Poetry / Stefan Mohamed
Review: Milk Poetry – Stefan Mohamed: Farewell Tour, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘Insightful, incisive and glistening’
Reviewing Stefan Mohamed is like trying to paint a song. Farewell Tour resists the treatment of ordinary prose; it wriggles free of its own outline and burns down its house. It politely declines. It stands on its head. It berates its purpose. At one stage I wondered if it was entirely a scheme to spite the idiot critics who dare translate creativity itself into stupid words on a stupid page.
The evening commenced with a poetry reading from Tom Sastry. I am unfit to properly exalt Sastry’s work. Each line – impossibly – harbours true novelty whilst imparting a conviction that only those words in that order could possibly suffice. It is very easy to write as well as Tom Sastry does: simply spend about 15 years selecting each successive word. Sastry’s writing is vulnerable, wise, careful and pristine.
Within about 40 seconds of Farewell Tour I knew I was in trouble. I laughed like a lottery-winner from start to finish, taking a brief respite during the interval to laugh like the winner of a local pub quiz. I was its perfect recipient; I simply can’t imagine anybody enjoying it more than I did.
is needed now More than ever
https://twitter.com/stefmowords/status/1572866724093132802
With elegant venom and relentless wit, Mohamed tours contemporary discourse and lays bare its absurdities. All that is lurid and cliched is derided and scorned; all that is vulgar and foolish is berated and exposed. Bogus affectations of nostalgia for mythical Good Old Days are justly ridiculed as Farewell Tour explores heritage, felt-identity and class.
The show, at its heart, is a sprawling satire of the imaginary man to whom right wing media tirelessly appeal; a state-of-the-nation show in which the state is liquid because everything is sinking and nothing is OK. Farewell Tour captures exactly the dissonance of social conservatism: it mourns an imagined past whilst longing for the present it refuses to see.
Farewell Tour is the insightful, incisive and glistening achievement of Stefan Mohamed, an artist as creative as any you could name. It is funnier than a show has the right to be. I can only hope its title belies one last surprise.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ChRzWOfFFbO/
To keep informed of future Milk Poetry events, follow @MilkPoetry on Twitter. Stefan Mohamed is at www.stefmo.co.uk, or follow @stefmowords on Insta.
Main photo: Courtesy of Stefan Mohamed
Read more: Stefan Mohamed: Reservation
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