Tuesday 2 May 2017

Cock and Bull and Beautiful False Advertising

I went to Cock and Bull thinking it was going to be funny. The way it was sold to me, and the way I then described it to anyone who asked me what I was going to see, was a show where “Three females perform their own alternative party conference”. It sounded like the sort of comfy, sketchy satire that could best be enjoyed on a Sunday evening by a bunch of well-intentioned liberals looking to have their anti-Tory, anti-Cameron, anti-May grievances massaged. I was in.


But it’s not that show. Not at all. I don’t think I’ve come out of a show more confused and terrified this year. I thought it was extraordinary.


It opens with an introduction, a simple explanation of the show and how it got here, the sort of postmodern, DIY, antitheatrical gesture towards “liveness” that really gets under your skin-- but here it’s rendered by a female performer dressed in a shiny black suit, with pristine gold paint covering her hands and every word is emphasised and mechanised as if the teleprompter is going too slowly and she’s trying to cover. It’s breath-takingly uncanny.


The performance then begins and over the course of the next hour, you’re spellbound. It’s this macabre dance of empty gesture after empty gesture. Phrases and movements--  Cameron’s smug “pumps me up”, his slatheringly condescending pointing when he said “do up your tie” (am I betraying my political bias yet)-- pour out and are turned into beats, a sort of choric, Philip Glass score of inanity.


David Cameron’s infamous “Hard-working families” refrain is deconstructed, ripped apart, metamorphosed into a plangent crie de coeur, tingling and peeling the skin from the strains of Dido’s Lament out of which it emerges.


There’s moments at which errors seem to slip in only to be taken up into the gesture: a collapse onto the floor, becomes a repeatable movement. Every motif becomes empty as soon as it is ingested into the theatrical machine. As the performance builds they tear their clothes off, they mime sex acts with the chairs, they slap their arses: political discourse has never had its orgiastic and erotic nature made more clearly manifest. Gone is Purcell, in its place crass striptease, pure revelry to the sound of Frank Zappa’s Bobby Brown Goes Down, rendered through DIY editing into a song about David Cameron’s dreams.


And then the music stops and you are left with three nude female performers covered in slightly lustreless gold paint staring at you and the silence, broken by Donald Trump saying that line from that recording. Their heavy breathing, pulling the artificial delight back to the spatiotemporal present, was deafening.


In the final moments (this is not a spoiler, how could something so ephemeral and indescribably be spoiled through description) the performers embrace. It is a quiet, closed-off moment. We anticipate a slowing, after the bombastic nude fetishized female body has exerted itself so fully, and it is achieved. There is a sort of cute-meet as they hold each other.


But as their hands keep moving on each other’s backs, keep placing themselves carefully, robotically, we remember that they are not nude for their benefit, but for ours, they are not holding each other, they are performing. There is no escape from this: the labour is not just as much for them as for us, it is we who wanted this.


I have rarely seen a better matching of form and content as the performers exhaust themselves, standing on tiptoes until the sweat drips off them, tearing their clothes off until any pretense toward character seems laughable, as they attempt to escape the shackles of the piece they themselves created.


And I couldn’t stop thinking about Benjamin (I mean, who CAN!!!) Absent presence made manifest onstage, the empty labour of performance-- bodily labour-- fetishized in just the same way that people fetishize the sloganing of the political elites. Simultaneously lamenting and revelling in the hollowness of Theresa May’s “strong and stable government”.


And I haven’t even mentioned how funny it was; how much it complicates the highly gendered nature of this oppression; how BEAUTIFUL it was! Glimmering golden hands performing a gestural dance in shafts of light: it was unbearably expressive.


I was glad to be missold: like our current political discourse (*hammering the point home never felt so cheap but I’ve done it anyway*) anything good is not soundbite-ready, not commodifiable, and through the very process of making this show, along with a critique of current politics, this show is also a reflexive cry at a neoliberal cultural landscape that requires art and artists to be mechanised, that forces every show to be summariseable in under thirty words, I mean, I’m at 750 and I’ve barely begun.




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