GOB SQUAD'S KITCHEN. To 26 July.
London.
GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN
(You’ve Never Had It So Good)
devised by Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will.
Soho Theatre To 26 July 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 1hr 30min No interval.
TICKETS: 020 7478 0100.
www.sohotheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 July.
Inventive hour-and-a-half of people being famous for fifteen minutes.
Gob Squadder Bastian Trost is famous in Germany but not in Nottingham. Curious, as the Squad has bases in the English Midlands and Germany.
At least, he says he’s only famous in Germany. Or rather, ‘he’ says so. Except, it’s not ‘him’ it’s her, speaking for him. Although first she said he (‘he’?) was famous outside Germany too. But that’s because she misheard. Though she didn’t mishear Bastian, who was sitting in her front-row seat watching her on screen. It's part of this piece's reflections on spontaneity and art, creation and recreation, and the relations between performance, performer (redefined in the 1960s) and audience.
Andy Warhol's declaration everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes attains some truth for several Soho audience members. They become screen stars, for this live Gob Squad performance is projected almost entirely on a 3-panel screen.
The panels look back to Warhol’s Sleep, Kitchen and the many screen-tests he gave friends, black-and-white video recreating a period atmosphere.
The central panel recalls the kitchen of Warhol’s 1965 plotless, improvised film. There’s Sharon Smith, though she could be Edie Sedgwick; and a screen-tested audience member is told to be a superstar, the outcome Warhol intended for Sedgwick.
Gob Squad’s Kitchen also uses Norman Mailer’s paean to Warhol’s original as defining, for people a century hence, what it meant to be alive in sixty-five. This comes at what the Squad, with apparently un-Warholian interest in structure, call the heart of their work, a riotous party-piece. The sense of Warhol’s delight in spontaneity, however chaotic, is carefully reproduced here, though the hesitations, arguments and spontaneities are under control, creating, with reminders of the then/now gap, a dialogue between the orchestrated and the aleatoric.
There’s an inevitable drop in energy as the performers are gradually replaced behind the screen by audience members. Inevitably, this brings laughs that relate to their identity as audience-members and a lower, discontinuous energy. And responses to instructions from an earpiece are nothing like personal responses to a voice in the head. Still, it all has a freshness many carefully executed productions might envy.
Cast: Sharon Smith, Laura Tonke, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost
and members of the audience.
Sound: Jeff McGrory.
Video: Miles Chalcraft.
Design assistant: Chasper Bertschinger.
2008-07-22 12:28:34