Moderation

Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American west (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of a present day city increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations and private interests.

Set in the flooded ruins of a dystopian East London, POLLY II: PLAN FOR A REVOLUTION IN DOCKLANDS draws on references to soap opera, science fiction, satire and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’. It alludes to Polly, 1728, John Gay’s censored sequel to the popular Beggar’s Opera, 1727, which resurrected the character of the robber Macheath in the disguise of the African pirate captain Morano, scheming to take revenge on a colony in the West Indies, and is populated by many of the characters made popular by Gay and Brecht. The film features the naïve and incorruptible Polly, the vengeful whore Jenny Diver, and the treacherous and greedy Peachum – fencer, thief-taker and king of the beggars – and portrays them surviving in a lawless zone, set to be redeveloped into luxury waterside living, as a comment on the social struggles against gentrification and privatisation.

Shifting between documentary, historical reconstruction and melodrama, The Empty Plan interrogates the relationship between theory and practice in the theatre of Bertolt Brecht.

Set in the wake of Britain’s first financial crisis, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and based on the inferred prison encounters between the thief Jack Sheppard and the writer Daniel Defoe, this critical costume drama traces connections between fiction, speculation and aesthetics.