German/UK company Gob Squad are nice. They create amazingly welcoming shows and they come across as lovely, open, caring people. Nice people. For many years ‘nice’ has been anathema to progressive artists, a word that encapsulates repressed 1950s manners, subscriber-pleasing blandness and sappy sentimentalism. But in Gob Squad’s hands, niceness, combined with their fierce intelligence and artistic innovation, becomes a razor sharp blade to dissect the manners of avant-gardism itself and carve a new space for a humanistic and utopian artistic vision.
In Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) the company uses the film works of Andy Warhol as a launching pad to dissect notions of history, identity, performance and community. One of the hallmarks of the company is their use of multimedia and this is certainly at the forefront here.
What really amazes in Kitchen is their ability to genuinely interrogate the history and conventions of both film and live performance. Far too often media in performance is shallow, and if resources are devoted to the media content it is usually with the aim of making it look slick. Gob Squad eschew slickness in both their film and their performance; instead, they focus on the real relevance of these different mediums to the themes they are exploring. The result is double the audience satisfaction as the performers effortlessly juggle this vast array of elements and cultural conventions.
And Gob Squad are master jugglers. There is constantly split focus over three screens and the stage, yet each element is given time and space so nothing feels rushed or confused. Audience members participate and each performance is perfect just as it is. The company members lie but all their lies are honest. All the mechanics are revealed and yet the show is full of theatrical magic. It is about the 1960’s but feels fiercely current. Some of the ‘acting’ is bad but then you remember that Warhol’s work had some of the worst acting ever committed to film. In fact the show as a whole is both a meticulous homage to and a loving piss take of everything Warhol was and stood for.
It starts with an attempt to recreate the spirit of the Sixties in Warhol’s Factory, the place where ‘it all began’. But this is not a real history. This is history as remembered by people who weren’t there, a mixture of mythology, fantasy and collective jealousy at missing the most exciting decade in history. It then focuses in on Warhol’s obsession with identity and ‘realness’. Here is a screen that hides the performers even as it displays them. Here are performers playing themselves in a live recreation of a film where everyone was performing their own identity. Here are audience members playing the performers being wholly themselves while being told to pretend to be someone else. It is all thoroughly entertaining, hilarious and surprisingly profound.
Gob Squad call themselves ‘a patchwork family and a social utopia’; the overwhelming friendliness of the performance, even in the midst of its intellectual rigour and form-bending innovation, creates a sense of deep community. We are here to share an experience, not to watch those of other people. The show seems to suggest that what we need today is not to return to Sixties experimentalism but to focus on who we are here and now, to look around us and connect, in whatever way we can, with whoever we can find.
Rating: 4 ½ stars out of 5
Gob Squad and Brisbane Powerhouse present
Kitchen (You’ve Never Had it So Good)
Powerhouse Theatre
20 – 24 February
World Theatre Festival
www.worldtheatrefestival
13 – 24 February
