On a Friday night in May, I made my way down the bustling streets of Shoreditch to The Rag Factory to witness All Good Artists Are Dead perform their first night of Who’s afraid of Anton Chekhov?
The all female collective is made up of East 15 graduates, Nadia Lamin, Ella Gamble and Dina Gordon. The collective produced their piece under the influence of poet Gordon who wrote the core text for Who’s Afraid, as well as performing and directing the piece. There is a sense of something organic about the production and there is no doubt that its strength comes from the talent, chemistry and passion of the artists who have put it together.
It is a little hard to review a piece like this because every bit of the experience is very intimate and very personal. Right from the very beginning of the evening, waiting down a Shoreditch back street for a friend, a charming guy with fantastic trousers (orange and stripey for the win) asked if I was here for the play and handed me a small flyer on plain paper. He described where to go within in the venue and it became apparent that there was also an art exhibition of some description taking place. Passing the exhibition, we ventured up a rickety stair case into a very cosy performance space. Already in place were the three actresses in character. The atmosphere was charmingly intimate and disarmingly ramshackle. It embraces an evening set around a personal experience, and certainly myself and my friend came away from the evening with very different experiences.
My experience was a piece that explored the many shades of what it is to be a creative individual. Whether it be Lamin’s almost child like innocence manifesting in a kind of madness, or Gamble’s explosive anger and bitterness towards the world that drives a frantic need to create. The atmosphere was thoroughly reminiscent of nights spent frantically writing at 3 am, compelled to scribe like a man lost in the desert stumbling upon an oasis is compelled to drink. It is something beautiful, something thoroughly insane and often times once the craze has crashed over you, it can seem utterly meaningless. You can wax lyrical all you like about it, but does that change that in reality all you have done is stay up stupidly late and written words? The pieces challenges this and asks questions that every person who has hungered for a typewriter or an easel in a Parisian loft accompanied with glasses of absinthe, has asked. It mocks itself for doing so and laughs at the bullshit that is over complicating artistry.
Visually, everything about Who’s Afraid of Anton Chekhov? was beautiful. Lamin’s white dress accentuated her haunting beauty and at times felt like the last thing pinning in her character’s frantic energy under the pretense of composure. Gamble was the stark comparison, a visual representation of unrestrained artistic energy, resulting in her character (who was in fact a man) having the most delightful pencil thin drawn on moustache and impoverished, worn around the edges aesthetic. Gordon on the other hand, commanded the stage in her an outfit that I can imagine professional dominatrices wearing in the year 2100. The chain around her neck was an interesting device, the cold metal jarring beautifully with her ferocity. The stage was littered with art work, play books counterbalanced perfectly by a beautiful tea set laid out upstage. The calm within the maelstrom.
Although the ideas are all there and the cast are fantastic, I do think they are a little let down by the lack of external vision. In short, they need a director. Gordon’s work is incredible, whether it be her edgy poetry that punctuates through the audience or simply having the drive to write, perform and direct a piece. However, I think you can be too close to a piece and it is really key to have somebody who can remove themselves and smooth out the creases. Without direction, the piece seems to be having something of an identity crisis. It flirts with a narrative and punctuates with surrealism without quite devoting to either. Although I don’t doubt this could be a statement in itself, I do feel the piece would move to a new strength by fully finding a path and sticking to it. The piece oozes potential and it would be a real shame to see it confined to a weekend run in Shoreditch (no matter how appropriate and ideal the venue space).
All Good Artists Are Dead are a collective with raw energy and bags of potential and I for one can’t wait to see what they get up to next.
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