I was once hired to promote a ‘leading men’s deodorant brand’ which out of respect for my employer I won’t identify here, though for the sake of my blog’s integrity I will say that it makes you smell like a teenage boy, and it rhymes with ‘stinks’.
The gist of it was I got paid £90 to distribute promotional packs of the latest range called ‘Dry Focus’ on and around my university campus. The promotional packs consisted of florescent light bulb-like tubes containing a rolled up poster of the page 3 model Keeley Hazell and a small sample canister. The poster had a seductive caption: “Guys, keep your eyes on the prize, the mating game is all about your wits not your pits. Stay dry, stay focussed. Keeley x.” About 400 of these arrived in a hefty box at my door and though I spent two afternoons earnestly harassing indifferent undergraduates, there were about 100 cans left over which are currently maturing peacefully under my bed, clocking up vintage.
It was generally a humiliating task. I had to always be on the move in fear that one of these students will open their present immediately and be offended by the poster and tell me just how little respect I have for myself. On a couple of occasions I also had to be accompanied in the shadows by a friend who had to take photographic evidence of my work. If I was really doing my job properly I would have also gone into lectures and announced to a crowd of 100 4th-year linguists that Dry Focus gives lads ‘pulling power’.
Lectures are a great place to target a large number of people in one area. You will need to target 2 lectures per week – distribute the cans as students enter and leave the lecture theatre. Brownie points for anyone who is able to get Lynx a mention at the start or end of the lecture. Why not tell them to come and see you if they want a free can and to try the latest pulling aid from Lynx.
And you’ll see there’s all sorts of extra homework to do on social networking sites which I dutifully complied with in my occupation-less tedium, to the general wrath of my facebook community. As I went online and searched for Lynx (oops I said it), I’d see that my colleagues from across the country had already been there. Bogus five-star reviews on Amazon (which, to their credit, they’ve since taken down). Bogus fan clubs with bogus messages from friends who loved the sampler. Bogus threads on YouTube ad pages for the product. Lynx was everywhere, and where it wasn’t, I made my mark- it was like Fight Club.
The job was advertised on SAGE, the university jobs listings service. I was eventually paid about two months after the end of the project, once their accounts department had worked out how to peel a banana. Dubit, the marketing agency who were responsible for this, also recruit children for viral campaigns, as evidenced by an ad I once saw on their recruitment hive Dubit Insider. Dubit children roam the Earth precociously turning other children into Dubit children. At a certain age they spontaneously wither one day, taking with them, to purgatory, anyone within a radius of five or six metres. And that might be how the world ends.
(Update, November 1, 2009: A guy in India has sued Lynx (or, ‘Axe’, as the brand is called out there) on the grounds that in seven years of using the company’s products he has not attracted a single girl. Vaibhav Bedi, 26, said: “The company cheated me because in its advertisements, it says women will be attracted to you if you use [Lynx]. I used it for seven years but no girl came to me.” Full story.)
Six months into my new cosy-comfortable Oxford life, time came to switch flats once again. Flatmate who furnished the flat was sadly and predictably transferred to London to mix numbers in Mayfair; I’d have loved to stick it out in my peaceful Waterways pad, get onto Gumtree and elect his successor, but I didn’t have the means to kit the property out by myself so, brushing the dust off my picaresque hat, I headed out once more to the perilous seas of guerilla room-hunting.
Returning humbly to Gumtree, things were looking bad. At a glance, one in three offers could have been scams. The Oxford houseshare section was overridden with dodgy ads: short, impersonal single-paragraph affairs teeming with clichés and lazy grammar. With one week to complete my quest, I entered the fray with a sinking feeling.
Scammers had upped their game. They now had mobile phones and offered customer support. When I placed an urgent ROOM WANTED ad up on Gumtree I soon got a brief courtesy call from a landlord who said he’d seen my ad and that he was about to email me; if I had any questions please don’t hesitate to get back in touch. In the email he revealed his name as James Moreton. He was offering a beautifully decked out flat in a very desirable area of Oxford to share with two air-hostesses. The address was Moreton Road.
His email (from jjmoreton1@yahoo.com):
I recently found your advert .I have a double room in a 3 bedroom house for
rent and its available in North Oxford. If you are interested , please get
back to us asap for pictures, price and location.
thanks
James
I said tell me more. The next day, all in good time, I got his next email:
Hi,
I called you yesterday.We are a lovely, freindly, hardworking family which when you ll get to know us you will be glad to meet.I got married 14years ago and have 2 lovely children, ( Jamie 18, Angella 11) .We moved to Aberdeen cos of our newly bought property and Job which we want to take care of and we intend to settle down here fully.. Our property was purchased a couple of years ago and we have worked hard to maintain it and thats why we would like to keep it that way and rent it out to a capable Tenant.
The house is actually a beautifully styled and spacious 3 bedroom (2 x double bedroom) and boasting gorgeous floor throughout, sky tv with a 24hour broadband internet ready if you have a computer, the house is furnished, Its got a very Magnificent interior Deco like Flat screen TV, fully fitted kitchen, sleek and stylish fixtures and fittings throughout, newly renovated and mordern bathrooms, a combi boiler gas Central heating and back garden.The other rooms are being occupied by good tenants who works with BAA as an airhost but currently out of town.Obviously,its a very quiet flat. I can make the place unfurnished since you are coming in with your furnitures.
It is situated at Moreton Road, OXFORD, OX2 7AX. The monthly rent is £450 plus a £250 security deposit. The £250 security deposit is refundable at the end of your stay if nothing is damaged in the house, you’ll have your own privacy without anyone interfering in what you do. The rent is with all taxes and utilities bills included in the rent. A lot of good tenants have been let down because of the high charges from agencies and so I have decided to find a tenant myself.
I have attached some photographs of the room and the house for your clean view. I hope you would get back to us as soon as you can so that we can reach a conclusion.Also I would like to know a little bit more about you, your family, what you do. We just want to know a little bit more of whom we might be renting our property to.
Best Regards
James
07769916953
Poor punctuation etc etc (and the image he projects of his happy family jars somewhat with the fact his first child’s birth pre-dates his marriage by four years), but skim-reading the email in my urgency to find a place, I didn’t pay too much attention to its flaws. It sounded like a lovely set-up and, having heard his voice on the phone, the fact that this could be a scam elegantly flew over my head. I spent 40 minutes carefully composing a friendly but mature autobiography to majestically trumpet the fact that tenants don’t come as respectful and responsible as me. He had sent me some images of the interior, and funnily enough I even said in my email to him that “I’d almost be inclined to say it’s worth more than what you’ve asked for.” As the ubiquitous Gumtree forum slogan goes, if it’s too good to be true, then it is. Ah, what a sucker.
So then came the long, template-like, tell-tale email about how time-wasters have got the better of him in the past by not honouring promises, with full instructions on how I should prove I have the funds through an arrangement involving a MoneyGram transfer to a trusted friend or relative. It was an exceedingly wordy email detailing all the terms and conditions of the lease- most of it isn’t worth reproducing but I’ll share the MoneyGram part, the crux of the scam, as a resource for future potential scamees:
Regarding proving to me that you can afford the property.
Am sorry if this might inconvinence you,but am abiding by the policy.I have dealt with alot of people who eventually wasted my time. Before I can come down to meet you at my property.
I will want to see proof ,that you can afford a both the rent £450 and deposit £250…..TO CONVINCE ME BELOW IS THE DETAILS :
1) Visit the nearest Post office around your place and make a transfer of the actual rent and deposits to anyone close to you like your partner, mother or friend.
2)You will use this to fill the Money Gram Transfer form i.e (Senders name = Partner) to Yourself (Receiver=Your name).not ME
3) Scan & Send a copy of the receipt as an Evidence or if you are not comfortable with that you can email me with the details so I can confirm its Validity.
Once I see this receipt, I will be convinced that you can afford our property then we can arrange a proper veiwing of the house. if you are interested in it,then we definitely sign the rental agreement/contract form..If you dont like the property,I will pay you back the Money Gram charges immediately before leaving the property but if you like the it then I will deduct the charges your first month rent so you are not losing anything.
This is an EVIDENCE that you can afford the property.So Note that you are NOT to send me any money untill you view and ready to rent the place.If this is okay by you then I will be looking forward to your response soon.
I was gutted. This guy didn’t even bother reading my A* email. So there I was, dynamically thrown back to square one with this long, unspecific, wall-like email. What a waste of time, what a gullible idiot. And then it hit me that his name and the property’s street were (carelessly?) identical. And then it hit me that he had a thick foreign accent that really didn’t suit the name James Moreton. What an airhead.
But having come this far, and wasted as much time as I had, I thought I should document this low-level scam in the making for posterity. So I recorded a series of our conversations. The first is about Rule Number One of gumtree flat-hunting: if there’s any mention of Western Union or MoneyGram, it’s 100% a scam. There is absolutely no logical basis for an honest landlord to ask a prospective tenant to prove their financial stability through wire transfer.
MoneyGram transfer:
2.57: “This is how me and my wife have agreed to do it so that people don’t waste our time” – scammers wield the notion of ‘timewasters’ like a sword.
3.28: “You showed most interest” – be wary of exclusive offers, especially along the lines of “we think you’ll treat the property with the most respect”.
3.58: A busy man!
The deed:
2.19: I wish I’d tried “James, I don’t want to waste your time but would three weeks be impossible?”
3.11: Close shave!
6.21: Why so insistently inquisitive? Is this information useful to him?
So three hours later I received an email with a pdf attachment that he claimed to be his scanned deed. It looked impressively detailed and he’d put in some nice touches with masking tape. For a photoshop job this was pretty good, but where did the template come from? I google searched for images of deeds but it didn’t throw up anything similar, let alone matches. So I called up Yorkshire Building Society who’s indicated as the mortgage lender for more info. Apparently all the numbers and codes in the document match up to the kind they use, but the lady pointed out that a deed would necessary have a signature on it somewhere- which this doesn’t. And the headers indicate that this is a three-page document, so I presume there isn’t one. The registration time stated on the document is a baffling oddity as well- eleven o’clock in the evening, surely Yorkshire Building Society don’t register new properties around the clock? No, says the lady on the phone, they definitely don’t.
Some of the wording in the second half of the document makes me wonder whether this is based on the deeds to an allotment of some description. Can anyone with experience in property-buying shed any more light on this? It astounds me that he’s so confidently and comprehensively persistent whilst frequently coming up with childish idiosyncrasies like the Moreton-Moreton connection and now this ridiculous time-stamp.
End game:
1.21: “You can just send me a text” – lol.
2.01: Of course, what I did wouldn’t have proved I had the funds. It would prove that my bank account was now that much poorer.
3.40: I wanted to quiz him about the local supermarkets- another cautious interruption from JJ Moreton.
4.40: “Timewaster” the age-old poison dart of wire transfer scammers.
6.00: “Beech Road and then I’ve Moreton Road…” Moreton Road is the address of the bogus property he had advertised. There’s a small cul-de-sac signed Beech Road in Headington, East Oxford, but he means Beech Croft Road, which is a narrow road parallel to Moreton Road, by no means central or memorable.
This has turned into a quite a large entry but hopefully it will serve as a useful reference to anyone who ever has any suspicion that they’ve been contacted by a scammer. I should also add that, out of diligence I contacted the Thames Valley (Oxford) police about all the above for what it was worth, but absolutely nothing has come of it- what can they do?
Moving to Oxford, I found advertised on Gumtree a single-bedroom flat right in the centre of town at a very affordable price, it was too good to be true! When I showed interest the following was the email I got in response:
Hello ,
Thanks for the email and also Yes,I Mr.Rev Goodman Cannon owned the home and also it is situated at (St John Street) and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes me and my family to leave the our home and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a resposible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own.So for now we are situated in Miami FL,we are here in our new home with my wife and daughter and also with the keys of the apt which you are interested in renting,we try to look for an agent that we can give the document of the home and keys before we left but could not see and we as well dont want our place to be used any how in our absence that is why we took it along with us.So at present now i am in west africa for a mission of God crusade which i believe is a great work and my wife and daughter are in Miami FL in our current home.So i hope you will promise us to take very good care of our apt.So get back to me on how you could take care of our place or perhaps experience you have in renting home.Hope you are okay with the price of 115 Pounds per week with hydro,heat laundry facilities,air condition and so on.I look forward to hearing from you ASAP so that i can forward you an application to fill out and discuss on how to get the place for rent,also are you ready to rent it now or when?.and how long do you want to stay in the apt? Await your reply,below is the address.
St John Street, Oxford, OX1
Thanks and Regards.
Rev.Goodman Cannon
As Gumtree moderators seem to love saying to distraught victims and worried flat-hunters, if it’s too good to be true then it’s too good to be true. The sketchy grammar and adventurous spelling reminded me of my penpal from Edinburgh- this had to be a scam. And besides, the email was in comic sans, and I wasn’t ten years old.
So I laughed it off and didn’t bother replying. I figured gumtree scammers were just another one of life’s inconveniences you just have to put up with like rain and fish bones, and continued steadfastly with my search.
But looking back at it, there are some hilariously kitsch moments in his spiel. For a start he’s painted himself as a ‘holy man’ and tried to reassure me not only with this venerable title but also with a most dignified if bloody peculiar first name. Where the hell did he then get Cannon’ from?! Then he talks about Miami later on as if I’m chasing the American Dream, and simultaneously tells me he’s a missionary in Africa, spreading the light of Western Civilisation… What an ambitious salesman! Imagine if his grammar was a little better, say it was at the standard you’d expect from a wealthy priest as described, then I might have stayed on the hook. Surely with 250,000 people working in this growth industry, they’d have polished up their rudimentary language skills by now?! It’s sweetly inept in a way.
When I finally found my way through the jungle of deception and poor English and found a real flat to move into, I fondly recounted the above to my flatmate over our first drink together.
Hello ,
Thanks for the email and also Yes,I Mr.Rev Goodman Cannon owned the home and also it is situated at (St John Street) and also want you to know that it was due to my transfer that makes me and my family to leave the our home and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a resposible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own.So for now we are situated in Miami FL,we are here in our new home with my wife and daughter and also with the keys of the apt which you are interested in renting,we try to look for an agent that we can give the document of the home and keys before we left but could not see and we as well dont want our place to be used any how in our absence that is why we took it along with us.So at present now i am in west africa for a mission of God crusade which i believe is a great work and my wife and daughter are in Miami FL in our current home.So i hope you will promise us to take very good care of our apt.So get back to me on how you could take care of our place or perhaps experience you have in renting home.Hope you are okay with the price of 115 Pounds per week with hydro,heat laundry facilities,air condition and so on.I look forward to hearing from you ASAP so that i can forward you an application to fill out and discuss on how to get the place for rent,also are you ready to rent it now or when?.and how long do you want to stay in the apt? Await your reply,below is the address.
I started using Gumtree to find flats and flatmates two or three years ago and have successfully found a total of three flats and five flatmates, all of which have worked out superbly for me. The first scammish episode I had was in Edinburgh when I needed to sublet a room in my Tollcross flat for a couple of months over the summer. I got this email from a certain Timi White writing from timi_luvreal@yahoo.com:
Hello, Am Timi by name and am a model,i will be having shooting in your country and i need an apartment to stay till end of the show, if you dont mind i will like to know more about you and your apartment tell me the price for week or per month,the conditions and also do send me the pictures of the apartment if available, I will await for your response as soon as possible. Bye
I sent back a short response repeating the basic details I’d quoted in my Gumtree ad, which also already came with photos of the flat. The next email from Timi:
Hi, Thanks for your quick response.I am very Glad to hear from you.I want to let you know that the I am okay with all the arrangement but I will not be able to come and view the room first so I will be glad if you can send me some pics of the room.In fact I love the location of the flat.Like I said, it is My Daughter that is making use of the room. Regarding the Payment,I want you to know that I will be making the payment for a 5 Months which is £1,625.I will instruct My Client to issue to you a cheque of £4,000 in which you will deduct the cost of the rent plus additional £50 for running around and then send the remaining funds to my Daughter traveling agent who will handle My Daughter flight and every other thing.I want you to kindly consider the room rented to My Daughter cos She is surely moving in. She will be staying for a period of 3 months so subsequent rents will be paid monthly or weekly depending on how you want it.In view of this,I want you to kindly get back to me asap with your full name, contact address and phone number both home and mobile so that I can instruct my associate to issue the cheque to you.I wait to read from you soonest and do have a nice day.
About my daughter.. My name is Florence by name ,23 years, 5″8′ tall, straight,Female and single.She don’t drink or smoke,Her hobbies are reading,swimming for fun and sometimes play tennis. Kind regards.
Awful grammar, wild use of capital letters, a weird sense of urgency. And it wasn’t very consistent with the first email. Suddenly he’s his own daughter, and switches recklessly between ‘I’ and ‘she’. This individual is in a hurry, I thought, and later came to the theory that this was a Russian gangster on the run. In my next email I asked my mysterious friend for clarification. Why will they be paying 5 months of rent for a 3-month stay? Why have I been told she’s straight and single. What is she doing in Edinburgh? And what do you know, in the next email I get she’s looking to get married:
Sorry about the mistake,her name is florence and about all the rules we are okay with it and she is coming for shooting and after that she will be staying for there ,because she wants to get married in europe,i will be waiting to have your full name and address..
I replied saying I was hesitant to go ahead with this, that he wasn’t being clear enough. I asked him what company she’s doing her modelling with, whether she could speak English and could get in touch directly, and what the hell marriage has to do with any of this. And then:
Hello, She do speak english and dont worry about her
A bit rude! I replied quite succinctly that I will worry about someone who is supposedly wanting to move into my flat. But even then the guy persisted:
Thanks for the email and i will like to have the name and address to be on the cheque…
What the hell is wrong with this guy?! What’s he playing at?! For a couple of days it was just one of those curious incidents you laugh about over lunch, but I became genuinely concerned that I’d given too much away about myself to a nutter so I went on google.
The guy wanted to scam me. He was most probably from Nigeria, judging from the script, and part of an immense battalion of swindlers involved in what’s now commonly referred to as ’419 fraud’. The number corresponds to the article defining fraud in the Nigerian Criminal Code, and as many as 250,000 countrymen are thought to be involved in it. In the US alone, somewhere between $100m-200m are lost to 419 scammers every year. Returning to Gumtree, I discover that their forums are chock-a-block with woeful victims, many of whom report to have let their guard down in their desperation of finding somewhere to live.
If I’d given Timi White my address, I would shortly have received a cheque in the post for £4000. The instruction was to keep three-months worth of rent and a bit of pocket money for my troubles and send the remaining money on to his daughter via wire transfer. My bank has to credit me within 5 days whether or not they’ve finished clearing the cheque and so when in, say, 10 days time when they’ve finally come to the conclusion that the cheque was fake, they will then deduct the money again. If in that time I’d transferred any money out of my account as instructed, then I’d stand to lose that amount of money. The bank doesn’t usually refund the victim in this kind of scenario (as it’s me who trusted the cheque and willingly brought it to the bank), and there’s not a lot police can do to follow up as wire transfers don’t require identification from the receiver.
What entitles critics to judge a comedian’s set? All they do is criticise, criticise, criticise, but can they do any better than the comedians?
Fest reviewer Fern Brady who’s been award-nominated in the past for her TV columns has written up an exhilarating account of trying out stand-up to get under their skin and understand their point of view. I shivered in nervousness as I read her build-up to the night and breathed out loudly in relief when it was all over. And I loved reading about the camaraderie demonstrated by comedians she sought advice from. It’s the best thing I’ve read about the Fringe festival, and makes those ubiquitous interview features feel trivial and shallow.
Just so I don’t come across as disingenuous to those who know me, yes, I did something similar last year, but frankly this takes more balls and it’s just so agitatingly well written!
Sarah Kane is a compass point in the world of edgy student theatre, and this year students from London’s Royal Holloway boldly go where many have gone before.
Crave is Kane’s second last play. It was premiered at the Fringe in 1998, just a few months before her suicide aged 28, and has since been obstinately reappearing in Edinburgh year after year like an angry ghost. Typically considered her most mature work, it’s an unflinching, anarchic projection of her disturbed psyche, told through the morbid mutterings of four strangers in a bar. They are the fragmented voices of one shattered mind despairing over sexual and familial rejection. Together they paint the portrait of a nervous breakdown.
Essentially Crave is a meaningless play, valued for its wild uniqueness and bolstered by the premium of its writer’s death. It has been staged to great effect in some triumphantly creative productions in the past and there will be more good productions in the future, but this particular one is a dud. Crave needs a thoughtful and enterprising director to interpret it in their own way and play around with it. Here, there’s no added value.
It’s a lacklustre narration of a shallow script handled by actors who look cheerfully drama-school, who look smug about putting on a Sarah Kane play, who look like they’re laughing when they grimace in Kane’s incurable agony.
Crave is a blank canvas and a blank canvas is what Royal Holloway Theatre has brought along to the Fringe. Where’s the imagination? What are they trying to achieve?
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy has been described as a fantasy of manners. It depicts a world governed by an absurd yet ironically familiar internal logic akin to Candide’s or Gulliver’s where barons and earls and heirs quarrel and sulk interminably over nothing.
Boy in Darkness is a short story based in the same world but written separately from the iconic trilogy as an off-beat supplement. Since the author’s premature death in 1968 it largely remained out-of-print until it was rereleased in 2007 as part of a motley Mervyn Peake compendium and follows the down-the-rabbit-hole adventure of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, as he escapes the banal safety of his castle on his 14th birthday.
Curious Directive’s adaptation has the qualities of a purring cat. It’s a hypnotically serene and enchantingly peculiar cross-breed of physical theatre and puppet show which brings to mind children’s fantasy fiction. In this capacity it’s perhaps a little misplaced in its late evening timeslot, but its softness is endearing, comforting even, and walking out of the show at the end feels a bit like leaving a hot bath after exercise.
At a glance the performers come across as young and inexperienced, but on closer inspection their movements are elegantly economical, accurately animalistic when they need to be, and the lines they speak don’t feel overeducated like they so often do in the hands of drama students. Yann Allsopp is unassumingly good in the lead role, with Fiona Mikel bringing tons of charm to the more demanding part she plays.
There’s an Italian expression that often features in long descriptions of certain Renaissance paintings: chiaroscuro, or literally, light-dark. The theory is that bright, vibrant colours contrasted with thick, dark shadows create a striking, majestic beauty, such as in a Caravaggio painting.
Rich Rusk and Gomito Theatre Company’s The Lamplighter’s Lament is, for lack of better words, an exploration of chiaroscuro. Its story is vague like a distant memory, open to interpretation and limited only by your imagination. Three performers who uniformly look like the Mad Hatter mix puppetry, music and tricks of light to paint the picture of a windswept seaside town, and the lonely existence of a lamplighter.
Throughout the show the stage remains as dark as the depths of the lamplighter’s soul. Firefly-like wisps of light, at once the lamplighter’s torch and his ardent spirit, dance constantly in the shadows in a curious ritual that gently brings life to the puppetry, the ghostly stage lights and the myth.
Bedlam Theatre’s acoustics lend much to the invaluable music and sound effects, without which the play would have undoubtedly felt dour. The pre-recorded accompaniment brings something more profound to the puppetry’s whimsy, segueing from softly poignant piano tunes to Celtic folksongs to the caressing sounds of surf.
It’s a relaxing, charmingly incomprehensible show that brings out the troupe’s bohemian exuberance in rainbow colours. There’s a striking chiaroscuro beauty to the visual effects, but one that becomes banal through repetition, and one that all-too-lazily relies on the sound system and the audience’s generous imagination for sustenance.
“Run from the beast, run from the beast, run from the beast…”
As the audience enters the room, Badac Theatre Company’s Steve Lambert is running on the spot, dressed in a torn and faded prisoner’s frock and staring wide-eyed into the spotlight above. With a coarse voice he is chanting “run from the beast,” the beast of Nazi oppression. As the lights go down we are on the cusp of the Holocaust.
Audiences and critics will divide sharply into two groups over this vicious tour-de-force as they most vociferously did over Badac’s 2008 offering. The Factory was a highly billed situational theatre piece that turned a part of the Pleasance into a network of Auschwitz gas chambers. Badac Theatre Company shaved their heads, armed themselves with bats and bile, and invited audiences on an authentic tour of Jewish persecution inside. Here, the scope is narrowed to a one-man affair and a small venue with seats.
The group will admire Lambert for his wild and reckless energy as he runs, shouts, spits and sweats without a single moment’s respite as the Jewish ghost he incarnates flees in abject terror from the beast. The performance is a single, unbroken climax, an unflinching ode to derangement and dehumanisation.
“Laughter and gunshots, laughter and gunshots, laughter and fucking gunshots” – short, unequivocal descriptions that spray out with his spit like machine gun fire, volley after volley after volley. “Constant, insane, fucking noise, constant, insane, fucking noise”- no time for reflection, no room for reason, just an agonisingly long, visceral imagining of what it might have been like inside the head of a Holocaust victim as the world around him collapsed.
The second group will see Badac’s unrelenting evocations of torture and terror as an obscene and distasteful orgy of aggression. There’s not a single moment of lyricism or melancholy or contemplation. The story is quite unashamedly one-layer deep and excessive in its brutality to the point of absurdity.
In one segment, Lambert describes the beast armed with barbed bats attacking fellow prisoners in his concentration camp, getting closer and ever closer as victims fall limp to the ground around him. A chant is repeated 20 times in a horrific musical frenzy, a maddening factory-line cacophony: “Jewish cunt. Rips the flesh. They scream. Nearer.” It’s pornographically simple, and worse still, it’s easy to imagine that Badac are cheaply exploiting one of the most sensitive of modern historical subjects for dramatic effect.
As a machine running out of power and coming to a grinding halt, The Devoured eventually just stops, and as a ghost phasing out of existence, Steven Lambert just turns around and quietly disappears through the curtains. By this point his prisoner’s frock has changed colour and is weighing heavily on his shoulders – it has been through a lot and absorbed an inordinate amount of Lambert’s sweat, in the most intensely energetic of monologues. It’s a striking reminder of the enormous commitment this actor has made towards Badac’s principles in a production which—notwithstanding difficult moral questions—undoubtedly packs a punch.
Staged in the former Spiegel Tent and by a theatre company called Making Strange, Luck comes labelled with weirdness and whimsy. And true to its vibes, Megan Riordan pulls together a wonderfully capricious multimedia show in which she spills the beans on her peculiar upbringing and the tricks of her father’s trade as a professional gambler.
And the beans go everywhere with her hyperactive discussions flitting from one topic to another like a roulette ball bouncing recklessly between slots without ever settling. Sentences are left unfinished, subjects abandoned without conclusion, always restless, always in a rush to move on, like the impulses of a gambler, like the ephemerality of luck, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!
But it’s not her problem, and that’s because we the audience are in control – sort of. Those in the front row are given dice, coins and whatnot with which to determine the show’s fate every three minutes or so. With a bit of luck—and no two shows are the same—she’ll divulge some fascinating details about how her father’s team of elites gained an advantage on the house at Blackjack.
At other times we get discussions about superstition, a wild dance here and there, and—this may be what her show is really all about—confessions of her insecurities. And thus emerges from all the organised chaos the poignant humanity of an individual terrified by the vertiginous complexities of chance and probability with which she was made to grow up. This, I’ve learned, is something called ‘constitutional luck’.
