The theatrical alternatives to spending a fortune on seeing A Little Life, choreographer Marikiscrycrycry, and three shows to see next week...
You could go see a better Ivo Van Hove show in Amsterdam for the same price as a stalls ticket to his latest West End show. Plus: a chat with contemporary dance artist Malik Nashad Sharpe, and more.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
This week: inspired by astronomical West End ticket prices, I’ve come up with three theatrical alternatives to spending a shedload of money on seeing Ivo Van Hove’s A Little Life; there is an interview with dancer, choreographer and movement director Malik Nashad Sharpe, AKA Marikiscrycrycry; and there are shout-outs for shows at Battersea Arts Centre, the Traverse Theatre, and the Hampstead Theatre.
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Three theatrical alternatives to spending £183.80 on seeing Ivo Van Hove’s A Little Life.
A lot has been written about the astronomical price of West End theatre recently, mostly around the cost of catching two shows in particular – Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Paul Mescal and Ivo Van Hove’s adaptation of A Little Life starring James Norton.
Some of it has been a bit disingenuous, to be totally honest: there were tickets available for less than £20 for both shows and a lot of journalists just cited the top price bracket as if that was what everyone was paying. And, in any case, this is commercial theatre: it is all about making money. If people are prepared to pay £300 to see something, then producers will charge them £300 to see it.
The broad point most of these pieces make, though, is totally valid: ridiculously expensive ticket prices make this type of theatre – a big star in a stylish show – the preserve of the wealthy. Like many, I would like to see producers provide more transparency about where that money goes, I would like to see more of it make it into the pockets of the creatives that made the show, I would like more influential artists to take a stand, and I would like to see more discounted ticket schemes.
My main feeling about all of this, though, is of sheer bewilderment. Who is paying £300 for a theatre ticket? How could anyone do that and think they were getting value for money? Do they have any idea how far that money would go if spent on other shows? So, to illustrate how utterly insane paying the top price for a West End theatre show is, I thought I would conduct a little experiment.
Let’s say I wanted to get a seat to see A Little Life next week. The only official ticket I found was for the Tuesday evening performance and it cost £183.80. That, then, is my budget: £183.80. I decided to see how far £183.80 would stretch in theatrical terms. Here are three alternatives I came up with.
Option A: Five hit shows in London for £175
On Tuesday, you could get a seat at the back of the stalls to see Daniel Fish’s radical reworking of Oklahoma! at Wyndham’s in the West End for £35.
On Wednesday, you could catch Miriam Battye and Katie Mitchell’s acclaimed adaptation of Rebecca Watson’s novel little scratch at the New Diorama Theatre for £19.50.
On Thursday, you could head to the Bridge Theatre and be part of the standing audience for Nick Hytner’s smash-hit immersive production of Guys And Dolls for £39.50.
On Friday, you could go see a late preview of Josie Rourke’s National Theatre revival of Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa in the Olivier for £40.
On Saturday, you could see Rafaella Marcus’ terrific two-hander Sap at the Soho Theatre for £24.
That is decent seats at five of the best shows in London right now, all for £158, leaving you enough cash to treat yourself to a £3.40 Tesco meal deal – that is with a Clubcard, of course – before each show. It would come to £175 exactly – £8.80 less than you would have spent seeing A Little Life.
Option B: A weekend of Scottish theatre for £171.88
You could leave work early next Friday and catch the 14:48 train from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley.
You would arrive in Edinburgh at 19:13, in time for Friday’s performance of Isobel McArthur’s brilliantly fun reimagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped at the Lyceum Theatre for £20.
On Saturday, you could catch the train to Glasgow to see that afternoon’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint performance at Oran Mor – Lesley Hart’s Welcome To Bannockburn – for £18. Plus that is your lunch sorted, too.
Back in Edinburgh, you could catch the Saturday evening performance of the National Theatre’s touring production of The Ocean At The End Of The Lane at the Festival Theatre for £19.50.
You spend Sunday doing free stuff in Edinburgh – visit the National Gallery, climb Arthur’s Seat, etc. - then catch the 16:00 train from Waverley back to King’s Cross, arriving at a civilised 20:42.
The trains from London to Edinburgh and back, and from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back would cost you £100.78, assuming you’ve got a railcard of some sort. The theatre tickets would total £57.50.
You can stay in my spare room to save cash, pay £13.60 for four Tesco meal deals – don’t forget your pie and your pint is included at Oran Mor, and spend £171.88 for the whole thing, leaving you £11.92 for some shortbread.
Option C: A midweek trip to Amsterdam – to see a better Ivo Van Hove show for £181.96
You could catch the 16:10 flight from Luton to Amsterdam on Tuesday 2 May, arriving at 18:20.
You could go see Ivo Van Hove’s Kings Of War – his superb mash-up of Henry V, Henry VI – Parts I, II and III – and Richard III that evening for €42.50, or £37.43.
You could have a superb night’s sleep in a 10-bed mixed dorm at the presumably luxurious Xplore Hostel Amsterdam for a mere £24.
You could catch the 11:20 flight back from Amsterdam to Stansted, landing at 11:25 our time.
The flights would cost £90, the trains to and from both airports £27.13, and hopefully the Netherlands has an equivalent of the Tesco meal deal for £3.40 for your pre-show dinner. The total would be £181.96, a whopping £1.84 less than it would cost to go see A Little Life. Maybe the Xplore Hostel Amsterdam can upgrade you.
Meet contemporary choreographer, dancer and movement director Malik Nashad Sharpe, AKA Marikiscrycrycry.
“I lived in Japan for a couple of years, and in Japanese L and R are the same letter, so everyone called me Marik,” Sharpe explains. “And then, when I first started making work, I was focusing on Black sadness. When I was a student, everything was about Black joy. Black joy, Black joy. It felt so sinister, demanding joy when everything about Blackness on the news was negative. It was harrowing. I wanted to work on sadness instead. That is where the second part of my pseudonym came from.”
Not that Sharpe always works as Marikiscrycrycry. Like a lot of performers, he has a portfolio career, spanning different activity in different artforms. When he works as a model, a dancer on other projects, or as a movement director – on The Glow at the Royal Court, on Closer at the Lyric Hammersmith, on Bootycandy at the Gate Theatre, for example – he goes by his own name.
When he makes his own work, though, he is often Marikiscrycrycry. That work draws on a wide range of vivid dance styles and queer aesthetics, and focuses on themes of melancholia and marginalisation. It started with 2017’s $ELFIE$, continued with 2018’s SOFTLAMP.autonomies, and found a wider audience with 2019’s He’s Dead, a four-person piece that asked: was Tupac depressed? The Guardian’s Lyndsey Winship called it a “confident, original, uncompromising, abstruse performance.”
Born in 1992, Sharpe grew up in New York, on the south side of Long Island: “Deep, deep immigrant suburbia in the shadow of an amazing city,” he says. He learned to dance in the street and via the internet because “there was nothing else to do”, studied experimental dance at Massachusetts’ Williams College, then moved to London to study contemporary dance at Trinity Laban. “My family are from the Caribbean, so I do have a weird connection to here,” he says. “I love London.”
Building a career as a contemporary dance artist is tough, though. “I made stuff with my friends for no money,” Sharpe says. “I performed every chance I got. I think I performed 200 times one year, at club nights, galleries, open events, anywhere. Eventually people and institutions get to know you, and start offering you opportunities and commissions. It helps that dance is quite international.”
Sharpe’s hard-built CV features performances across the UK, Europe and Canada, residencies at Sadlers Wells, the Barbican, and elsewhere, and current associations with The Place, Somerset House Studios, and Stockholm University of the Arts. “I’m having a Scandinavian moment,” he says. He is currently preparing to premiere two new works. Dark, Happy, To The Core is an eight-person performance about “chasing utopian visions” set to “really, really fast music” that will debut in June. Before that, Goner, a new solo horror show, opens at Hackney’s Yard Theatre next week.
“I wanted to make work about someone who is a goner, the person in a horror movie with no chance of survival, the one that is about to die,” Sharpe says. “I wanted to humanise that person. Who are they? How did they get there? And I wanted to make things slightly uncomfortable. There is darkness. There are jump scares. There is some eerie audio. I think it is going to be pretty creepy.”
Goner is at the Yard Theatre from Tuesday 18 April to Saturday 22 April as part of NOW Festival.
Three shows to see next week
Hate Radio - Battersea Arts Centre, until April 22
Milo Rau is the founder of production company the International Institute of Political Murder, the artistic director of Belgium’s NTGent, and one of the most acclaimed and adventurous directors working in Europe today. Hate Radio is his harrowing show that reconstructs a broadcast by RTLM, the Rwandan radio station that encouraged and incited genocide in the early 1990s. It has toured extensively since debuting in 2011. I saw it in Ghent a few years ago. It is gripping, galling theatre, and well worth catching when it arrives at Battersea Arts Centre next week. Tickets – if there are any left – are available via the button below.
Sean And Daro Flake It ‘Til They Make It - Traverse Theatre, until April 23
Laurie Motherwell is an emerging playwright from Glasgow. He is currently resident writer at the Tron Theatre, where he is developing a Scotland-based sci-fi play called The Grand Sun Shines Eternal – there is a rehearsed reading of it in May – but before that his new play Sean And Daro Flake It ‘Til They Make It is debuting at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. It is directed by Robert Softley Gale, and stars Sean Connor and Cameron Fulton as two pals trying to make it in the cold world of ice cream vans. I am off to see it tomorrow night. You can get tickets via the button below.
Blackout Songs - Hampstead Theatre, until May 6
Blackout Songs first ran in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs space last November. It was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre earlier this year, and now returns for a month-long run on the main stage. Written by Joe White and directed by Guy Jones, it is a Constellations-style two-hander – featuring the superb Alex Austin and Rebecca Humphries – about a co-dependent couple struggling with alcoholism and amnesia. The Guardian’s Arifa Akbar called it “brave and original writing, hard-edged and unsentimental one minute, heart-meltingly warm the next.” You can get tickets via the button below.
Shouts and murmurs
Here are some other bits and bobs that caught my eye this week, and that you might be interested in…
Opera director Adele Thomas’ Twitter thread about the appalling rates of pay for directors is both eye-opening and alarming.
This Guardian piece by writer Jack Thorne on Richard Burton, John Gielgud and their 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet - the basis for his new National Theatre play The Motive And The Cue, starring Johnny Flynn and Mark Gatiss - is super.
This Howlround essay by Christopher Bannow on his experience touring Daniel Fish’s critically acclaimed, radically reworked version of Oklahoma! on a US tour - and the reception it got along the way - is excellent, too.
A lot has been written about audience behaviour lately, and a lot of it has been total nonsense. The only thing worth reading is Archie Bland’s chat with author and audience academic Kirsty Sedgman for the Guardian’s daily briefing - or Sedgman’s own piece for The Stage.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this email. Or you can find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you next week. Happy Easter.
Fergus