Wot? No Fish!!

by the BREAD & CIRCUSES group (UK)

‘The Guardian’ newspaper recommends ‘Wot? No Fish!!’, brought to us from the UK by the ‘Bread & Circuses’ group, as “a show about love… made with love”.
Just imagine 55 years of married life recorded on more than 3,000… notes. From the pride experienced at the birth of their first child, to the acrobatics of a rich love life, to their autistic son’s confinement and subsequent death, up to London’s WWII blitz and marital nagging, because one wanted to buy a fur coat and the other always looked scruffy.

It all started in 1926 when shoemaker Ab Solomons unconsciously doodled a sketch on the brown envelope in which he gave his wife his weekly wages. During their marriage up until 1982, Ab developed his art, drawing something on the envelope for Shelley every week. These drawings – weekly illustrated documents of love – record Ab and Shelley’s family life and its ups and downs, with great wit, warmth and honesty. Some of Ab’s visual fixations are… his wife’s legs and the couple’s bedroom – the backdrop for many scenes in their “drama”. What is also of interest is the fact Ab almost always drew Shelley with a red nose, as she had caught a cold on her wedding day and her nose was red. This action intimates that the image he had of her inside him never changed, even when she grew old and was diagnosed with cancer.

Danny Braverman’s solo – he penned the play, while it was first directed by Nick Philippou – recounts the funny and moving story of how he recycled his uncle Ab’s lost art. Braverman starts off behind a desk, discovering this visual treasure and tells the couple’s story. He places the doodles under a camera so that we can see them on a large screen placed on stage.

The performance was a success at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2013) and continues to tour the world (Battersea Arts Centre, the Boston ICA, Sydney Festival, Melbourne Malthouse and, recently, the Southbank Centre). According to Lyn Gardner, theatre critic at ‘The Guardian’, it was one of the ten best shows in 2014, while it received the Brian Way Playwriting Award.

A collaboration between Danny Braverman and Nick Philippou. Written and performed by Danny Braverman, originally directed by Nick Philippou.

Greek supertitles