You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
When did the Vaults become the Vaults? The cavernous, graffiti-strewn passages under Waterloo station occupy the same category of London spaces as the Battersea Power Station and, for a long time, the disused Millennium Dome: atmospheric, semi-active spaces crying out for permanent civic use. If not an entertainment space, you thought, then maybe an unconventional use could be found – like the skate park under the National Theatre, which shares the passages’ edgy ambience. It wasn’t too long ago that they were the Old Vic Tunnels, sporadic host to immersive Eugene O’Neill productions and premium parties to mark the Mexican Day of the Dead – and yet it was one of those places that you always resolved to visit, only to check the website and find that there was nothing on for months. However, in the last few years, the VAULT Festival – the six-week, carnivalesque gala showcasing the best of London’s fringe – has come to seem as if it has always been there, so woven does it seem with the space’s warp and weft.
This year’s festival combines VAULT veterans – such as the delightful Artful Badger, a one-of-a-kind theatre company in thrall both to wildlife and explosives – with a host of innovations. The expansion of London’s pop-up and outdoor arts scene in the last few years means that VAULT keeps having the raise its game – and so this year sees the introduction of the VAULT Film Festival, a brand new restaurant called the Suffolk Punch and more venues, parties and workshops than ever before. VAULT is the Audrey II of the London arts scene; it just keeps getting bigger.
Among paranormal enthusiasts, Edinburgh is contender for the most haunted city in Europe – a city of dungeons, ghouls and ghosts. At the VAULT Festival, the lingering ghost of Auld Reekie supports the concept of the mysterious presence. Almost all productions, indeed, are either bound for Edinburgh or have come fresh from it. The Flanagan Collective’s Fable – which ran at Summerhall at 2015’s Edinburgh Fringe – is no exception, and even takes place in Scotland. A co-production with Greenwich Theatre, the play is a two-hander about Jay (Holly Beasley-Garrigan), a hard-pressed teacher unsuited to the fast-paced, competitive modern world, who travels more than 400 miles to the remote Highlands village of Ardfern to meet Blair (Dominic Allen), a “tree surgeon and poet” that she met on the niche website UniformDating.
There were all manner of reasons why Fable shouldn’t work. Its sentiments of escape, while sincere, are also adolescent. “We are part of a generation suffering from soul-drought, of purpose-drought,” says Jay, who has always dreamed of being an astronaut. Ardfern is a refuge from the corrupted, capitalist world of Tesco and billboards; Blair is a kind of Thoreauvian back-to-the-land archetype, and like Thoreau, rather insufferable. “Look up from your phones,” he commands, in an echo of an unspeakable spoken word YouTube film from 2014. “That’s where the trees are.” Later, he speaks of his desire to “take down the internet, the Tescos, the flyovers” and says that, if he had a daughter, he would call her “Bear”.
And yet, and yet – Fable is impossible to dislike. Why? Because of its massive heart. Beasley-Garrigan, the heart of the play, voices these sentiments with such soulful conviction that it’s hard not to be touched; her character has a starry-eyed dreaminess, a real sense of wonder. The on-stage presence of Wilfred Petherbridge, who strums mellow but stirring chords on an electric guitar throughout, help add to the play’s warmth, as do the lo-fi slide projector aids. The sentiment may be childlike, but, like an eager-to-please child, it is also very endearing.
While Fable offers a critique of the modern world, Squidboy, the one-man show by New Zealand-born performer Trygve Wakenshaw, makes no claim on significance. And nor should it, for Squidboy is pure, unabashed, Energizer-Bunny silliness by a master of physical performance and comic timing. Trygve spends the show alternating between two roles: a squid, represented by a white squid costume that (fittingly, given the show’s breathless lunacy) almost resembles a straitjacket; and a crusty, Old Gregg-like fisherman on a crazed, wide-eyed mission to hunt said squid. There’s the barest semblance of plot – a squid falls in love with a disembodied voice in a lift – but it does not really matter; it is only the peg on which Trygve hangs his comedy. This is the kind of show in which Trygve can spend ten minutes chasing a fly around the theatre, or mouth the words to Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas, and it will remain completely hilarious, purely due to a well-timed tic or twitch of the eyebrows. Even better, for something so silly, the voice-in-a-lift romance manages to become genuinely heartwarming by the end: you feel united with Trygve in a bizarre, utterly special communion.
Like Fable, The London 2012 Games Closing Ceremony Closing Ceremony – written by BBC New Comedy Award winner David Callaghan – is set in Scotland; like Fable, it previously had a run at the Edinburgh Fringe; and, like Fable, it successfully transcends elements that would otherwise be incredibly ominous, in this case a talking dog, audience participation and earnest political sentiment, which, in theatre and comedy, ought to be handled like radioactive waste (cf. Royal Court plays such as If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep, the comedy of Mark Steel and any episode of The News Quiz). However, Callaghan – and his wonderful performer Clare Sheppard – clearly have a good set of forceps and protection suits, for the play wins the audience over to its keenly felt appeal against injustice. Sheppard plays Holly, a boisterous and wise-cracking Glaswegian who is aghast that the communal, inclusive celebration of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony has given way to the rise of UKIP and anti-immigration sentiment – and is determined to arrest this decline. Sheppard is such a likeable, engaging presence that you don’t leave feeling hectored but, instead, feel like writing a blistering letter to your local MP.
The VAULT Festival continues until March 6.
