Arts > Theatre

The Dead Rat Orchestra - Tyburnia

Norwich Arts Centre

03/08/17

There is a macabre fascination that still draws audiences to stories of crime and punishment. Marie Tussaud's waxworks museum originated from her collection of death masks rom the guillotines of the French Revolution. The London Dungeon uses gory reconstruction and gallows humour to entertain and amuse its paying visitors.

It therefore came as no surprise when I arrived last week at Norwich Arts Centre for the start of of James Holcombe's Tyburnia, and found that nearly every seat in the auditorium was already taken.

Billed as 'a live film and soundtrack performance', and 'a radical history of 600 years of public execution', the evening began with Norfolk's sartorially splendid social historian Neil Storey, complete with his hangman's noose and tales of public execution on the site of what is now Castle Mall.

After a traditional lament from Lisa Knapp and members of the Dead Rat Orchestra, sung along to the beat of hemp hammers and the stripping of the raw fibres, the first stage in the process of rope manufacture, the film Tyburnia commenced.The project was researched and filmed over several years in and around the area of central London close to Marble Arch and Hyde Park, the site of the original Tyburn Tree gallows. Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, and projected in composite form using six projectors, Holborne's imagery has been subjected to various editing and chemical processing techniques in order to produce a highly stylised, if at times flickering and slightly chaotic, piece of visual art.

The project was researched and filmed over several years in and around the area of central London close to Marble Arch and Hyde Park, the site of the original Tyburn Tree gallows. Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, and projected in composite form using six projectors, Holborne's imagery has been subjected to various editing and chemical processing techniques in order to produce a highly stylised, if at times flickering and slightly chaotic, piece of visual art.

At various points during Holborne's meticulously researched history of the infamous and notorious site, Lisa Knapp and the Dead Rat Orchestra perform a series of execution-linked broadside ballads. Alongside the documentary-style footage investigating the history of  Tyburn we find ourselves watching more recent reportage of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Hyde Park from 2010, Anonymous UK's anti-capitalism demonstrations along Oxford Street, and of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's Connaught Square residence just off the Edgware Road.

As the performance unfolds it becomes clear that Tyburnia is drawing a strong political correlation between the increased use of public execution in the 16th century as a means to control civil disobedience, and measures still taken now to safeguard the status quo of capitalism and the banking system. Whilst every frame within the film ostensibly focuses on the social history of public execution, Holcombe's inclusion of more recent events within the Tyburn area changes the entire context of the piece in a potent and illuminating way.

Not always easy to follow, and some of the subtitling had a tendency to drift annoyingly in and out of focus, but the resulting impact is stark - fascinating and thought-provoking in equal measure. Mix in an accomplished performance from the Dead Rat Orchestra, add the haunting clarity of Lisa Knapp's vocals (do check out her wonderful album 'Till April is Dead – A Garland of May), and you are served up a potent cocktail of a performance.

A brief Q & A session gives James Holcombe the chance to share with us the secrets of why certain, seemingly unrelated, film images made it to the final cut. To find out for yourself the relevance of the Pomeranian dog and the sausages, or of the syphilitic penis in a jar, you will just have to seek out your own performance of Tyburnia.