Theatre / Anna Freeman
Review: Blahblahblah, Bristol Old Vic
Picture: Naomi Woddis
If a “cabaret night of spoken word” scares you into imagining a roomful of stroky-beards nodding at an ironic use of iambic pentameter, stop it immediately.
So, how do you watch poetry? Well, this month’s Blahblahblah in BOV’s Basement kicks off with host Anna Freeman literally showing us how to be an audience: what kind of appreciative noises to make, how to clap. It’s light-hearted, yet there’s also a sense of trying to make the genre a bit rock‘n’roll.
First up is Talia Randall, whose ‘Night Walk’ uses rap to explore the roots of sexual behaviour: “I was taught to be prey”. Elsewhere, in ‘Salt’ she revisits student parties where white kids dance to reggae – then speed-write through lectures on colonialism. Indeed, if there’s a theme to be found tonight it’s looking at past selves and finding embarrassment, confusion or a sense of belonging.
Niall O’Sullivan is the host of Unplugged, the open mic night at Covent Garden’s Poetry Café; his own set displays a solid quality, building from sarkiness to anger, full of internal half-rhyme and indignant syntax. His new prose poems are inspired by a summer of UKIP and the Scottish referendum. In ‘England’ he articulates a mercurial relationship with the country that gives him the Daily Mail, “weak tea and Gary Barlow singing Happy Birthday to the Queen”, while in “A/Version” his Irish granny’s missing thumb takes on a new significance when he finds himself at Buckingham Palace shaking the silk glove of the nation’s grandmother.
Malika Booker, inaugural poet in residence at the RSC, is a British writer of Guyanese and Grenadian heritage – and this cultural layering enables her to create a kind of linguistic mix-tape. ‘Brixton Market’ is a sensual piece marking the painstaking routine of shopping with mother, elevating the tactility of fruits and Kwik Save tins to symbols of atavistic ritual.
Other poems address the brutality of a military coup and of the racism endured by the ‘Windrush generation’. ‘Warning’ is about domestic violence, with its “swell eye and bust skin”, the ultimate threat directed at the male perpetrator: suffice to say, a cutlass is involved. There’s humour too, with the audience participating in call-and-response to ‘My Mother’s Blues’, a piece about the writer’s long-suffering mother.
‘Blahblahblah’ can suggest words that merely wash over you. But some of those words can also smash into your ears and knock you off your feet.
The next Blahblahblah is on Monday 8 December. For more info and to book tickets, visit http://www.bristololdvic.org.uk/storytimeforgrownups.html
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