John Ellingsworth

Film taste: Mamma Mia!, Made of Honour, Ghost, Blue Crush...

Music taste: Late Junction; sad/lazy/neurotic rappers; white noise music.

Hangout: I liked the Candid Café until they stopped me eating crisps there.

Most likes (about London): Anonymity; crowds; mass indifference as a next-best substitute for permissive liberalism.

Least likes: The Lord Mayor

Me in 10 words: Dissimulator, fantasist. Mother of three.

Reviews

venue Shunt Vaults Thursday, 23 October
Shunt are a ten-person theatre collective living and working in the gloomy catacombs under London Bridge. Sometime in 2007, unbearably exciting rumours began circulating about a show where audience members went through a nondescript station door and descended by lift to a surreal labyrinthine underground world. In retrospect it was never secret really (they even teamed up with the National Theatre), but in the last year or so it's become rather well-known and busy. There are a number of performance spaces radiating out from a hub-like bar they call the Shunt Lounge — itself occasionally ripped by powerful crosscurrents of theatre, unannounced performances and live art interventions. Rains of viscera and sand are de rigueur.
venue Blue Elephant Theatre Thursday, 23 October
Wins itself incredible extra bonus Fringe Points for being situated more or less in the middle of a council estate. The theatre is a cool (in the sense of skirting cold) basement with good enough facilities but no backstage or point of entry short of a sidedoor: fine for a lot of the dance/physical theatre shown there. They programme a lot of young companies, which ups the consumer risk accordingly. There's a comfy café playing live music, and rather a lot of arts college poseurs in the audience.
venue Camden People's Theatre Thursday, 23 October
I reviewed my first piece of experimental theatre here: Donkey Shadow by Petra’s Pulse. Two performers danced around with watermelons on their heads, threw fish up and down and rolled cooking pans in ellipses on the floor. The main CPT theatre is street-level and small, having a kind of dry sepulchral air which is (usually) exciting. (There's also a zero-rake basement space which is hot like Hell and likely to activate latent claustrophobic anxieties.) Administration is charmingly chaotic, with audience sometimes forced to sit on the stage.
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