Comeback Special 1 November
Kissing The Shotgun Goodnight 2 November
Chapter Arts
It’s rare that one gets to see work of such vivid, searing intensity as the double header of Greg Wohead’s Comeback Special and Christopher Brett Bailey’s Kissing the Shotgun Goodnight in the same year, let alone the same week. Credit for that must go to Theatr Iolo for bringing this work to Cardiff as part of their ‘Curate’ platform, showcasing work that is entirely removed from their usual focus of theatre for children and young adults. It’s an audacious piece of curation and programming. The work demands much of the audience – a willingness to become part of a recreation of an iconic event from nearly fifty years ago and the forbearance to submit themselves to a sonic assault of astonishing ferocity.
Greg Wohead’s Comeback Special is that marvelous experience in a theatre, a rare moment when the relationship between the performer and spectator is delicately played out in moments of mutual understanding and reciprocal trust. The subject of Wohead’s piece is Elvis Presley’s televised Comeback Special from 1968, but this is not by any means a jaded Elvis impersonation. Wohead recreates the spatial conditions of the original broadcast – the audience are situated on all four sides around a square stage that is the exact dimensions of the stage that Elvis used – and begins the show by asking us directly to imagine him as Elvis. Dressed in simple back jeans, t-shirt and trainers, Wohead could not look further removed from the lip curling, hair gelled King of Rock and Roll. But by asking us to imagine him as Elvis we are also reimagining ourselves as the audience, creating an alchemical transformation that is genuinely surprising and unsettling. Moving back and forth between time and space, Wohead take us into his hotel room where he is watching the show for the very first time and also transports the audience to the event itself. We are in it but yet also observers, as Wohead asks each audience member to enact moments from the show as the original audience did. It is the theatrical equivalent of a Trompe l’oeil, a playing with illusion and reality augmented by the video of the Comeback Special playing on four screens behind the audience. As an audience we are reminded not only of Elvis as a cultural icon but the waste of a life cut tragically short, captured in a freeze frame of startling beauty, before the drugs and obesity and rhinestone jumpsuits turned Elvis into parody. Wohead finishes with an elegiac version of Love Me Tender, burying the endless hackneyed tribute impersonators with a moment of genuine and heartfelt tenderness and authenticity.
The second half of Theatr Iolo’s curated programme is Christopher Brett Bailey’s punch to the gut Kissing The Shotgun Goodnight. Having been blown away by his previous show This Is How We Die, I insisted on dragging my 18 year old daughter and her friend to the show. Earplugs and a warning note on the bespoke DIY programme tells you all you need to know about the nature of this performance – a fiercely uncompromising sound and words extravaganza that is so focused it creates a bubble of tranquility and reflection amidst the storm of sonic energy. Anyone that has seen the conclusion of This Is How We Die will know the wall of white noise that envelops the audience at the end. Kissing The Shotgun Goodnight is a seventy minute extension of that ending, with melodic violin harmonies fusing with guitar solos and Hendrix-like feedback riffs. The staging composition is exquisitely designed and lit; the three performers form a triangle shape with Bailey at the apex, each with a mounted ‘piano corpse’ behind them, which is used as a percussion and string instrument. Although Bailey is credited as the author of the piece on the promotional material this is no one man show; Alicia Jane Turner provides the violin soundscape whilst George Percy doubles up with Bailey on electric guitar. Together the trio construct moments of haunting simplicity alongside ear shattering electric waves, with spikes of sound of up to 120 decibels. As the programme notes affirm “that’s as loud as a small plane taking off, a jackhammer at close range, or black sabbath in their ‘70s prime”. My guess is that the ear plugs are mandatory for health and safety reasons; my daughter blithely said afterwards that she only used them for the ‘noisy bit’ at the end. If This Is How We Die was a machine gun verbal barrage finishing with an all-enveloping musical mind meld then this performance was the exact opposite – a sonic landscape interspersed with monologues that reflect on death, existence and the headlong rush towards catastrophe, as the taped voice at the start warns us that we are entering ‘a hell dream’. Reflecting afterwards with my daughter, she said that there was a narrative in the performance, but it was a ‘narrative of emotions’. A perfect summing up of two exhilarating evenings.
words ALEX WREN