Wot? No Fish!! Program

WOT? NO FISH!!

24 FEB – 8 MAR 2015

Malthouse Theatre presents

WOT? NO FISH!!

CHAPTER ONE: BODY // LANGUAGE *** BECKETT THEATRE By / bread&circuses A collaboration between / Danny Braverman & Nick Philippou Written & Performed by / Danny Braverman Direction / Nick Philippou Stage Manager / Elise Stewart

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY // Andrew Gough COVER TREATMENT // The Sisters Hayes BACK COVER // courtesy of Danny Braverman

A note from Danny Braverman

After months of trawling through my discovery of Great Uncle Ab’s wage packet artworks, I’d selected about 70 pictures sketching out a story. On one level, it was the story of a typical East London Jewish family, the children of immigrants, struggling to make ends meet, showing fear and resilience during the Blitz and aspiring to move to the promised land of the leafy suburbs around Golders Green.

On another level, it was also the story of a remarkable undiscovered artist. Always inflected with irony and humour, I took a journey through Celie and Ab’s most intimate moments: tensions in the bedroom, dilemmas in parenting a disabled child and the examination rooms, wards and corridors of hospitals.

I was also struck by the echoes with my own life. I contemplated a picture of Celie and Ab visiting their son Larry in hospital. They had brought him food, but had obviously forgotten a favourite dish: ‘Wot? No Fish!!’ exclaims Larry. The picture reminded me of my own parents visiting me in hospital following a very serious

operation, and the subsequent months of recovery where I moped and meditated on my own mortality. I came to, maybe, an obvious conclusion: we can’t Canute-like stop the tide of events that disrupt our lives; we can only try to make sense of what happens to us. Uncle Ab, through his weekly ritual of making a piece of art, was making sense of illness, war, marriage, money and death.

Ab Solomons did not make his art to be either placed in a gallery or to inspire a piece of theatre. My strong feeling is that he made his art because he was compelled to: to make sense of life. And although his work is the product of a particular time and place, like all great art it is also universal.

What I offer is to show that everyone’s ‘ordinary’ life is actually extraordinary, and by sharing it we all get to know ourselves a little bit better.

Originally printed in The Big Issue.