Negative reviews strike me as pointless,
and damning with faint praise as futile.
My ideal reviewer is a matchmaker of
sorts, a yenta (not a pander) who helps a
show find its audience and an audience find its show. Maybe it’s not a match
made in heaven, not entirely free of challenges and failures, but it’s
rewarding for both in the end. The audience finds the challenge engaging: not
so easy that it bores nor so difficult that it alienates. The company finds an
audience that welcomes the challenge and will come back for more. The result,
if not true love, might be Flow. Everybody wins.
Which brings me to GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN’s
Jennifer Pick and Lucy McCormick offering to “open up and let [me] in, right
in” to an “evening with conversations, songs…shit like that”. Not the most
auspicious invitation, a bit bathetic, but let’s keep an open mind.
From the outset we don’t hit it off. Two
youngish women in tawdry dress and hair extensions wander before a bank of
superfluous tech on an undressed stage, fitfully burbling banalities and
playing air violin to miscellaneous show tunes. I come smack up against my
expectation that a performer should try to win my trust, try convince me early
on that she knows what she’s doing. The pair already have shit daubed on them.
My brain, responding at some pointlessly visceral level, duly stops looking for
subtleties and stuffs the show into the pigeonhole of painful parodies of
mainstream entertainment, post millennium. Blunt. I feel blunted. That was
quick.
From then on, I fail miserably to silence
my inner critic, a hectoring bastard at the best of times. I just can’t relax and have a
laugh at Number 1's fierce, layered parodies. My bad. By the end i’m just
feeling cranky and well, stingy.
The problem with parody is that the
audience needs to be intimate with the work, form or practice being parodied.
The more references we can catch, the more the piece coheres and resonates with
us. If we fail, we’re left feeling excluded by an in-joke. At a loss for a
frame of reference, we probably just end up comparing it to work that did
manage to engage us - better work as far as we're concerned. Everybody
loses.
My problem is that not only am I not sure
what they’re making fun of, I’m not at all convinced that they know either.
They certainly cast a wide net: mass culture, musicals, reality TV, theatre,
“performance art”, “failed art”, each other, themselves, us, me. The one
aesthetic rule at work seems to be "go further, push till it breaks."
Apparently,
everything
is one big fail.
The way performance art generally escapes
the traps of mainstream narrative - the constant chasing after what will happen
in the end, or at least what will happen next -
is to force us to ask “What’s happening now?” It’s a ploy that was
mainstreamed years ago by TV shows like 24 and Lost.
OK, I’ll bite. I’ll just give them my
trust anyways and ask: if they're not just trying tease a response out of me
with a cattle prod, what are they doing?
Surely it’s not irony all the way
down: one can only reassure oneself that “that’s the point!” so
often before it all starts seeming pointless again. You can only undermine and
undercut so much, can’t you?
Of course their target isn’t mass
culture. After decades of exploring ever cheaper and easier ways to push our
most basic buttons, mass culture is reduced to parodying itself, it doesn’t
need performance art’s help. From TV to
the West End, from productivity to food, it’s all porn now and we all know it.
As for just making fun of us, I don’t for
a second believe that Jen and Lucy are that mean spirited. They may not be
letting me in, may be refusing to give me my expected dose of theatrical
intimacy and vulnerability porn, but they’re nowhere near stupid and mean, for
all the show of being stupid and mean.
Maybe they’re making fun of themselves by
questioning an artistic process that has invaded their homes and their lives,
leaving its mess everywhere, making it impossible to connect after all. Maybe
they’re really wishing private was private, fuck off was fuck off.
I can’t help searching for answers in
subtleties, hoping for something that can actually resonate, not just clang
around my brain and gut. Of course expecting subtlety from a company whose very
name screams GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN in all caps risks missing the point.
Maybe they’re telling me that subtlety is
overrated. I no doubt overrate it; I love smugly patting myself on the back for
catching a subtle detail or two.
As for the shit…
I’ve changed (...quick estimate)1812
nappies in the last 2.5 years; and as far as I’m concerned 1972 was the last time
anyone said anything funny or interesting about shit on stage. “Literally
eating shit!” (while of course not literally eating shit) is hardly
subtle. If anything, it’s way too on the nose.
Hmmm.
Come to think of it (which took a while)
an awful lot of the details of this show are way, way too on the nose.
The pretentious address of the title, the weird literal aptness of using “Send
In the Clowns” (lyrics here)
and “Tell Me It’s not True” (the team anthem of cheesy ploy merchants), the
“stools” brought from home, the red door and the mimed window, the bra, the
telling us to fuck off by saying “Fuck Off” a hundred times or just leaving the
stage, and of course the shit that’s literally shit, only not really, all of it
hilariously too on the nose.
Finally there’s the show’s failure
itself; and it does fail, right on the nose. It’s not even just looking to
fail, not just chasing the fading fashion for shows that holler “Look at my
glorious failure! Isn’t it fab!”, it’s actually daring to fail.
Maybe the subtlety was under my nose all
the time.
I kind of like the uncertainty of all
these maybes, it’s been a while since a show has left me floundering this
badly. Good. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. I might find a way to let my
guard down. Well, maybe next year.
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