots Assemble – Spitting Image Saves The World is a strong contender to the original series, one which works surprisingly well as a live production.

So then my lovelies; plaudits, praise, encores, and roses – and hopefully the start of more Spitting Image on stage.

Idiots Assemble: Spitting Image Saves the World runs at Birmingham Rep until 11 March. For a full performance schedule and links to online ticket sales visit: www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/whats-on/spitting-image-live

Writer Jimmy Dougan

*Blue Jean is being screened at Mockingbird Cinema until 16 February, and at MAC from 24 February to 2 March*

I can’t help but feel like queer people are being put through the cinematic wringer of late.

The game-changing, galvanising radicalism of late-70s trailblazers like Pedro Almodóvar, Chantal Akerman, and Derek Jarman has given way to a joylessly dreary, grey modernism with a core of heartbreak and sadness. A list of landmark LGBTQ+ films posted by the British Film Institute to their Letterboxd profile presents a veritable cornucopia of suffering.

Surely, I wonder, there must be more to queer romance than Timothée Chalamet sobbing into the camera while the credits roll?

Georgia Oakley’s feature film debut, Blue Jean, released by Altitude Films, is very much of this modern sensibility. This is a bleak film, with joy only occasionally breaking through the clouds. Yet it’s rooted in the very real, very sad history of the British LGBTQ+ community and provides an illuminating window into the past.

It’s 1988 in Newcastle. Jean (Rosy McEwan) teaches PE at a comprehensive school. She’s also gay and meets her partner Viv (Kerrie Hayes) and friends at the local gay club most evenings. If her employers find out she’s gay, she’ll almost certainly lose her job – regressive Section 28 legislation imposed by Margaret Thatcher’s government forbids schools from diverting from heteronormativity.

Jean views her sexuality as something to be concealed and hidden. She’s done fine until now, but the arrival of a new pupil Lois (Lucy Halliday) begins to cause problems when the 15-year-old starts showing up at the gay club and taking an interest in Jean’s personal life.

Blue Jean drew me in with a tantalising opening, showing Jean methodically and artfully dying her hair. She’s putting on a mask and becoming someone else, on the run from something in her past. It’s an arresting image, suggestive of Jean’s immaculately controlled image and personal life.

The film is shot by cinematographer Victor Seguin in neat 16mm which deftly evokes film of the era, looking not unlike something the BBC’s former Brum-based Pebble Mill Studios would have broadcast. But the aesthetic is heightened by deliberately muted pastels clashing with seedy nightclub neons to suggest something sexier and more contemporary.

Seguin keeps the camera close on Jean so that every glance and twitch is captured. This feeling of entrapment is enforced by the narrow aspect ratio. She’s a caged animal.

McEwan’s performance is striking and strange. Everything Jean feels and does is suppressed and controlled, so everything she does comes across as a bit weird and rehearsed. When Jean’s sister brings up her previous marriage to a man, McEwan plays it as if a nuclear bomb has gone off in the garden. Jean is ruined by fear and her titanic, bold performance works brilliantly.

There’s also a refreshing lack of judgement, or indeed gendered gaze in Oakley’s direction. I was reminded of Céline Sciamma’s revolutionary 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and often felt that Blue Jean’s most cutting-edge aspect isn’t its politics, but rather how it frames female and queer bodies.

Whether making love, showering after netball, or scoffing a Pot Noodle, there is something refreshingly mundane and unspectacular about the way these people are depicted. They are simply allowed to exist.

However, it’s a shame McEwan and the camerawork isn’t better served by the material. Too much of the film feels didactic or clichéd. An early scene shows Jean inexplicably explaining the fight or flight response to the netball team, as if Oakley doesn’t trust us to automatically assume that a closeted lesbian in Thatcher’s Britain might just be continually on-edge and terrified of being outed.

The many scenes of Jean and her friends in the gay bar arguing about the nuances of queer identity begin to grate too. Only when Oakley begins to let loose do these scenes take flight. She films beautiful queers in beautiful clothes dancing in luxurious slow-motion. She sets a lover’s quarrel in a blood-red bathroom with ‘Blue Monday’ for a soundtrack – fantastic.

The final thirty minutes are gripping, with Jean finally having to confront the damage her political and sexual ambivalence have wrought. The tension is unbearable; the dilemma Jean faces is challenging and knotty for her and us. The film is weaker for not hitting these highs sooner.

Blue Jean is a discomforting and uneasy film. It resists simple categorisation – perhaps to a fault – and only occasionally transcends its period trappings to become something truly thrilling.

And while Oakley could do with trusting her audience more, Rosy McEwan’s searing performance alone makes this one worth giving your time to.

Blue Jean – official trailer

Blue Jean is being screened at Mockingbird Cinema, at The Custard Factory, until 16 February. For full listings and links to online ticket sales visit: www.mockingbirdcinema.com/production/blue-jean/

Blue Jean then screens at MAC from 24 February to 2 March: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/event/blue-jean 

To read more about Georgia Oakley go to: www.georgiaoakley.com 
For more from Victor Sequin go to: www.victorseguin.com/

For more on Mockingbird Cinema visit: www.mockingbirdcinema.co
Foir more from MAC visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk

For more on Altitude Films visit: www.altitude.film

Writer Victoria Lane / Photographer Connor Pope

In the early years of the 20^th Century, collage gained prominence as an artistic medium as a way of reflecting the rise of biassed political narratives in the media in an increasingly fractured and fragmented society – sound familiar?

In Triple One Five’s takeover of Artefact Gallery in Stirchley, we see collage return to its anarchic, satirical roots in an explosive and irreverent fashion.

Triple One Five are a Birmingham based collective of four artists: Adam Wynn, Ken Banks, John Glennon, and Byron Jackson – whose entire oeuvre consists of satirical works created solely from words and images cut from the daily free tabloid, Metro. What started as an Instagram page evolved into a monthly zine which has now culminated in this show.

But why collage? “It’s like the hip hop of art,” Triple One Five explains to us on the show’s buzzing opening night. “It’s a way of taking something fully formed, a ready made object, then remixing and repurposing it to form something new.”

Triple One Five’s satirical works hark back to origins of collage championed by artistic movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism, whose collages poked holes in capitalist and right wing media narratives through absurdist humour.

It may not come as a surprise that Metro, most commonly found strewn on the floors of buses and trains nationwide, is the most widely read newspaper in the UK. Due to the background presence of Metro in our lives, Triple One Five suspect that we may not be fully interrogating the political motivations of the material we are reading on our way to work every day.

Whilst the paper may officially make claims about its political impartiality, its ownership by the publishers of the decidedly right-wing Daily Mail may raise more than a few eyebrows.

By remixing and reforming Metro’s images and words to dance to their own tune, Triple One Five are shining a spotlight on issues that may have been buried by mainstream media, such as successive scandals and dodgy funding – reclaiming the narrative by highlighting that hidden motivations and agendas the publishers and writers of Metro might be trying to obscure.

There’s a particular emphasis on the freshness of pieces as well. Each artwork is a direct reaction to the previous week’s Metro – something the artists are keen to describe as a way of ‘making sense of the chaos’ of contemporary politics.

Upon entering the exhibition space, the viewer is confronted with a dazzling array of pieces from the collective’s first five years. Over 100 pieces are eclectically hung together against the pop of the yellow gallery walls. The impression is that of recognisable pop figures and politicians (many of whom have since resigned in disgrace) being paraded into a conga line of corruption, callousness, and incompetence.

As a collection of artworks, the overall impression is a damning indictment of the last five years of Conservative rule.

The exhibition is not ordered by time period nor topic. Collages with strong political messages hang next to pieces of a more light-hearted and humorous nature, which particularly highlights the absurdity of contemporary politics.

For example, an impossibly long legged Peter Crouch hangs next to a piece featuring the faces of Putin, Adolf Hitler, and Ed Sheeran imposed on each other to form a sort of hellish boy band.

The absurdist juxtaposition of contemporary events remixed with elements of silliness and playfulness means that despite the heavy subject matter, the artwork never feels either overbearing or depressing.

One of the most pressing concerns within the art world is that the realm of visual art is fast becoming increasingly exclusive and elitist as marginalised people are being priced out of participation. This show opens at a time when art is being increasingly erased from the UK curriculum and only 12% of people working in the arts originate from working class backgrounds.

However, accessibility to art is important for Triple One Five, with one member of the collective having no previous artistic experience before their foray into collage. Which further makes their show at Artefact Gallery feel particularly subversive in reclaiming visual art as a rebellious medium.

This is also exemplified by the Metro collaging workshop held at Artefact the day following the show’s opening night. To create a collage, the aspiring satirist needs no previous artistic experience –  just an idea, some scissors, a pritt-stick, and a little bit of politically charged rage.

The images and words used in the making process are completely free, and use of Metro in this way feels incendiary – a way to use the establishment’s own weapons against them.

What’s next for Triple One Five? “We may put together to take out an advert in Metro so we can remix our own advert,” they laugh. Keep an eye out for that on your next commute.

Triple One Five’s exhibition is free to visit at Artefact Projects in Stirchley from 27 January – 27 February 2023

For more on Triple One Five go to: www.instagram.com/tripleonefive

For more on Artefact go to: www.artefactstirchley.co.uk

Words by Jimmy Dougan 

A few weeks ago, I finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s extraordinary 1998 novel The Savage Detectives. I’m still in mourning – if only I could’ve found a way to prolong it, to stretch out the final, haunting evocation of the Sonaran Desert. 

The book is an almost encyclopaedic depiction of a semi-fictional literary movement, Visceral Realism, but it’s also a head-spinningly vivid evocation of pre-millennium Mexico, a place too busy being born to notice the trouble brewing amongst its youngsters and literary juveniles. 

The case Bolaño makes is pretty simple: literature is vital, with books a cornerstone component of any civilised society. A society that doesn’t read is one that doesn’t care. 

Enter, then, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new film for Netflix: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths – the newest film from the maverick director of 2014’s Birdman and 2015’s The Revenant. 

The ghost of Bonaño lurks in every frame of this dazzling film, depicting post-colonial Mexico at a crossroads between past and present, young and old, struggling to define itself in a globalised age. I could feel my copy of The Savage Detectives boring holes into the back of my skull as I greedily booked a ticket to a pre-release screening at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) ahead of a Netflix release on the 16 December.

Bardo follows Los Angeles-based Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a Mexican journalist and documentarian, returning to his native country after hearing he is to receive a prestigious award for journalistic ethics. He begins experiencing strange hallucinations and surreal adventures, the lines between memory and fantasy becoming increasingly blurred. 

Iñárritu’s film depicts the endpoint of all Bolaño’s concerns: art has become a commodity. Bardo shows a shallow and joyless society, one built on atrocity and trauma but obsessed with clicks and content. Risk-averse and dull, this world contains about as much excitement as swimming in a children’s paddling pool. 

Sound familiar?

The cinematic language Iñárritu’s film employs is something else entirely – forget leaving reality at the door, he’s left it at home. 

This film is a beautiful, melancholic story about what it means to be an artist in the increasingly strange moment we’ve found ourselves in, and what truly constitutes a ‘home’. 

Is it four walls and a roof? A family? An O-1 visa? 

Iñárritu is far too canny to give us an answer, but one of the great joys (and trust me, there are many) of Bardo is just how much this notorious director eschews conventional ideas of narrative, and storytelling, to present a personal yet universal portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man. 

At the middle of it all is Cacho’s performance as Silverio. Derided for leaving his home country to find greater success in the States, Silverio is hated for his new docudrama, A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which is about the conquistador Hernán Cortés. It’s no coincidence that with his tanned skin, greying hair, and sunglasses, Silverio bears a striking resemblance to Iñárritu himself, a director who made one film in Mexico in 2000 then went to America to earn greater plaudits (and fortunes). 

Cacho’s performance is one of brutal honesty and sadness, he resembles a clown not quite in on the joke. Like the viewer, he ambles through the film and greedily jumps from memory to fantasy. It certainly helps that Cacho is surrounded by one of the strongest casts assembled this year. Particular highlights include Griselda Siciliani as Silverio’s wife, Lucia, and Ximena Lamadrid and Íker Sanchez Solano as their children. 

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is one of the year’s best films. It’s a work of capital ‘S’ Serious cinema to which agnostics need not apply. It asks for a lot from audiences, a 160-minute attention span included. 

It’s a stunning new entry into the Mexican cinematic canon, and one which takes up the gauntlet Roberto Bolaño threw down to the Mexican literary establishment in 1998. Here is a new Mexican myth for the post-Trump age. Iñárritu’s point? Artists matter, and a society that doesn’t value artists can’t be called a society.

Exquisitely shot by Darius Khondji on 65mm film, this challenging film is self-indulgent, joyous, funny, sad, startling, and anything but boring. And, if you commit to this film in the way it deserves, if you carve out the time to step into the strange and beautiful dream Iñárritu has crafted, you will be rewarded. 

One of my favourite lines from The Savage Detectives is as follows: ‘Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.’

Bardo, Fale Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will be released on Netflix on 16 December.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths – Official trailer

To read more about Roberto Bolaño visit: www.panmacmillan.com/authors/roberto-bolano 

To read more about MAC’s cinema and screenings lineup visit: www.macbirmingham.co.uk/whats-on/cinema