Theatre review: The Last Days Of Jack Sheppard

Published on Saturday 1 August 2009 15:37

The Last Days Of Jack Sheppard CCA, Glasgow

THE nation has been economically wrecked by financial speculation and compromised by the corruption of self-serving politicians. A web of credit agreements and financial instruments has come messily undone. Ordinary people seek to recover from a spectacular economic crash created by the machinations of a rich elite. Disenchanted with the age of greed, they become obsessed by celebrity, crime and scandal.

Welcome not to 2009, but London in the 1720s after the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. At the heart of all this painful chaos is the legendary figure of Jack Sheppard, an apprentice turned thief whose notorious prison escapes have made him a folk hero for a nation that has had enough.

When The Last Days Of Jack Sheppard, a film installation by artists Anja Kirschner and David Panos, opens at Glasgow's CCA on Saturday, the echoes between past and present will not be accidental. When the co-production between CCA and London's Chisenhale Gallery first opened down south, one critic dubbed it "almost too timely to be true".

Part costume drama, part avant-garde performance, part documentary, The Last Days Of Jack Sheppard seems apt indeed. But beneath the obvious context also runs another tale, about how we self-consciously craft dramatic narratives from messy lives, about how fame operates and about the birth of the modern machinery of celebrity: the novel, the newspaper and the scandal sheet.

The fragmented script focuses on the efforts of the novelist Daniel Defoe to shape Sheppard's story for print. An accompanying display of archival material will demonstrate the sheer volume of myth-making about a man who inspired countless fictional outlaws from The Beggar's Opera's Macheath to Hogarth's Tom Idle. "Sheppard," says McKee "was Jesse James's favourite outlaw."

This is not the first time Kirschner and Panos (she's German, he's Greek, they both live and work in London) have dissected the mores of their adopted city. They've used the techniques of TV soap to probe urban regeneration in Docklands and Hackney. This is their most significant work to date and it is also being portrayed as the rebirth of a venue that has been both lauded and troubled in recent years.

The beneficiary of a massive lottery refit in 2001, CCA drifted without clear artistic purpose or soul until the close of 2005, when it emerged it was undergoing an economic meltdown of its own and the venue went briefly dark. McKee, who was appointed interim director in January 2006, has spent three years reshaping the organisation.

He is frank about the need for change. "Like a lot of lottery buildings we had business plans that tried to operate in a really old-fashioned way. The world had changed around us." He says the new model of working is "open source", the latest holy grail in arts administrations that are trying to appeal to audiences used to mass participation technology such as Facebook and Wikipedia.

Since 2006 CCA has increasingly opened its doors to grassroots organisations and outside enthusiasts like the music promoters Nuts and Seeds or film organisations like Camcorder Guerillas and The Magic Lantern. "In the YouTube age people no longer want to be curated at, they want to do it themselves."

McKee hopes this film about the recession will mark the organisation's own turning point. "The way we see it we had our own recession three years ago and in a sense we've had to work our way through it. We're lean and we're prepared."

The Last Days Of Jack Sheppard, 8 August to 26 September, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, until 26 September