Drawing: Bryony Kimmings in Sex Idiot

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Award winning British performance artist Bryony Kimmings also includes ‘activist, writer, Feminist, Comedian, Auntie and person’ to her Twitter description. Her work is described as ‘haphazard, loud, dangerous, unpredictable and mega fun’.

“It is an artist’s duty to say and explore the things that are untouchable or hard to talk about.” Bryony uses a combination of music, dance, story-telling, video, comedy and the autobiographical narrative, inspired by taboos and anomalies of British culture.

She gained notoriety as a solo artist with Sex Idiot in 2010 – a funny and unapologetic account of the female sexuality in the 21st century. For the show’s finale Bryony requests audience members to donate some of their pubic, which she sticks together to form a moustache for one of her songs.

7 Day Drunk is a collaboration with a team of scientists to analyse the impact of alcohol on her creativity. In a studio-based experiment a GP, a psychologist and a neuroscientist monitored her alcohol levels over a week, while she created art and performances. For the live shows she performs and creates artwork sober then compares them to footage of the experiment and asks the audience to rate the results.

“I feel I am a better artist when drunk or hungover,” she said, which is not uncommon to creative people, given the centuries of artistic achievement of influential work under the influence.

Last year she performed Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model at the Soho Theatre with her mini-me, 9 year old niece Taylor, who faces a barrage of stereotypical princesses and pop stars in a desperate need of a role model to guide her through the expectations and confusions of womanhood.

She reprised Sex Idiot for one week only this month as part of The Festival of Love at London’s Southbank Centre. “I promise this is the last time in the UK until I do it at my own funeral,” she commented. I left this sketch at the venue and she returned it signed with a nice dedication.

Drawing: Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram “Sultans of Swing”

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The Pakistan cricket team possessed the most feared bowling attack in the world during the 1990s with the demon duo of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis – nicknamed the ‘Sultans of Swing’.

Regarded as two of the greets fast bowlers in the history of the game, their trademark deliveries were their variation of swing bowling at great pace, particularly the reverse swing of the ball.

Right handed Waqar, known as the ‘Burewala Express’ or ‘Toe Crusher’ took 373 test and 416 ODI wickets and has the best strike rate for any bowler over 350 test scalps. His fastest delivery was clock at 153km in South Africa in 1993.

South paw Wasim is considered one of the founders of and the finest exponent of reverse wing bowling. He is the only bowler to this day who could produce the ‘double sings’, moving the ball twice in one delivery. His speciality was the lethal inswinging yorker. In a sixteen year career he took 414 test and 502 ODI wickets. Wisden selected him in the all-time World XI to mark the 150th Anniversary of its famous cricketing almanack.

Good team mates? Hardly! The relationship between the two greats was not convivial, with neither speaking to each other on or off the field. Their rivalry was so intense that, “every time Waqar took a wicket, I too would get charged up to do the same,” Wasim said after they both retired. “It was the opponents who suffered from the rivalry, not the Pakistan cricket team,” he claimed.

Time has softened the conflict. They are good friend snow and both have been inducted into the Cricket Hall of Fame.

Drawing: Anna Sloan “Curl Power”

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Twenty three year old Scottish curler Anna Sloan’s expressive face became one of the vivid images of last year’s Winter Olympics.

She was an integral part of Eve Muirhead‘s bronze medal winning ‘rink’ in Sochi. Along with with Vicki Adams, Claire Hamilton and alternate Lauren Gray they bounced back from losing their semi-final to Canada to beat Switzerland and win Team GBs first women’s curling medal since their coach Rhona Howie struck gold in 2002. A year earlier, representing Scotland, they won the gold at the World Championships in Riga.

Having not watched curling before, the coverage of the event became compulsive viewing. The excitement and tense nature of the games as the curlers were ‘sweeping’ the ‘stones’ down the 46m ice ‘sheet’ towards the four concentric rings called the ‘house’. As an animator I just had to draw it – the energy, the passion, the drama can all be captured in the rampant renderings of a 4b pencil.

I sent this quick montage of vice skip Anna ‘sloan’ ranging on the ice to her curling club in Lockerbie where she kindly signed it for me.

Drawing: Glenda Jackson in Marat/Sade

Posted on August 20, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The Persecution and Assasination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (whew) is a 1963 play by German writer Peter Weiss. I won’t give you the German version. Thankfully, it’s usually shortened to Marat/Sade.

Set in the historical French Charenton Asylum, it is a ‘play within a play’, where the actors are inmates. The play within the play is directed by the Marquis de Sade (the man after whom sadism is named) culminating in the assasination of Jean-Paul Marat.

The 1964 production was staged at London’s Aldwych Theatre, directed by Peter Brook. It featured the powerhouse actress Glenda Jackson in her first major role. She played Marat’s assassin Charlotte Corday as a ‘waif-like narcoleptic unable to control her behaviour’.

Writing in The Observer thirty six years later, David Edgar said, “I was 16 when I saw this and it suddenly made clear to me what theatre could do… it was the best performance I’ve ever seen”. The production ran on Broadway in 1965 and in Paris. Glenda also appeared in the 1967 film version. Glenda was nominated for a Tony Award.

She left the theatrical stage for the political boards in 1992, where she is a Labour Party MP representing Hampstead and Kilburn. She signed this sketch at the House of Commons last week.

Drawing: Pippa Nixon in Thérèse Raquin and King John

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Over the past seven years English actress Pippa Nixon has taken on a mixture of critically acclaimed stage roles in both contemporary and classical writing. Her three year residency at the Royal Shakespeare Company saw Pippa play many leading roles. In 2012 she worked with Maria Aberg in a production of Shakespeare’s King John where she played a female bastard, the illegitimate offspring of Richard I. It was a part that earned her many stars. Simon Taverner said, :Outstanding – no other word for it.”

Pippa has just completed a short season of Thérèse Raquin at the Theare Royal in bath, Michael Billington said in The Guardian, “Pippa Nixon is destined for stardom… Her great gift is the ability to act with every inch of her body.”

Drawing: Luisa Omielan in What Would Beyonce Do

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Luisa Omielan is a fresh and frank new female comic, in fact the Telegraph called her “Fresh, frank and fearless – a gutsy new star is born!” Vogue used the other ‘f’ words, “so fresh, so funny, so original prepare for a full on rearrangement of your insides.”

She scored a sleeper hit with What Would Beyonce Do?, which completed a sell-out, twice extended Edinburgh Festival Fringe run and four sell out shows at London’s Soho Theatre in 2012.

WhatsOnStage said, “uplifting, intense and fearless… The Queen B of comedy.”

Her follow up is Am I Right, Ladies? which she performed at the Soho before taking it to the Edinburgh festival where she is currently in residence at the Laughing Horse @ the Counting House until the end of this week, playing once again to packed houses. She will be returning to the Soho in September, so Londoneres, watch out!

Drawing: Eve Best and Clive Wood in Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare’s Globe

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The season of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is into its final week at the Globe in London, with Olivier award-winning actress Eve Best and RSC veteran Clive Wood in the title roles.

It’s Shakespeare’s greatest exploration of the conflicting claims of sex and power, but its contradictory features make it difficult to put into a single genre. It can be classified as a history play, a tragedy, comedy and a romance! Cleopatra is the Bar’s most complex female role.

The Guardian’s Michael Billington summed up the performance of the two leads “restlessly sensual, Best is excellent at capturing Cleopatra’s mercurial contradictions… Wood plays Antony as an old ruffian who is seduced by the Alexandrian fleshpots… more at ease with the ragged world of male soldiery… is faintly apprehensive of the quixotic, mood-changing queen.”

Paul Taylor in The Independent reinforces this, “Best is a supreme mistress at working the Globe space, wonderfully unforced audience rapport and brings a terrific impatient energy to Cleopatra’s capricious changes. She even flirts with the groundlings (standing audience members) planting a kiss on one of them. Clive Wood is a natural casting as Antony – a sexy ageing lion torn between two worlds, who vacillates between duty and pleasure.”

Drawing: Rick Stein

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Combining two of my vices – drawing and watching cooking programmes on TV – I decided to draw a few of my favourite celebrity chefs. Rick Stein was the first. I sent this sketch to him at his flagship, The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow on the northern Cornish Coast and he sent it back quicker than you could boil a lobster.

He’s been on our TV screens for the past two decades with that happy laid-back demeanour. He also sells seafood by the seashore, and more. His empire includes The Seafood Restaurant, S Petroc’s Bistro, Rick Stein’s Café, Stein’s Fish & Chips, a cookery school, accommodation, a gift shop, a deli, a patisserie, a fishmongers and The Cornish Arms pub in nearby St Merryn… and no Rick Stein at Bannisters in Mollymook in NSW, Australia.

Rick has to be credited for single-handedly reviving the British seafood industry. Padstow is now a popular tourist destination. His impact on the local econmy has led some to call the once sleepy Cornish fishing village ‘Padstein’.

Drawing: Fiona Shaw in The Testament of Mary at The Barbican

Posted on August 14, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The Testament of Mary is a controversial play by Colm Tóbin based on his 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novella of the same name and the play Testament, which was initially performed at the Dublin Theatre Festival in October 2011. It imagines a new account of Christ, one is which his mother Mary questions her son’s death, his divinity and the followers who called him the son of God.

Its short Broadway run in 2013 had militant Christians on the streets accusing it of blasphemy, though it still garnered three Tony nominations, including Best Play. Tony-nominee and four time Olivier-award-winning actress Fiona Shaw played Mary, directed by long time collaborator and Olivier-winner Deborah Warner. The production had its only UK performances at London’s Barbican, where Deborah is the Associate Director, in May 2014.

The play gives Mary a voice, since she is strangely silent in the Biblical text, in an 80 minute monologue. It powerfully captures the terrible grief of a disenchanted mother who has lost her son, first by fame and then by a terrible public death. One of the most potent moments is when Mary says, “when you say that he redeemed the world I will say it was not worth it, was not worth it.”

The production mesmerised audiences and critics alike on both sides of the Atlantic. The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer summed up the acclaim, “Shaw is magnificent thorughout.”

Drawing: Lucy Briggs-Owen and Tom Bateman in Shakespeare In Love at the Noel Coward Theatre

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

“I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.”

After six weeks of rehearsals and three weeks of previews, Shakespeare In Love opened at the Noel Coward Theatre in London last month, sixteen years after the original film version.

Featuring a company of 28 actors and musicians, this sweeping rom-com, based on the Oscar winning screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, has been adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, directed Declan Donnellan.

Shakespeare in forbidden love summarises the tale of a promising new playwright, Will (Tom Bateman), short of cash with writer’s block and in desperate need of a new hit, finding his muse in passionate young noble woman Viola De Lesseps (Lucy Briggs-Owen) who inspires him to write Romeo and Juliet.

The play within a play (with music) opened to excellent reviews and is booking through to 25 October this year. There’s also a dog named Barney. He sometimes steals the show.