Nothing Is Coming The Pixels Are Huge

Banging name for a show, I thought. I’ll give that a crack. And, handily, Theatre 42’s show has buckets of really interesting stuff to shout about.

It’s loads of boxes. More boxes than you’d think you’d ever see onstage. Maybe a thousand? And some characters in a future world who have had their memories uploaded use the boxes to build a landscape. A projector colours the landscape and then they tell you what they remember it being. Boxes turn from rivers, to roads, then shops, then houses, and then the characters aren’t characters and then the memories are maybe not memories either. And a world is made and unmade and then you remember it’s always just been cardboard and light.

Which sounds sort of facile. Which it isn’t. It’s a smart, nice premise – visualising cybermemory as packets of data that can be reconstituted at will but that might not hold any real-world significance. Clever, right?

And over the course of the hour, they reformulate and deconstruct this central idea in interesting ways. The playing-style of it was very World Without Us by Ontroroend Goed* but with more projector. And more boxes. (There really were fuckloads of boxes. I almost couldn’t deal.) And at its best it rung with some of the sensitive lyricism that imbued that whole masterful show.

And the design (for which it very deservedly won a specially-created award at NSDF) is sort of extraordinary. I don’t understand how people this young and this not funded and this fledgling company-y managed to pull out a show that looks and feels as expansive (note I’m not using expensive as a byword for quality) as this.

My main thought was that any of the professional designers for the shoddy, tatty work that I’ve seen over the past year at bigger theatres should really take a look at this show and feel very cowed. These are students with, presumably approximately zero budget, and the show looks and feels beautiful.

I think there was occasional misfiring of tone: sometimes the performances became just a little bit sincere and performer-y for me. And I was also hoping for slightly more in way of approaching a development in the idea – there’s something really fruitful around fungible pockets of reality but I’m not sure this show sticks to that idea, instead it lurches more towards shonky sci-fi, which felt tonally a little strange. I wondered whether it was deliberately going for absurdly bad descriptions of the future cf. the monologues from Escaped Alone but I’m not sure they weren’t just a bit naff. No. That’s rude. Not naff. Just a tad sincere. But they were a sincere bunch, so I don’t want to shit all over that sincerity. IT WAS ALL GREAT!! Feel free to quote me.

I really have essentially got only praise for them. To have made a show this compelling and thoughtful and, Christ, this unmarketable (“it’s a show about a box being a bus. it’s really good promise.”) is an act of enormous integrity and I almost had a little weep at the end because there was only one box left undescribed. And then I remembered it was a fucking box and I told myself to get a grip.

*Both shows seem to chime interestingly with the great decentralising the human work Dark Mountain are doing over here, but that’s by the by.


Nothing Is Coming The Pixels Are Huge is part of the magnificent, ludicrously brilliant, totally wondrous Incoming Festival at the New Diorama Theatre. The festival showcases emerging companies from across the country all this week (and NDT's Artistic Director David is officially the nicest man in the whole wide world and if you go this week you should say hello and ask how his ankle's doing).

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