“Romeo and Juliet [at the Young Vic] was all in the air, Woyzeck [at the Barbican] was in the water and this is on the walls.”Nine months on and the resulting show combines Farr’s literary passion with Gardarsson’s gravity-defying derring-do, set to a mercurial, melodic score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (of the Bad Seeds). At an athletic, broad-shouldered 6ft 2in with an unruly mop of dark brown hair, the former gymnast towers over David Farr, his co-director and the artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, in west London, who cuts a more diminutive and precise figure, dressed in a flowery shirt, jeans and baseball boots. “I’m not in love with her,” yelps Lil’ Chris defiantly on the angular “Is She Ready?”. As for “Get Delirious”, it bears a resemblance to Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” and Devo’s “Girl U Want”, which would be mighty reference points if Lil’ Chris had actually heard of them.He wipes sweat from his brow, essays a puerile sneer and I realise he’s one of those kids who think punk rock was about the posturing of Sid Vicious rather than the real anger of John Lydon. It sounds easy enough, but the challenge lies in the fact that said bed and chair are not on the floor but are nailed to the back wall of the set and hang a vertiginous seven metres above the stage.
Gardarsson, co-founder of Iceland’s Vesturport theatre company, is no stranger to such challenges, having played Romeo on a trapeze, indulged in aerial gymnastics in Nights at the Circus and directed a Woyzeck that featured bungee ropes and scenes played out in an enormous glass water tank.
But playing Gregor Samsa, the anti-hero of Kafka’s novella who wakes one day to discover that he has transformed into a “monstrous insect”, is his most physical role yet: “I feel like I’ve been hit by a train,” he says.As lunch break is called, Gardarsson unstraps his back support and whips off his Boreal climbing shoes to reveal feet covered in plasters. “The next one is a slow one for all the ladies,” announces the would-be teenage rebel, without the irony of Darkness frontman, Justin Hawkins who went to the same school as Hardman. In fact, all “I’ve Been Had” does is conjure up the ghosts of early Eighties acts Pat Benatar, Hazel O’Connor and The Motels. Mind you, The Strokes managed to appropriate and update The Cars’ sound for the new millennium and Avril Lavigne cleaned up with a pretty similar style.Thankfully, Lil’ Chris keeps his set short and sweet, only playing nine of the 12 songs from his debut album (due out next year on RCA). There is no encore but the ironic scene-makers at the back and the teenage girls at the front seem pleased enough I put Lil’ Chris down for detention and extra homework.. With one week of rehearsals left before Metamorphosis opens, its leading man, Gisli Orn Gardarsson, has hit a snag – he has to find a way to get from his bed to his chair without turning his back on the audience.
Like The Runaways, Chris Hardman goes for a punk-pop sound, which proves highly infectious to an audience of young, screaming fans who should be at home on a school night and probably only know The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” because John Peel’s favourite single was covered by Busted. “Me and My Life” sounds like Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” with the riff from the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” thrown in by guitarist Neil Jones. Lil’ Chris is nearing 16 but looks 12 as he jumps on stage in front of his four-piece group and launches into “Is There Anybody out There? (Kickin’ Off)”, the song he was forever trying to teach his schoolmates on TV.
He’s wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt and a khaki and white cap and is a hyperactive performer, jumping up and down and climbing on the monitors. “Because young meteors burn out,” says Tetzlaff.Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape (01728 6871 10), 30 September; Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (08703 800 400), 1 October. The story of pop is littered with teenagers who burnt brightly then disappeared or struggled to make the transition to adulthood: Musical Youth, but also Hanson and The Runaways, the proto-punk girl band put together by svengali Kim Fowley in 1976. Fowley co-wrote a few songs with Kiss and might have been impressed by Lil’ Chris, the cap-wearing kid from Lowestoft who became the focus of the second series of the Channel 4 show Rockschool. At 18, he entered his first big competition and came second, “but that didn’t change anything My career developed gently.
There was no point when it kicked off like crazy”.Since then, he has been steadily performing and recording, and has now come round to rerecording his beloved Bach Sonatas. How will the new recording differ from the one he did 12 years ago? “Wilder and freer, I hope.”He attracts students like the Pied Piper when he tours – some follow him around the world – and what he’s doing this weekend is also, in its way, didactic: as mentor to the Borletti-Buitoni Trust’s latest budding stars, he’s heading them in concerts in Suffolk and London This scheme goes for the slow burn, too. “I’m a very good sight-reader, so my teachers were too easily satisfied. The most practice I ever did was just two hours a day.”Things changed when he went to L?k conservatoire, and fell into the hands of a professor who pushed him to the limit. It was partly his immaculately pure tone, partly the daring that intermittently broke through his modest fa?e, and particularly the off-the- wall cadenza he gave to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto Whence that?
“I played it first when I was 15,” he says. “It’s the only one by Beethoven we have, so it gives the clearest impression as to what his improvisation was like. He just went crazy, and I felt that if he allowed himself to do that, maybe we should follow suit.’
Born 40 years ago into a musical family in Hamburg, Tetzlaff says that, while he always assumed he would become a professional, he didn’t take it seriously until he was 14.
As the youngest label to have five chart hits to its name, Transgressive have an impressive track record which has pricked the ears of the majors. Both label bosses have been headhunted for top A&R jobs, but have refused the lure of fat salaries.. Micah P Hinson
On tour 2-8 October. Artist: Ty
Title: Closer. The violinist Christian Tetzlaff has been around for a long while, but it was only when he played a Prom in August that we British clocked him.
