Jamie Shovlin: Hiker Meat at Cornerhouse Manchester

Imagine standing in a hall of mirrors: you look around you and all you can see are images of your own face - familiar but fragmented - a dozen or so contortions and iterations that are similar but different, except there's just one thing… you don't exist.

Let me put it another way. You know that bit in The Matrix where a slack-jawed Keanu Reeves utters, with deadpan profundity, "There is no spoon."? Yeah. That.

Confused? You will be. But then that is one of the biggest draws of Jamie Shovlin's mind-mashing exhibition "Hiker Meat" which puts forward the question: "How do you re-make a film that never existed?"

The three floors of this exhibition are, in effect, Shovlin's hall of mirrors - and at the centre is a film by legendary Italian exploitation film maker Jesus Rinzoli - Hiker Meat: the slashery kernel at the heart of it all.

Except Hiker Meat is not a real film, and Rinzoli never existed.

Step into the first floor of the exhibition, though, and you may well be convinced otherwise. Detailed panels on the wall trace the story of Hiker Meat's colourful and troubled journey from inception to conclusion, full of juicy morsels relating to the highs and lows of collaborative film-making - from clashes of egos to disagreements and spats over plot-points and casting.

Equally convincing are the props (my favourite being the model of the giant worm, which provides the film's supernatural, teen-feasting terror, though the severed head comes a close second), posters and other ephemera that add to the credible narrative of this film that never existed.

Work your way up through the next two floors and the audio-visual installations deconstruct phase two: the remake of this fictional horror flick.

In the end, it was never Shovlin's intent to remake the whole film - budget constraints and personal inclination just two of the main reasons for not undertaking such a colossal venture.

However, in collaboration with writer Mike Harte (whose name, via the power of the anagram, provides the film's title) and composer Euan Rodger, a full screenplay was drafted, a soundtrack composed, and a prototype constructed using a collage of over 1500 vintage film clips that roughly matched each sequence.

The culmination of this real-life collaborative effort was the filming of the beginning and end sections of this prototype and a trailer for the film in the Lake District in June 2013 - all of which feature in Shovlin's feature-length debut Rough Cut.

Rough Cut is the bow on the beautifully-wrapped polystyrene-filled shop-display present, the cherry on the meta-cake: a documentary which showcases these sequences whilst also charting the behind-the-scenes of the gruelling seven day shoot and providing an insight into the group effort behind the wider Hiker Meat project.

Jamie Shovlin's Hiker Meat is many things, depending on where you're standing. It's a parody of and homage to a much-maligned but popular cult genre. It's a truly multimedia exhibition, bringing together sketches, painting, sculpture, video and film. It's a playful exercise in story-telling and an experiment in creative collaboration. It's an artist's game of Chinese Whispers and Russian Dolls, where truth and fiction collide and coalesce: where the line between reality and fiction is as solid as its watery reflection.

Ultimately though, it's not really important what is "real" and what is not. As Shovlin himself expressed to an initially befuddled yet captive audience, when he reads a novel he's not interested in whether or not it's real - he is more concerned with whether the narrative and the world contained within its pages is compelling enough to captivate the imagination.

But perhaps Morpheus said it best. No-one can tell you what Hiker Meat is. You have to see it for yourself.

Jamie Shovlin: Hiker Meat continues in Galleries 1, 2 & 3 until Monday 21 April 2014. 

Catch Rough Cut before the exhibition closes on Sunday 20 April. Watch the trailer and book tickets here. Rough Cut is a Cornerhouse Artist Film. 

La Pizzeria Ristorante - Northern Quarter

Last Thursday, I attended an event like no other I'd ever been to.

My prior knowledge was limited. What I did know was the following. It was a restaurant opening. It was a pop-up. It was in the Northern Quarter, on High Street, in the space above The Market Restaurant, most recently occupied by the Kahlua Coffee House. There would be free drinks and free pizza.

Great, I thought. Who doesn't like free drinks and free pizza?

Once I ascended the steps to the pleasant leafy interior, I was offered a glass of prosecco and informed that the pizzas would be coming round shortly. The guests and I were also told, with a wry smile by our hosts, that there was a twist. We raised a polite eyebrow, trying to dredge up the requisite amount of curiosity, wondering what it could possibly be.

Turns out I didn't have to wait long. I accidentally happened upon a menu and a press release which had been carelessly left on the bar, spilling its secrets to all sundry. Oops. I now knew the grand surprise.

I was surprised, alright.

Armed with this new, terrible knowledge, I made my way back over to my friend and partner in pizza crime, but I couldn't bring myself to divulge the secret.

"So what do you think?" I asked, my face impassive.

She took a bite, tearing into a too-even square topped with pepperoni and salami.

"Yeah. It's ok. Kind of tastes like a supermarket pizza? Dunno, something about the base. It's very uniform."

I nearly spat out my prosecco. "Oh right!" I said, as my stifled snort swiftly turned into a choking cough.

I hadn't even said anything but the Great Mystery was already disintegrating. I looked around. I could see it in everyone's eyes. They were thinking the same thing.

And then, several more greasy pizza boards later, it was formally announced. La Ristorante Pizzeria is brought to you by ... Dr Oetker!

I chewed on another slice, agog. Spinace, I think. It wasn't half bad, to be honest. It pleased my palate with its garlickiness. But now that this unholy truth was out, it only seemed to gain more WTF momentum.

Here we were, Manchester's media elite (well... ish :P), bundled into a room, being fed squares of oven pizza.

What.

If this is the new model for the Northern Quarter pop-up, then I dread to think what will pop up next. Perhaps the next logical iteration is a cocktail bar called, ooh I dunno, "The Bar", decked out in red and white, where the "cocktails" consist of some fizzy brown liquid poured into a martini glass and served with a swizzle stick, at a fiver a pop. But guess what! There's a twist. It's actually just Coke, served in a fancy glass! Isn't that just swell? Go buy some Coke! At the supermarket! Where it's much cheaper!

Um.

La Ristorante's predecessor, Kahlua Coffee House, succeeded because it trod the delicate tightrope between old-fashioned, out-there brand peddling and doing something a little different. Its cocktails were both good value and high quality (best espresso martinis I've had in a while), with many concoctions on the menu unique, and the food similar.

Meanwhile the cocktail masterclasses, led by local booze experts/legends The Liquorists, and weekly movie nights (showcasing a good mixture of indie, arthouse and comedy with films like The Big Lebowski, Frida and Nacho Libre) not only lent an air of credibility to the bar as an events space, but also seemed to gel well with the laidback yet discerning NQ vibe. In short, it fit in, and it added value.

I don't know how the NQ crowd are going to react to this latest pop-up but I imagine the majority of responses will range from hilarity, to apathy, right through to ill-concealed disdain. I have this image of Largarita-fuelled punters flinging burrito javelins through the window across the road over at Luck Lust Liquor and Burn.

But what am I saying, that's madness and, quite frankly, a waste of a perfectly good burrito - which, incidentally, usually consists of under a tenner's worth of massive, dirty, oozing deliciousness I would struggle to replicate at home.

And that's exactly what I'm finding so hard to get my head round here. They want to raise brand awareness, that's fine, I get that. But why would anyone pay, to go out to a restaurant, to have cheap frozen oven pizza served to them, when they know that (a) that's what it is and (b) there's a Tesco's down the road selling the exact same ones 3 for £6? Unless it's 2am and the "restaurant" is actually a van outside a club. It just. It just MAKES NO SENSE.

The irony is, I honestly quite liked Dr Oetker pizzas before this event. But now, I'm so incensed by the nonsensical and ludicrous nature of this half-baked PR pizza disaster that I'm in half a mind to visit my nearest Asda and tear down the frozen pizza aisle shouting "NO! Just no!" at the top of my voice, all the while pelting the nearest unsuspecting customer in the face with boxes of Ristorante.

Perhaps I'm being too unkind. The venue is still lovely, and no malice is meant towards the lovely staff who served us, who proved apt at keeping our disbelief at bay with each successive glass of free prosecco and wine until a jolly haze made everything seem at once whimsical and amusing.

But sorry, Dr Oetker. Wine or no wine, my conclusion remains the same: No. Just no.

Cannibals at The Royal Exchange

Manchester playwright Rory Mullarkey’s first full-length play Cannibals defies definition.

I went into the theatre knowing very little about the production. All I had to go on was the title, which suggests taboo-smashing content of the, almost certainly, disturbing variety; the poster – enigmatic, stark but possibly a bit pretentious in that sort of minimalist arty way; and the tagline – “Death, Love and Consumerism in the 21^st Century.”

One hour and 50 minutes later, after a tense, interval-less, sensory, emotional and intellectual assault, I left the Royal Exchange feeling a little dazed and shell-shocked, not quite sure where I was or how I felt about what I had just seen.

So, how to describe Cannibals? Well, the tagline is actually a good starting point. Yes, people love and yes, people die. In the very first scene, for example, a man tells his wife the many reasons why he loves her, only to be shot dead minutes later. 

But of the three themes laid out in the tagline, consumerism is the most integral.

In the developed Western world, consumerism refers almost exclusively to the buying of things – our endless need to populate our homes and lives with Stuff. It’s why we have supermarkets: those great bastions of modern society that seem to stock twenty different types of everything, from shampoo, to cigarettes, to tinned beans, to loo roll. In short, choice is king... but I often find myself wondering just how luxurious or unique tissue paper needs to be to fulfil its primary bum-wiping function.

Consumerism in the remote post-Soviet region in which the play opens, however, is a much simpler and more visceral affair. The consumers in this society are peasants, and their main want and need in life is simply having enough to eat, to survive the long and cold winter. It’s a place where desperation turns people against one other – a brutal, bleak, dog-eat-dog, human-eat-dog/horse/badger/even human world.

Mullarkey’s play roots us in the latter, ostensibly alien world of peasant farmers and war and economic hardship, of remote villages and old crones and holy fools and one-eyed icon painters.

Our way in to this world, our human conduit, is Lizaveta, a young woman whose husband is murdered, victim to a nameless war.

Lizaveta, played with great energy and passion by Ony Lihiara, must run for her life. She finds temporary refuge with a cantankerous, gun-wielding old woman (the brilliantly deadpan Tricia Kelly) who puts her to work in the fields. Here, she befriends Josef, a simple but good-hearted fool (Ricky Champ) and a painter, Vitalik (Simon Armstrong).

But soon, war and opportunism intrude once again on Lizaveta’s life, and through forces beyond her control, she finds herself transported across Europe to a strange, grotesque, bewildering place – Manchester, our world, which, through Lizaveta’s eyes, no longer looks as comfortingly familiar.

I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to say you will enjoy this show, in the same way you may not enjoy watching a dissection. It’s original and compelling, certainly, but also provocative, brutal, bleak and disturbing.

“Appreciate” is perhaps a better word, but whether you appreciate Cannibals will probably depend on what you feel theatre is meant to do.

If you think theatre’s prime purpose is only to entertain, to provide two hours of respite from the daily grind, to envelop the audience in a gentle web of feel-good escapism – then this production is not for you.

But if you believe theatre has the power to explore and interrogate difficult ideas and concepts, to take you on a discomfiting but powerful emotional journey, to make you reconsider your beliefs and your worldview, or to shake you out of a complacency you may not have even realised you had, then Cannibals is definitely worth seeing.

You may not necessarily enjoy it, but if you find that you see things a little differently when you leave the theatre than you did when you first arrived – as I did – then Mullarkey should feel proud to have done his job.

Cannibals continues at the Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann’s Square, Manchester until Saturday 27 April 2013

http://www.royalexchange.co.uk/

Get £10 tickets through Manchester Confidential here.