PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Brewery, Bristol (to Sat 12 Mar) THEATRE/LIVE ART Three performers enter the stage in near-pitch darkness, each holding a bicycle light which they use to slowly, teasingly illuminate portions of the set and each other. A propitious beginning to this full-length debut by Bristol’s Sedated by a Brick, full of promise upon which, sadly, the next hour didn’t deliver. It consisted of a series of speechless tableaux and minimal action scenes by these three protagonists in various positions of domination, submission and co-dependency. One of them, a seeming ‘master’, patiently awakened his sleeping/catatonic ‘servants’, who then rose up, or so it seemed, against him.

Occasionally visually gripping, at moments quite funny, these scenes more often seemed pointless, ponderous and painstaking. In one tranche, lasting several minutes, one performer solemnly wrapped an entire table, legs ’n’ all, in bin-liners. Sure, the finished product looked faintly otherworldly and unsettling – but it came at the expense of several dull minutes of someone routinely performing an unexciting, slightly awkward chore ad nauseam. This is live performance, folks: you’ve got to create something beautiful, AND keep us gripped while you do it.

Within a cold economic climate and grim predictions of play-safe cultural monotony ahead, you gotta like the fact that this kind of naked experimentation gets encouraged. Sadly, though, ‘If Destroyed…’ sacrificed crucial things like narrative and on-stage energy in the pursuit of powerful imagery. It softly asked interesting questions like, ‘does theatre have to bear any relation to anything in the real world?’ The answer, of course, is no – if not, though, it must run on its own engine, fuelled by things like pace, poetic language, watchable characters and a gripping narrative. This show bypassed all of these. SBAB should be encouraged to pursue disquieting and bamboozling visual worlds – but they need more pace, humour, characterization and ideas than were shown here. (Steve Wright)

Copyright Steve Wright 2011

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