The premise of the thing is simple. Two performers in clown makeup ask each other questions, from a list of allegedly around 2,000. This list is a major prop: it looks increasingly ragged, as befitting a show that has been run in one form or another since 1996. (The performers remarked on this during the performance.) The stage is surrounded by lightbulbs. They take turns: one asks, one answers. The questions run all over the place: do you imagine you’ll live to be eighty? Why did you become a prostitute? How big is your house? Is your cunt tight? (This asked to a male performer, this evening.) Whorls of stories, of no particular veracity, emerge from the answers: of being happy about their genetic prospects for long life, but sad about what their lifestyle might do to it; of meeting a stranger on the plane the previous night, and having slept with them. Patterns emerge: Etchells, for example, kept saying little kitty cat in a particular intonation, stretching this out across questions. Performers keep asking each other why they’re lying, again to no particular effect. Many of the questions involve university: Etchells talks about what he learned there; the other performers, mostly, claim not to have learned anything. I left my pen behind, and wish I’d taken better notes—but I’m not sure what importance these notes of individual moments might have had. The important thing, if anything was important, seemed to be the rhythms: the way the performers settled into a back-and-forth, which they then disrupted; the way the two performer switches that happened during the six hours took on immense significance. For a while the lights failed, and the performers continued while stagehands sorted out the lighting onstage; nothing, particularly, changed. Some cell phones went off. We got older.
The show is well-established: 24-hour versions have been run, and the questions are all published, available for sale from the company’s website even. Etchells himself teaches at Sheffield, and this work is as I understand it duly canonized within discussions of this kind of semi-theatre, semi-performance-art.
It’s almost required if you’re a cleverboots writing about this sort of thing that you mention things around the edges of the performance. For me this meant noticing how your attention also switches to the other audience members. In part this was because, this evening, someone who had not figured out how to turn the beep noise on her DSLR off took questions, approximately every ten seconds, for almost the entirety of the six hours. If I hadn’t been sure she was with the performance I might have hissed something at her; in retrospect this felt as much a part of the performance as anything else. People entering and exiting drew everyone’s attention from the performers; we then drifted back to the performers. They didn’t seem to want to be there, but they didn’t seem not to, either. I was reminded of Beckett: it would pass the time, and it did. It felt like the saddest parts of living in provincial England, in Lemaington Spa: like the sun was dying, and I might just lie down in a field and die--but first a hangover and some thoughts about sex.
