Review: In Between Time 2017: Cuncrete

In Between Time Festival has now become a firm fixture in the annual Bristol theatre scene, programming the more performance-arty work that sits out to leftfield of Mayfest, itself sensibly having a year off to draw breath and plot for 2018.

Programme notes for Cuncrete (“Performance Art? Either learn to paint or sculpt or fuck off”) aroused curiosity and not a little nostalgia for the days of punk, agitprop and the liberal use of exclamation marks (“A drag king punk gig/no-wave musical about architecture and idealism! A dysto-utopian noise about The Man and how we ended up in this mess!”), along with an image of a veined erect penis superimposed on a tower block, both pointing skyward to make us ponder the word ‘erection’. “We’re all self-made men here!” yells Bristol-based Rachael Clerke, rearranging her trouser tackle in her guise as Archibald Tactful, front-(wo)man of the cross-dressing ‘anti-virtuoso’ punk band, The Great White Males.

The GWMs launch, Poly Styrene-style, into the first of a series of thrash numbers (“onetwothreefour: Right To Buy!!”) about property speculation and the lack of affordable housing, with Tactful holding forth in between in a West Country drawl she must have borrowed from Pam Ayres.

It’s a great cock-tale of shonky send-up of ’70s style sloganeering battlecries (“You don’t need affordable, you just need more cash!” “Down with the sink estate, up with the real estate!”), agitprop theatre, and really bad musicianship (“None of them have ever been in a band before. None of them have played these instruments before.”) It’s also a pretty authentic tribute to the actual glory days of punk, reminiscent – for instance – of the now-legendary Mekons’ opening set at a 1977 charity fundraiser in Leeds, where they all swapped instruments none of them could play and were so bad that the MC didn’t even name-check them (I know, I was there).

The four members of The Great White Males look like they’ve just walked out of one of Diane Torr’s Man For A Day drag-king workshops, and in the true spirit of female to male cross-dressing, they look so wrong they look right: the facial hair is too linear, the collars too pointy, the eyebrows too mono, the jawlines too slack and the crotches so bulgey they must be smuggling badgers, not budgies.

Josephine Joy as Johnnie Jove must have watched hours of footage of Sid Vicious before picking up that bass and playing those three notes, straddle-legged, like she really means it. Anna Smith is spunky as drummer Little Keith (“Keith was drawn to it like a pleb to a trade union”), while Eleanor Fogg’s John Smith on lead guitar looks like a young Brad Pitt auditioning for a role in an am-dram whodunnit.

In Cuncrete, Rachael Clerke conjures up the spirit of punk like a genie out of a bottle, and makes us laugh more than she tries to make us think. Pure DIY fun from four women who extract the piss from erection.

Rachael Clerke and the Great White Males: Cuncrete was at Arnolfini on Saturday, Feb 11 as part of In Between Time 2017. For more info, visit www.inbetweentime.co.uk/whats-on/cuncrete

Pic: Paul Samuel White