Talkin' 'bout the ghetto

Do you ever have those days where you never could have imagined in the morning where you'd end up that afternoon?

On Thursday morning I had a quick coffee with the AD of Tamasha Theatre Company who kindly invited me along to a 'thing' at the Jellyfish Theatre that afternoon. I say 'thing' because I didn't catch the name of what it was I was being invited to however I had already heard about the Jellyfish Theatre (a temporary structure made entirely of recycled materials) and was keen to see what it was all about.

So by 3.30pm there I was trotting down Union Street in search of a recycled building. After mistakenly walking up to a gate that turned out to be a memorial to prostitutes who had apparently died in the line of duty when their workplace burnt down on Redcross Way, I found the Jellyfish.

The Jellyfish Theatre - side view

The Jellyfish Theatre - the tail end

The project is an initiative of the The Red Room called the Oikos Project which is intended to draw attention to environmental issues by staging two plays about such issues in this temporary structure (Saturday was the closing night of the second production and therefore the structure will begin to be demolished over the next few days). While the building itself has been well-received, unfortunately the two plays staged within it were panned by critics. I heard one person say it was a case of form over content and that this a problem with a lot of theatre at the moment where people are more concerned with novelty of form, forgetting about the substance.

Anyhoo, the 'thing' in the Jellyfish turned out to be a panel discussed hosted and attended by a collective of theatre companies from the BAEM sector (that's Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority). As it happened there were a few people there I had already met over the past few weeks as we are doing a co-pro with one of the companies, and I had also previously been introduced to the arts council representative who was there. 

The panel discussion didn't appear to have a clear-cut aim but was more intended as a conversation about  the current position of the sector - all based on anecdotal evidence - and what they see as the future of the sector - again, anecdotally. There was fierce-looking woman there who kicked off proceedings by quoting a poem about holding diamonds where her thighs meet (!). She quickly got into a heated debate with another panel member who announced that he deliberately doesn't take any of the disadvantaged black youth he mentors to see theatre about disadvantaged black youth (or 'hoody' dramas) as he thinks it wouldn't do them any good. Why take them to see something they could see in their own neighbourhood for free? Rather, he prefers to take them to see Ibsen or Shakespeare. Miss Twinkle took great exception to this and called him patronising. 

Not having had much experience of "hoody" drama, I wasn't too sure what to make of all this. The way the panel member described it, a hoody drama would entail a night of guns, drugs and lots of words ending with "z" instead of an "s", such as Endz. It sounded terrible and not very interesting. Of course you would choose a night of Ibsen over this (though I have at least one colleague here who would beg to differ). 

Luckily for me, I was off to see Estate Walls with my colleagues that night at the Oval House Theatre so I would find out for myself - that's definitely Walls with an "s" by the way which is actually I think what made it so good. This was a 'hoody' drama story told with vibrant, cleverly wrought language that, while it didn't let you forget you were on the street with these characters, also transcended the mundane to really sparkle. They were some really good young actors too, and a great set.

So the moral here is: there's good hoody drama and bad hoody drama, just as there's good Ibsen and bad Ibsen. I was told that the writer of Estate Walls sees everything he possibly can and is very eclectic in his tastes. It doesn't matter what your genre is, it's the content that matters! Amen!