Pity

-->

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.

–

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.

Mechanimal

There’s a man onstage and he’s pretending to be a bird. He’s trying to fly and he’s attempting birdsong and he’s migrating to the city. He’s throwing feathers in the air and jumping off a box. He’s cooing and bouncing around the stage.

There is always a weird moment in the theatre at the Fringe when you say to yourself “is this a joke?” Often it isn’t and you’ll have to find some way to muster a sincere response to something that you have found quite moronic, which is hard but can sometimes be quite rewarding – there are plenty of shows that have started with my “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” that have ended up under my skin – and while I’m convinced that Mechanimal was aware of its silliness –because a bearded man pretending to be a bird is funny and all the stoney-faced audience members in Zoo needed a reminder of that, in my opinion – once I moved past that silliness  the show opened up for me.

It appeared to me to be about trying to decentre the human within the narrative. There was a story about researchers on birds who study their navigation via the stars and their measuring and recording their birdsongs and noticing the ways in which human interventions in the environment like cities and artificial light have damaged the birds’ natural capacities. But the piece did a neat trick of centring not on the researcher, but the birds – and metatheatrically putting the audience in the position of the researchers and the performer, or the performer attempting-to-be-bird, in the position of the bird (or maybe the human who desires to be more birdlike). I don’t know really. It seems to me a lot more complicated the further I get from it.

But I think what I felt really satisfied by was that I seemed to, in a really fascinating trick, have learned loads. Without having a boring scene where two people talk about birds and their flight-patterns, the piece made me genuinely interested in the environmental impact on birds and informed me, while offering some really complex theatrical tricks.

I liked it a lot.

–
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.