Latitude Festival 2009 - Friday: Part I

I was overwhelmed by Latitude before I had even set up my tent. With a programme weighing in at 250 pages, a bellowing thunderstorm, and a campsite with a bar, day one was the inevitable blur. I stumbled through the woods at the edge of the site, tripping over the art works, suddenly discovering a disco in a clearing. Camille O’Sullivan was playing somewhere in the main area, lightning was strafing the night sky and performance poets were bellowing from the poetry tent. Accompanied only by a shaky internet connection and the nagging tiredness from twenty four hours on the bus, I slipped down into the crowd.

Both Theatre 503 and Nabokov bring their urban anxiety into this lovely rural setting. 503's Urban Sprwal is a series of short plays, themed by London Underground stations and including a typically nasty Mark Ravenhill mini about medical experiments on healthy children. Nabokov cranked up the unease with Is Everyone Okay? - all dubious lusts, tainted masculinity, and unhealthy desire contested to disturb and undermine the suited facade of city life.

Drywrite have a series of short plays- a theme emerging here, as the Festival set-up encourages fast turnover and direct action- that are essentially choreographed fights. Hyped as a meditation on stage violence, they are really brief emotional dramas with a bit of scrap at the end, with the audience encouraged to bet on the outcome. Most moving when they deal with personal matters, they are trying to draw a connection between sport and art, and subverting the idea of drama as somehow more refined in its violence.

The next afternoon offers the bizarre sight of Desmond O’Connor tempering his filthy ukulele numbers to a family audience. A consummate professional, he somehow made 'Cheap Shite White Wine' acceptable to the crowd, before being joined by burlesque agitatator Fancy Chance in what might rank as the most inappropriate kids’ line-up ever. Fortunately, they stick to tongue twisters, Chance keeps her clothes on and Des doesn’t swear... much.

Later in the evening, Chance appears in a Star Trek uniform and performs a funky striptease that is mistaken by some members of the audience for an un-ironic, if slightly bizarre, erotic show. Even as part of an adult cabaret, she stands out as charismatic and unusual, plying a thin line between performance art and burlesque. O’ Connor, despite being denuded of his best material (both 'Jizz Mopper' and 'Motherfucker' probably wouldn’t work for a family crowd) he keeps his smile and hosts immaculately.

The Festival atmosphere ought to be ideal for cabaret- short acts, audience participation, broad humour, yet it doesn’t quite work. It might be the boorish shouts from some of the audience, or the impossibility of glamour in the rain and mud, but the acts feel sometimes dislocated. Miss Behave, thanks to her bullish attitude and strong rapport with the crows, is a forceful compere, but there is something amiss. Both theatre and cabaret tents are adapting to the format, and Latitude offers them new audiences: at times, it still feels like a battle.