WOT?  NO FISH!!

A Review by Joe Sinclair

"Try a little chrain with that"

I’m so grateful to daughter Caroline for taking me to see Wot? No Fish! At the Battersea Arts Centre.  It was a one-man show not to be missed.  The one man was Danny Braverman and it was less a Braverman performance than a bravura performance that left the audience – or at least this member of it – enthralled and laughing, with a few tears mixed in.

You might think it impossible to build a one-hour-plus show on a series of cartoon pictures drawn on the back of small wage packets.  But this is precisely what Danny did – first at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013, and now being shown around the UK and – hopefully – further afield.

From the very start, when Danny Braverman appeared on stage, spoke about Whitechapel and the Royal London Hospital (where I myself had been born), passed around fish balls and chrain⁽¹⁾ to the audience, I had an immediate sense of rapport.  And then he introduced the story of his great uncle, Abraham (Ab) Solomons, who had lived in Dalston and upon whose death a shoe box of ephemera had passed to his son Jeff, thence to Jeff’s cousin Danny Braverman.

Upon examination the box was found to contain hundreds of cartoons drawn by Ab on the back of his wage packets, starting in 1926 with the first very simple sketch he had made for his new wife Celie.  From that point the sketches grew more ambitious and provided a real piece of social history as they covered family joys and arguments (broyguses – as Danny described them in Yiddish), births and celebrations, holidays (usually in the rain) on the south Essex coast, the menace of Hitlerism, the war and the blitz in London, marital disharmony and recovery, and Ab’s retirement.  After his retirement, the wage packets ceased, and he bought packets of similar sized card from Smith’s.  Thereafter the cartoons became more extravagant, including the use of colour, until the death of Celie (a few years before Ab’s own), whereupon his artistic efforts ceased entirely.

It was not merely a family history in graphic form, it was also a history of an entire culture and society that moved, not in a straight chronological line, nor in a circle (i.e. what goes around, comes around) but – as Braverman put it – in a spiral fashion.  Or, as was suggested to him: as a helix.

Danny himself, with his family, moved from the East End to London’s more up-market north-western districts of Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb.  Decades later, Danny Braverman has moved back to Dalston – now much more trendy and expensive – only to be rebuked by his mother: “It took us three generations to move from the East End to the “promised land” and it’s taken you less than a generation to move us back again!”

The incredible coincidence is that the rather splendid apartment that Danny and his partner ultimately moved into in Dalston is in the same house that Ab and Celie occupied in those years from 1926 onwards!  It defies belief!

After the performance I spoke to Danny and said “What a pity, considering it starts with a birth at Whitechapel’s Royal London Hospital, that you are not showing it at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, or elsewhere in the East End.  He agreed with me.