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This show is exceptionally difficult to write about. It feels enormous and sticky and tentative and bold and like butting up against someone’s shoulder in the street and you’re never quite sure if you pushed them or they you. 

It’s about advertising (why anything needs to be “about” anything at this stage is beyond me but whatever) and more specifically a Volvo advert that Sam saw as a child and is going to recreate for us. The show is made up of these beautiful, bright, multimedia passages, where Sam will make an “advert” in your mind, building it out of what seem to be these inchoate impressions of someone on holiday, of someone at a party, of someone falling in love.

Then in between these sections, Sam will build a car out of boxes and very DIY stuff onstage with an audience member while talking to them about the feeling of being cool and falling in love. That’s its sort of complex structure, but the mud of the thing feels very different.

I saw the show twice in under a week. Both times it was raining outside and I was slightly damp because Edinburgh is preternaturally damp, even when sunny. And it did this strange thing to me that I think is a hallmark of truly great work which is that it felt like a different show, despite being functionally exactly the same: the words Sam spoke were identical, the video and sound presumably made of the same light and frequencies, but it hit different bits of me and invited different bits of me to work.

THE FIRST TIME

I thought.

I thought about advertising and its structures. I thought about capitalism.
I thought about what I want and why. I thought about synthetic feeling. I thought about sensory overload and anhedonia. I thought about the way a tiny fragile human can seem so very small and their voice so very tiny and the way a haze and some side-lighting can make a mate look like a rockstar. I thought about love. I thought about roughness.

THE SECOND TIME

I felt.

I felt sad: so overwhelmingly sad and lost. I felt cheated out of my very desire and I felt that desire to be both being massaged and eased and encouraged and deconstructed. I felt the insincere structures of seeming seen, in the act of sincerely being seen. I felt the Baudrillard quote that was on the free sheet. I felt simultaneously like this was beautiful and cruel; that it was unfair to build this thing and invite people in and then demonstrate that it’s all smoke and mirrors. I felt a deep, warm affection for my friend Sam and I also felt like my wants were all surface, all preconditioned, that the inchoate, bubbling want is really a simulacrum of the will to consume.

I think it’s a really startling object. I hope more people get the chance to experience it. At times it feels like it is teetering on the point of collapse – even just technically, for a small company with limited means to stretch to something as grandiose and demanding as this is no mean feat.

It will stay with me for a while. 

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