EIF: ‘Truth’s a Dog must to Kennel’
Lyceum Studio - 10/08/22
The title is from the Fool in ‘King Lear’. Performing his own script, Tim plays, not the Fool, but an actor who’s playing the role of Fool - well, some of the time. And most of the action is after the Fool has left the stage, watching the travails of Lear and Gloucester in the latter part of Shakespeare’s play. Wearing a virtual reality helmet, Tim enters, describing in barbed terms the audience members. But it’s not us he’s describing, it’s a virtual audience, a rather smug and privileged one. He removes the helmet from time to time, and with a grin more conspiratorial than friendly, confesses that in fact there’s nothing to be seen in it.
With just the VR helmet, sometimes a microphone, occasionally background sounds, it’s very much a one-man-show. He plays off the audience and their expectations in a style close to stand-up comedy but shot through with darkness, tragedy, and horror; this reaches its depths as the “actor” witnesses the blinding of Gloucester.
He takes us on several journeys far from ‘King Lear’, often in the form of jokes, or what start out like jokes. One involves the familiar scene of being welcomed at the Pearly Gates by St Peter. It’s overlaid with another framework: the genie offering to grant three wishes. 1st wish, an egalitarian utopia; 2nd wish, a friendlier society of generous, Guardian-reading types (like us, the real audience, hints Tim), 3rd wish, “Kill Me!”. The punch line isn’t funny, it’s brutal.
This is virtuoso multi-layered shape-shifting, both in writing and performance. My only reservation is about overuse of the word “Fuck”. These days it’s become a cliché. In one of his set-pieces Tim shows how well he can work without it. A TV talent contest, contenders an extended family whose act breaks every inhibition, an onstage incestuous orgy. For every taboo word for a private body part, a sexual action, a yucky effluent, he substitutes the phrase “You know”. This starts funny, then becomes almost shocking, as well as mocking our squeamishness. And the phrase itself somehow bring us into the conspiracy.
A final disaster is in store. A member of the virtual audience had a combination ticket for dinner and theatre. Tim had pointed him out to us early in the show; he’d not digested his dinner well. Now the internal pains get critical; the man is carried out of the theatre with a heart attack. His death coincides with Lear’s in the play. Members of the audience get involved (the virtual one, I think), theatre staff, rapid responders, other cast members. Then, in a final switch, we get another joke sequence, this time it’s about penguins.
We the audience (the real one) leave the studio amused, bemused, confused. It’s been an impressive display of imagination, ironic humour, visceral horror, shape-shifting, role-switching. Will King Lear ever be quite the same again?
