The Last Days of Jack Sheppard @ CCA

The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is a grandiose pantomimic exploration of speculation: speculation and projection as they relate to both economic predictions and the myth of celebrity.

Anja Kirschner and David Panos’ uncomfortably relevant film is set amidst the first recorded financial crisis in Britain, the South Sea Bubble of 1720. The long-form piece follows the story of infamous carpenter-turned-thief Jack Sheppard, in a Brechtian assemblage of fragmented references, collaged illustration and costume melodrama. The story finds its backbone in a series of conversations between Jack and Daniel Defoe, as the author makes notes to publish a dramatised account of Sheppard’s crimes. Building on the idea of storytelling, the work plays with notions of artifice and theories of representation in a dizzying number of ways. The crumbling economy is held up to the light as the victim of immaterial spin; Sheppard’s celebrity is examined within the mechanisms of the early tabloid phenomenon; and the wider philosophy of history, as construct, is playfully probed through the very form of the work. On top of that, pieces of the original set are installed in the gallery space forming an immersive, physical referent to all of the self-reflexive façades on screen.

The work, co-commissioned by the CCA and the Chisenhale Gallery in London, has been nominated for this year’s Jarman Award, honouring artists working against convention within film and video. Beyond Winona Ryder making a second, recession-fuelled heist at Saks, nothing could seem more apt.