#6 VAULTS closed forever

“The oceans are rising. It will swallow this city and this entire theatre.” (An Extinction Rebellion protestor at Ibsen’s An Enemy Of The People on Broadway last Thursday).

The Name’s Bond… Aaron Bond?

Widespread rumours, first aired in The Sun, suggested that as far as Eon (the 007 production company) was concerned, Aaron Taylor-Johnson was on the verge of signing his Bond contract. The offer was on the table and they were waiting to dot the is cross the ts. The 33 year-old Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass and Kraven the Hunter) emerged from no where as a surprise front-runner; but as soon as the news appeared he ruled himself out within 24 hours. Taylor-Johnson said "we’ve all had enough [of studios] churning out stuff that dilutes wanting to go to the cinema… Taking on a Sony Marvel movie is a different challenge altogether. There’s the story, the character, the role; that’s one thing. But then you also step into a world where you’re dealing with a studio and a franchise — or possible franchises, though let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So, they’re rolling the dice on me, in a sense, which is a lovely thing. But you’ve got to appease the studio, please the audience and do what’s dignified for you as an actor. I find all of that super challenging.” So the anticipation grows for whoever’s next on Barbara Broccoli’s wishlist.

Grass-roots theatre withering away

The year is 2019 - I am sitting in a damp, cold, dark tunnel underneath Waterloo station as the regular rumble of trains overhead doggedly reminds me. It is the London premiere of Shida, a one-woman musical I am Assistant Directing and the theatre is the Vaults. Looking back, it is obvious now that the VAULTS festival in 2018, 2019 and 2020 were its apotheosis, its heyday. Starting in 2012, the event had grown from a quirky curiosity into a fully-fledged festival: by 2019, it hosted 425 shows and attracted over 80,000 visitors. 5 years passed and those numbers are a distant memory. Last week, VAULT Festival announced its permanent closure, bringing the curtain down on twelve years of daring, slightly damp fringe theatre underneath Waterloo. So the Vaults too now disappears another victim on the bottom rung of UK theatre. Over the last few years we have seen the following diminish:

• IdeasTap - gone

• Old Vic New Voices/24 hr Plays - gone

• OV12 - gone

• VAULTS - gone

• Edinburgh Fringe - priced out

• ACE - tiny success rate

It is now nearly impossible to get theatre seen and off the ground for practitioners starting out. All have been hit hard by Covid, and The Vaults got kicked out of its venue last year to make way for an immersive Batman experience that never happened. A plan to move everything to a new central London space looked promising after a successful fundraiser, but last week The Vaults announced that its principal funding had fallen through. Game over. Another springboard for early-career artists disappears.

Shows To Book Now

Oedipus at The Wyndham Theatre, 4th October - 4th January

Created by Robert Icke and starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, Sophocles’ epic tragedy is transformed into an essential, explosive human thriller and political drama on election night. Icke’s Oresteia at The Almeida was one of the best pieces of theatre I have ever seen back in 2015 and had a profound and lasting effect on me. I will make sure to see this - the production was originally produced in Dutch by Internationaal Theater Amsterdam and was on at the Edinburgh International Festival. Should be special. Snap up the cheap seats early.

The Constituent at The Old Vic, 13th June to 10th August

James Corden is back for his first role on stage since the National Theatre’s superb farce One Man, Two Guvnors. The marmite Corden, who last year left his US late-night talkshow after eight years, will appear in a new political drama by Joe Penhall. The Constituent is set in an MP’s constituency office. Corden will play “an ex-serviceman with a life in freefall” while the brilliant Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland, Line of Duty) is an opposition backbencher whose ideals of public office are tested by his demands. The play will be directed by the Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus, and is said to explore “the conflict between public service and personal safety”.

Reflections

King Lear at The Almeida

As flies to wanton boys are we to directors. They suffocate us for their sport.

I have now seen three productions directed by Yaël Farber - Salomé at the National in 2017; Macbeth at The Almeida in 2021 with Saoirse Ronan; and now this latest production of King Lear. I didn’t enjoy the first two and now find myself let down yet again. This is Lear, Shakespeare’s greatest text (not necessarily the best in performance) that Farber has over-directed into a messy shouting match that lacks any sense of pathos. Lear and the majority of the cast shout their lines to the extent there is little fluctuation in the emotion (namely anger) behind them - it becomes numbing and dull. The bizarre set involves a bulky piano that’s barely played (with no seeming contribution to the plot), tatty looking plastic sheets that look like they’ve been grabbed from a tip off Upper Street and the scattering of mud that looks like the black detritus of a 4G-football astro pitch. Even the blinding scene (spoiler, sorry) was boring. Honey-tongued Shakespeare is discarded for aesthetic bleakness and the result is utterly muddled. Nothing will come of nothing. Don’t bother.

Phantom Parrot in cinemas now

Kate Stonehill’s fascinating documentary uses Muhammad Rabbani’s detention at Heathrow Airport as a jumping-off point to explore the Orwellian surveillance activities in the UK and their potential for abuse. Rabbani, a human rights campaigner, was held under Schedule 7 of the 2000 Terrorism Act which gives border police powers to question and search people entering the UK without needing explicit grounds for suspicion of terrorism. That law was introduced pre-smartphones yet now Schedule 7 can be used to coerce anyone into giving up their devices and passwords or face being charged under the Terrorism Act. More worrying is that the data obtained from electronic devices is then passed onto a new programme in the UK nicknamed “Phantom Parrot”, in effect remote spying on mobile phone use - and the possibilities are terrifying. A brilliant, eye-opening doc.