Pity

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I loved Pity. I loved it an inexpressible amount and though I’m about to do some expressing, it will come nowhere near to expressing how wonderful I found it.

This is a piece of theatre that should not exist – it should have been dramaturged out of existence, it should have been remoulded into a more shapely structure, it should be calmer and cooler, it should have a necessary scene explaining how we should feel or what we should do, it should do more, it should be shorter, it should be cheaper, it should be simpler and more streamlined, it shout be pithy and about something, it should be quieter, it should be on somewhere else, somewhere smaller, somewhere less exposed, somewhere on the fringes.

But it’s downstairs at the Court. And it’s fucking nuts.

It starts in a town with a bunch of gags about it being basically the kind of small shithole in which Britain excels itself, to which a woman has moved, annoying her father no end. Her father is then struck by a big comic-book lightning bolt and dies and it only gets stranger from there. A department store explodes. The prime minister sings about sandwiches. The town descends into chaos and chaos reigns in manic, Technicolor strobe-lit techno.

Every time you think, I’ve had enough, the show gives you more ­­– it twists every direction you think it would be too far to twist. It is gift after gift, a surfeit of visual and auditory gifts. There’s far too much, a pile of objects onstage spilling out, collapsing onto itself, repeating and bursting at the seams until it makes you hanker after somewhere else, some other place, some other destination, an interval, something.

There’s a phrase people talk about with scenes where they “circle the drain”, meaning that they aren’t going forward they are just sort of going on and on and don’t know how to finish. I think the critical pushback from this play is that kind of response: “if only it had been a bit less itself”. But so many plays are less themselves and are fucking tedious as fuck. Whereas this has a generosity and an actual courage that it seems to me is so rare in contemporary theatre outside the Fringes.

Sam Pritchard is a miracle. As is Chloe Lamford. As is Rory Mullarkey. It’s a miraculous production. Consistently surpassing itself and just willing you to have the inevitable response that it is itself critiquing. The play is about the world as a mess and a culture of lunacy and repetition, of repetition and mimetic culture. Where every object is fungible, every response codifiable, every instinct on a visual and simultaneous plane, never corresponding to the past nor the future, always in the present.

There is an extraordinary moment towards the end of the play where a postal worker has a monologue about her family being dead but continuing to deliver the post every day, without fail, to nobody. It is beautiful and harrowing and sincere. It is some of the finest writing I’ve ever seen in the theatre. I cannot believe that people think that someone who wrote this monologue did not know what they were doing in the rest of the play, did not anticipate and desire your response to be “enough, already”.

The show activates for an audience the bits of their brains that want a meme and use it to create a piece of theatre that deconstructs that desire and its devastating impact on our world. This is a paean to human idiocy: a death-march to a culture that thinks itself invincible because it has been decaying for so long.

It made my year.

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