London Word Festival Guest Review: The Good Library

London Word Festival: The Goodbye Library

Produced by Emmy the Great and Jack Underwood

The Nave, April 2011

Review by Kathryn Johnson

This was a show for librophiliacs everywhere, and if you’re not in a library now or otherwise in reach of a dictionary – that means lovers of libraries. These people don’t just see their local library as a useful place to find free information; they need a regular library fix, feel at peace as they walk through the door, relish the genre-bending joys of finding, say, Men from Mars, Women are from Venus shelved next to the Qu’ran and spend a large proportion of their disposable income on overdue book fines. I confess to being one of them and it was obvious as the audience crammed into the Nave on Thursday night, clutching secondhand books to contribute to an impromptu library collection, that I wasn’t alone.

This amount of sympathy and like-mindedness in the crowd was lucky for the producers, poet Jack Underwood and musician Emmy the Great, who presented us with a cabaret style show that was entertaining and unpredictable but so shambolic it actually broke down from time to time as the cast stumbled around looking for lost props, asking each other what was coming next. To be fair, they laid their cards on the table at the start and warned us that the show would share the ramshackle charm and eclecticism of the library collections that inspired it. It was a celebration of libraries and an elegy to those facing closure due to government funding cuts (cue: hissing and boo-ing). The acts, which included music, poetry, comedy and readings, were titled as library categories from ‘Large Print’ to ‘Travel’ and ‘Business’.

This hit and miss approach produced some genuine hits. I enjoyed the improvisatory rhythms, punchy energy and humour of Jack Underwood’s poems and giggled at comedian Miriam Elia’s rendering of the diary of a French existentialist hamster and anti p.c. child’s guide to STDs (cheekily sneaked in under ‘Parenting’). Things came unstuck during the disproportionately long ‘Mind, Body and Soul’ section – perhaps inevitably – in which Emmy the Great played four songs inspired by weird, and possibly wonderful, books with titles such as Jesus Lived in India. Given such mad and creative source material the songs were disappointingly anodyne and cautious in style, but there was clearly a fan base in the audience who kept the positive vibes up. In the second half, after a yawningly long interval, there were readings by Nikesh Shukla and Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine, who both injected a welcome shot of professionalism and confidence into the proceedings. Unfortunately, Joe Dunthorne’s well crafted, confessional story of working in Australia as a teenage telephone salesman bordering on con-man, was followed by a so-called ‘Literary Criticism’ session which consisted of uninspired clichés and flopped for about three minutes until cast sidled off in embarrassment. At moments like this, the ‘ramshackle charm’ gambit started to seems a thin excuse for a large amount of faffing and fluffing that should have been ironed out in rehearsal. Maybe, like the library system, this show just needed a bit of pruning in order to really flower.