Tuesday 8 August 2017

The Secret Life of Humans

There’s a lot to really admire about Secret Life of Humans – the main one being that it is implausibly good-looking for an Edinburgh show and that it contains BIG ideas about BIG stuff. In a Fringe format ambition is often not rewarded – the programme is full of shows tackling a particular thing or event – sometimes really well, often very very badly – essentially, an hour ain’t long, so trying to get at the universal through the specific means that even if you fail, the specific has at least been approached and dealt with. But this show doesn’t do that.


This show, directed by David Byrne and made by New Diorama (there's my bias right there) attempts to work through the arc of human progress. All of it. Thinking about how that progress is to be measured and how we deal with the violent results of all that progressing (that might or might not be happening in a straight line or a downward spiral).


So, there’s big stuff going on but you wouldn’t know it to see the audience. People ho-ing and humming out of the theatre at the end looking engaged and pretty pleased. I liked that it catered to a wide age-range – something shows with stuff to say don’t do all that well in Edinburgh – and that it found a neat impressionistic language through which to tell its story. People walked on walls in the past – properly walked on the actual proper walls, like they were just so distinctly not of this period that they couldn’t even fit on the floor – it made a point viscerally but it also just made me really happy and I gasped and so did the bloke next to me.


It’s form is, I guess, fairly ordinary: the grandfather Jacob Bronowski is an important figure with a thesis on sociology and his grandson goes on a date with an inquisitive sociologist  *clunk* – but it works to get you into the story double-quick (and every playwright people laud has done that – I’m looking at you effin Constellations with your quantum physicist and beekeeper lovestory) and the first half is really sprightly and sweet and interesting and this then earns the second-half where the proper meat of the thing are but where you have still got enough interesting stuff to look at that if you’re not feeling like listening that carefully you can still just admire how nice a big chalkboard looks when Bertrand Russell’s face is talking on it.


There aren’t enough gestures towards complicating the relationship between the storytelling and its content, I guess. The grandson’s actual plot (the date is less datey than he at first thinks) doesn’t seem to have that much to say to the wider story and I wonder whether there’s something interesting about how generations past, so concerned with grand visions of humanity, cannot possibly accord with the present postmordern condition, which disbelieves in totalising in favour of the idea of the now and the here and, well, the specific.


But it speaks volumes that I came out thinking about this stuff in a show that ran for an hour and started with a quite funny tinder date. I liked it a lot.

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The Secret Life of Humans is at Pleasance Two for the whole month and then is coming to The New Diorama to do some more brilliance next year.




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