Brutalist Premolition: A Stage Play

'Brutalist Premolition: A Stage Play' was commissioned by Media Art Bath (MAB) with funding from the Henry Moore Foundation. It was presented in a solo context at Arnolfini Bristol on 4 November 2008 as a performance incorporating installation and video projection.

The original film 'Brutalist Premolition' is set within an apartment on the sprawling Robin Hood Gardens Estate in East London, a key example of post-war New Brutalist architecture intended as a utopian form of large-scale social housing (designed by Alison and Peter Smithson), housing a predominantly Muslim Bengali community. The film explores multiple layers of performance from the highly professionalised to the everyday reality of a family (long term residents on the estate). The film sees the introduction of two asian actors from the British ‘soap’ series EastEnders into the family unit, they perform intensive melodramatic script fragments from their past acting repertoire. In effect, the hyper-professionalism of the actors is seen against the relatively banal underplaying of the family. As the work progresses the actors presence takes over the apartment as the family significantly fall into background extras.

The single-screen video installation was first shown at the ICA, London. Using the precise dimensions of the family's apartment to both replicate and implicate the space in which the filming and subsequently the stage play takes place.

The stage play sees the same two EastEnders actors incorporated into the installation, a now theatricalised version of its origin. Their script and actions were reconfigurations of the dialogue from both production of and the final film.

A limited edition booklet 'Brutalist Premolition' was published to coincide with the commission, which included an essay on the work by Bridget Crone.