Sink or Swim for Spike Theatre

Great news for Spike Theatre, which now has everything in place to tour its latest show, Sink or Swim, early next year.

REVIEW: Next!, Unity Theatre

Next! is a one-man dark comedy on its second outing. Devised by actor Graham Hicks and director Chris Tomlinson, it first came to the Unity last year as part of its Making Art programme. Its recent two night run to rapturous audiences showed it had been well worth developing further.

Hicks plays, well, Graham Geoffrey Hicks, a would-be actor who bolts himself away in his flat, so afraid of rejection he distracts himself in every conceivable way to avoid answering the telephone. Taken to flights of fancy, we see him amusing himself with a string of bold audition-type sketches, a stark contrast to the gibbering wreck he becomes once the spotlight turns on him.

With elements of clowning, slapstick, farce and drama, the show rests on Hicks’s performance, a study of acting that ends up being something quite remarkable. At the beginning, it’s slightly odd seeing someone you recognise seemingly playing ‘himself’. But after an hour of being submerged in Graham’s world, all that has fallen away; Hicks has done it all and truly, convincingly become the character.

Graham is a loveable loser, effectively a one-man sitcom. Confined to a scruffy, cheaply-furnished flat, the script is reminiscent of Galton and Simpson, capturing that feeling, as in Steptoe and Son, that he is trapped in a situation he is destined never to get out of. Graham’s is a world of cassette tapes and dial-up telephones, which only adds to that sense of him being isolated and out of time.

With sound design from Patrick Dineen, choreography by Grace Goulding and dramaturgy by Joe Munrow (whose debut play Held is also currently on at the Playhouse Studio), Graham is a man of few words, happier lip-syncing showtunes or amusing himself making unappetising sandwiches, Morecambe and Wise style. Eventually, a stab at trying a stand up routine leads to revealing all the pent-up sadness and anger that explains his strange life.

A moving piece of well-crafted theatre full of bittersweet laughs, Next! is a must for lovers of intelligent comedy and anyone interested in the art of performance.

 

For more about the show, read the interview with Graham Hicks here.

Interview with Next! actor Graham Hicks

It’s been a hectic few months for Liverpool actor Graham Hicks, about to culminate with a reprisal of his role in one-man show Next! this weekend.

 

Devised by Hicks and Chris Tomlinson as part of the Unity’s Making Art Plus scheme, the play is described as a darkly comic tale of solitude and loneliness, and returns to the theatre after an initial outing last year.

 

“It’s about a guy who never leaves his flat and gets lost in his own fantasies. He is always auditioning, but is scared of rejection,” Hicks says.

 

In Next!, the boundaries between the real world and his surreal world of acting and performance become blurred. Will he ever become the star he feels he is destined to be?

 

Clowning is in Hicks’s blood as a performer. Alongside comedy partner Aiden Brooks, he is best known to city audiences as one half of Random Acts of Wildness; he has also received acclaim in recent months for his poignant role as Carl, the guide on the Anfield Home Tour, a weekly Biennial event that highlighted the problems caused by the Housing Market Renewal initiative in the communities of North Liverpool.

 

You might have even have seen him perform in the work-in-progress production of Spike Theatre’s Sink or Swim, as part of the Everyword Festival last month.

 

Which all sounds about right for someone who trained at the famous Gaulier clown school in Paris (where classmates included Simon Amstell).

 

But whatever projects come their way individually, Hicks and Brooks always come back to RAW. The pair met in 2005 while studying on Hope Street Ltd’s physical theatre programme. They claim not to have got along at first, but now, like a classic double act, even live in the same house.

 

Their first and only full length show so far, Legless ‘n’ Harmless, proved such a fertile ground for their comedy, they kept coming back to it, touring it extensively and enjoying a run at the Edinburgh Festival. “We had so much success with it, we didn’t want to let it go, and we’ve been doing our debut show for four years,” Hicks laughs. “But when you’re writing comedy it’s not about the quantity but the quality, and that takes time.”

 

Fans of old-fashioned, vaudeville and variety style sketch comedy, they recently hosted their own night, RAW Comedy (not to be confused with, erm,  Rawhide) at Sefton Palm House. It was a sell-out event that they hope to repeat in the new year.

 

And last but not least, they have developed their own theatre company, RAWD drama group, which works with vulnerable adults and puts on several shows a year. Currently based in Wirral, they plan to expand across Merseyside in 2013. With arts funding at an all-time low, the future plans for the company and its work will hopefully enable them to continue making a living doing what they do.

 

“We just like to entertain an audience as much as possible,” Hicks says. “A lot of people can forget about the audience a lot of the time, but that’s who the show is for.”

 

Next! is on at the Unity Theatre this Friday and Saturday (November 23 & 24).

 

The Liverpool Biennial Anfield Home Tour

The Anfield Home Tour is a piece of theatre that takes place largely on a minibus, in an effort to get us city centre types out to the Biennial’s ultimate hidden gem, the 2Up2Down/ Homebaked project in north Liverpool.

 

Artist Jeanne van Heeswijk has been working with residents of the area for two years — since the last Biennial, in fact — to develop a “people-centred re-imagining” of an area that has been devastated by regeneration attempts that have instead driven out communities and left entire streets boarded up awaiting demolition. Not least of all, the neighbourhood’s fate has been intertwined with that of Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium, which has kept everyone in limbo for some ten years while deciding its own future. Today, coincidentally, LFC announced they will not be moving after all, and will be redeveloping the existing stadium. Will it be poetic justice?

 

At the heart of van Heeswijk’s work is Homebaked, the reopening of a disused bakery that will, in the next few months, become a going concern once again as a community-run social enterprise. Get on the Anfield Home Tour, which runs every Saturday, and this is where you’ll end up, with a cuppa and a bit of cake and the chance to chat with everyone you’ve met along the way.

 

The tour, written by city author Debbie Morgan, directed by Fool’s Proof Theatre’s Britt Jurgensen, and performed by Graham Hicks, uses the stories of real residents — some of whom even invite the tour literally into their homes — to illustrate just what the community (or what is left of it) has had to endure, from compulsory purchase orders, to abandoned streets. Some will say the area was put into managed decline by those with vested interests; others will tell you the money from the CPOs were simply not a fair deal.

 

Hicks, better known as one half of comedy act Random Acts of Wildness, is Carl Ainsworth, a local tour guide you can even follow on Twitter (@carlainsworth1).

Along with bus driver ‘uncle’ Alan, he plays us Madness and John Lennon as we drive through the streets; he introduces us to people with stories to tell, and over the stereo we hear testimonies of former residents forced out of their homes; we pile on and off the bus to take in tales of times gone by and have our pictures taken outside the local landmarks. Sue, practically the only person left on her street, even shows us into her immaculate home — far more spacious, grand and well-built than any modern luxury flat, and owned by three generations of her family.

 

We finished at the bakery, where we got to chat with everyone involved in the production. It’s a hands-on, interactive and rather emotional experience. The seemingly indefensible absurdity of what has happened to what we’re told (and can easily imagine) was once a safe, close-knit neighbourhood in times gone by, is really quite hard to take in.

 

An unique and touching experience that could make you see the city in a whole new way, the Anfield Home Tour runs every Saturday of the Biennial (until November 25) and is free, although places must be booked by emailing visit@biennial.com.