I know that sometimes experiments simply can go wrong and that audiences may remain unresponsive. I am more than ready to see past those weaknesses if there is a brave idea at the heart of the performance. But Wish Experience’s The Awesome Show, however, had a disconcertingly lewd and witless vacuum in the place where its heart should have been. At the Tristan Bates Theatre.
I would like to acknowledge a couple of things before I start in on sharing my thoughts about what was undoubtedly the most uninspired and, for that matter, uninspiring thing I have ever seen performed on a stage. I know that sometimes experiments simply can go wrong, I am aware that performers have bad days from time to time, audiences may remain unresponsive… so what starts out as a piece of theatrical exploration can fall flat. I acknowledge all that and am more than ready to see past those weaknesses if there is a brave idea at the heart of the performance.
The version of Wish Experience’s The Awesome Show I saw, however, had a disconcertingly lewd and witless vacuum in the place where its heart should have been.
There is no real set, only a laundry line spread across the room, and the little paper pendants with mysterious words on them make me hope for an existential-explorative evening. Immersive and participatory theatre is always a risky venture with performers making themselves vulnerable and subjecting themselves to the mercy of the audience. On entering the space, the audience gets handed old pots, pans and spatulas. From the little explanation I get, it might be to cook an egg should I start getting hungry. After some time, everyone seems to settle on banging them together loudly because that’s what you do with kitchen utensils when you’re in a theatre. It’s not because I feel like doing it, but I kind of don’t want to keep the performers hanging and they tell me to make some noise, so I bang my spatula. I get a coloured pen to fill in a pop quiz which consists of random pictures of kittens, human sex organs and atom bombs being projected on a white sheet. I circle numbers on a little sheet of paper, circles which never will be returned to and, in a way, already represent the futility of life. I am being informed that the purpose of all this is to find out what “awesome” means for different people, because apparently “awesomeness” is a fluid concept. Already I am awed by the audaciousness of the experiment and wonder where the promised champagne is.
Admittedly, I had quite a few preconceptions about a show that chooses a name like this and features sparsely clad people presenting cupcakes on their advertising material. The only thing that made me dismiss these preconceived ideas about the show was the fact that this has been initially developed in cooperation with BAC and has been worked on for nine months now. I can only assume that the workshop phase consisted of producer and performers reading every available book on theatre games to each other and patting each other on the back when they managed to sneak in a reference to sex or rainbows.
Basically it’s a succession of trivialities, pointless sketches and little games like throwing cupcakes in baskets or making rainbows with spray bottles. For lack of a better comparison, it was like children’s entertainment on a cruise ship. Surprisingly, there was nothing childlike or wonderlike about The Awesome Show, which from this point onwards I shall refuse calling it that. This show has not grown beyond its scratch performance beginnings and I did not see a glimpse of anything that indicates it ever will.
So, no, I did not feel challenged to question my idea of “awesomeness” nor was I moved to even care about the concept. I shouldn’t be so hard on the show though, because in a way it succeeded in demonstrating to me what my “awesome” is, namely, exactly the opposite of The Awesome Show. Even as a Wednesday evening diversion, the show failed because after twenty minutes I became slightly aggravated by the infantilising tone some of the performers had towards the audience. So the reason this project fails is a combination of both: weak concept and fatigued performers.
But here is the beauty about scratch performances and workshop phases – they constitute a space that should allow for enough room for artists to develop material, to be outrageous, to recognise when an idea has run out of steam, to tweak and sometimes even to fail. It’s part of the artist’s job who goes out to explore: to recognise and acknowledge artistic failure and stagnation. That’s the awesome thing about art that even failure allows for everyone involved to grow and hopefully Wish Experience will find new, more coherent and relevant projects in the future.