The no-cars part of Camden High Street is like a set for a Wild West movie inspired by psilocybin. Dragons and giant footwear burst from walls above shopfronts. Pop art and tattooists vie for your attention with candy shops and Colonel Sanders, like some parodic, peak Haight-Asbury montage.
It’s all perfectly in keeping with a London neighbourhood where, half a century ago and more, potheads could purchase bongs and mystery herbs of borderline legality without much fear of the constabulary. Maybe they still can.
Being there the other day was quite a trip, and wilder still for the smell of fresh rain on streets lately parched by blazing heat. If you didn’t know better, the foursquare Oxford Arms, which has commanded the junction with Jamestown Road since late Victorian times, might have been a hallucination.
It wasn’t, though the strands of London tradition it pleasingly combines do include a form of mind-expansion. That’s intended as a compliment to the Etcetera Theatre, which has been nestling in its darkened niche upstairs and putting bums on its 42 narrow bench seats since 1986.
Most of those seats were taken for the opening night of Ghosts of West Hollywood, a solo show by Tino Orsini. Many were filled by a party of around a dozen, whose members leaned back or forward as required so that one of them could capture a group selfie. The dark compactness of the scene enhanced the impact of Orsini’s entrance, making him seem vast in his check shirt and dungarees.
The performance, which runs until Sunday, is billed as exploring “the pursuit of an acting career in Hollywood and the personal cost of reinvention”, blending “confessional storytelling with dark humour and theatrical flair”.
Its story starts in Italy, then moves on to reminiscences of a childhood in Fulham that evoked, at least in my subjective and perhaps mistaken imagination, a time when that part of town was not quite as smart as it is now. Encounters with addiction and HIV ensue, along with chasing that LA dream, a return to London and a recovery.
Theatre on this scale feels minutely intimate, with no hiding place for the lone deliverer of 45 or so minutes of self-penned lines, each one of them memorised and rehearsed. To me, watching alone from near the back, that fragility seemed to nurture a kind of solidarity with those who’d picked this entertainment offer for their night out. Each time a quip or wry observation got a laugh it came as relief, as if a tightrope walker had taken and completed a risky step without falling.
At the end, Orsini bowed, acknowledged the slide projectionist in his tiny annex and thanked his audience for its kindness. He also asked it to spread the word about Ghosts of West Hollywood (and so, in my small way, I have).
Then it was back to the Wild West movie set, past the Underground station becalmed by the RMT, a sprint for a Number 59 and the steady journey home, thinking about what a jewel the Etcetera Theatre is and how they don’t have a bus service like London’s in West Hollywood.
John Vane’s London novel, a political satire called Frightgeist, can be purchased here.