5 Encounters On A Site Called Craigslist

Here are some things to know about me before we begin:

I know Sam, the maker who made this show.

I’ve seen this work at various stages.

I have an interest in making Sam happy.

I really liked this show.

And I am really proud of my friend.

And those three things are, I believe, coincidental but also necessarily related.

So, that’s worth bearing in mind.

My perfect day would be by the seaside eating trifle with everyone I know. Oh, and there would be dancing.

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This show took my breath away.

It is stunningly small and simple. Sam is going to tell you the story of five sexual encounters he had with five different strangers, all men, on a site called Craigslist. That’s it. It’s all true and it’s all going to be told with a breathtakingly straightforward honesty.

Over these stories, volunteers from the audience “play” the parts of the men. Here “play” doesn’t mean “act” it means “be”. Because although the story “out there in the past” is the site of the narrative, it is also in the room.

As the encounters are described in detail by Sam, the audience member synthesizes some part of what these experiences might mean. (synthesize is too clear but it’s as close as I can get – GOD THIS SHOW IS SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT), When the first encounter is described, they make sound effects through a microphone, instructed by Sam, that aren’t really quite what is happening in the story, but sort of fit in your mind anyway, and build pictures of another room somewhere else where the sound of a peeling carrot really does sound like giving a blowjob.

In this way, these moments become messy and unclear: the relation between the theatrical action and the narrative action distort one another. This form is innovative and playful and exciting. It’s part Barrel Organ part Tim Crouch part… Well, there’s a lot of stuff here. But it’s also completely its own thing.

On top of this, Sam tries to get to know his audience. Not like in other shows you’ve seen – like in stand-up where they have a rehearsed line for every job someone says they have – in this show Sam just talks to audience members and they talk to him. And so a show about his time on Craigslist trying to make connections with strangers is played out in the form – a show where Sam meets strangers in the audience and tries to find ways to explain himself to them as openly and transparently and meaningfully as possible – to attempt to lay himself bare.

And in its creation of its own semiotics – one that is noisy and obfuscatory but never cruel or exclusive (Sam takes great pains to make us aware there is nothing to miss, nothing we are going to get wrong: there is no grand point we are supposed to reach where the show will unlock itself: you know how it is working, you can see all the strings but this process is the point of the show) – it matches its form to its content in a way that sort of takes your breath away.

This is a piece which at its heart is searching for a way out of the “ideology of communicational transparency” which Lyotard describes as an aberrant fallacy. It’s engaging with questions about how we know each other, why what we know might or might not matter, and how emotional intimacy is as much an act of wilful blindness to falsehoods as casual sex acts might be.

And when one thinks about what it takes to make a show like this one is bruised emotionally and theoretically. Think for a moment about the openness of that subject-matter: having sex with strangers is not something we talk about that much. Men who call themselves straight having sex with men is not something we talk about that much. People talking about their complicated sexualities is not something we talk about that much. People talking about how we hide bits of ourselves from those who know us best is not something we talk about. We just don’t have a language for it that isn’t censorious or fetishistic. This show finds new languages for the incommunicable stuff we can’t and won’t communicate.

And the languages resonate and reveal themselves into something magnetic and raw and cogent and heartfelt. You’ll want to give Sam a hug after. And everyone in the room.  And yourself.

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Things I was thinking about afterwards:

I hope Sam is ok.

I hope the audience are ok.

I hope I’m ok.

Balloons are cool.

I’ve seen three shows in which people take their clothes off just today.

I don’t think I want to go on Craigslist any time soon.

The show’s ambitions being small, its resonance within the world is also necessarily small.

I wonder how it might relate to bigger stories and issues.

I can’t wait to see what’s next.

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5 Encounters On A Site Called Craigslist is by YESYESNONOTHEATRE and is on at Zoo Monkey House (they *need* to change that name) until the end of the month.
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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.

The Secret Life of Humans

There’s a lot to really admire about Secret Life of Humans – the main one being that it is implausibly good-looking for an Edinburgh show and that it contains BIG ideas about BIG stuff. In a Fringe format ambition is often not rewarded – the programme is full of shows tackling a particular thing or event – sometimes really well, often very very badly – essentially, an hour ain’t long, so trying to get at the universal through the specific means that even if you fail, the specific has at least been approached and dealt with. But this show doesn’t do that.

This show, directed by David Byrne and made by New Diorama (there's my bias right there) attempts to work through the arc of human progress. All of it. Thinking about how that progress is to be measured and how we deal with the violent results of all that progressing (that might or might not be happening in a straight line or a downward spiral).

So, there’s big stuff going on but you wouldn’t know it to see the audience. People ho-ing and humming out of the theatre at the end looking engaged and pretty pleased. I liked that it catered to a wide age-range – something shows with stuff to say don’t do all that well in Edinburgh – and that it found a neat impressionistic language through which to tell its story. People walked on walls in the past – properly walked on the actual proper walls, like they were just so distinctly not of this period that they couldn’t even fit on the floor – it made a point viscerally but it also just made me really happy and I gasped and so did the bloke next to me.

It’s form is, I guess, fairly ordinary: the grandfather Jacob Bronowski is an important figure with a thesis on sociology and his grandson goes on a date with an inquisitive sociologist  *clunk* – but it works to get you into the story double-quick (and every playwright people laud has done that – I’m looking at you effin Constellations with your quantum physicist and beekeeper lovestory) and the first half is really sprightly and sweet and interesting and this then earns the second-half where the proper meat of the thing are but where you have still got enough interesting stuff to look at that if you’re not feeling like listening that carefully you can still just admire how nice a big chalkboard looks when Bertrand Russell’s face is talking on it.

There aren’t enough gestures towards complicating the relationship between the storytelling and its content, I guess. The grandson’s actual plot (the date is less datey than he at first thinks) doesn’t seem to have that much to say to the wider story and I wonder whether there’s something interesting about how generations past, so concerned with grand visions of humanity, cannot possibly accord with the present postmordern condition, which disbelieves in totalising in favour of the idea of the now and the here and, well, the specific.

But it speaks volumes that I came out thinking about this stuff in a show that ran for an hour and started with a quite funny tinder date. I liked it a lot.

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The Secret Life of Humans is at Pleasance Two for the whole month and then is coming to The New Diorama to do some more brilliance next year.

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A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.