Okay or not okay? Michael Jackson, Pablo Picasso, Kanye West… Who do we hold accountable? And how? Who even actually has this power that we’re supposed to be speaking truth to anyway? This ballsy production not only asks but demands answers to these questions. Written and directed by Proteus’s Artistic Director, Mary Swan, Indestructible is an unflinching examination of nauseatingly complex, and just plain nauseating, interplay between gender and power in the contemporary art world.
Richly situated in a digital world built by the production team and multi-disciplinary artist Paula Varjack contextualizing all of the plays’ imagined characters in an all too familiarly problematic alternate reality, this show offers audiences a non-traditionally immersive theatrical experience. The plot follows “YBA” artist Catherine Shaw as she mounts her first exhibit in ten years and invites audiences to explore this imagined exhibition via QR link following the performance. The play encourages audiences to do their homework but also takes care to bring the story itself to a satisfyingly cathartic conclusion without sacrificing any nuance in its contentiously debatable themes.
Never shy to cite its sources, the jointly academic and satirical tone of this piece will appeal to fans of comedian/art-historian Hannah Gadsby’s recent work, which is explicitly referenced in one of the play’s most outrageous intervals. Although the dramatic arc of the script and the characters themselves are well thought out, it is in this and other fourth wall breaks when the audience is directly addressed or cleverly clued in that this play is at its most engaging. The jocularity of actor Paul Huntley-Thomas particularly serves this project in scenes where broad physical caricature clues the audience in to a certain character’s despicability. Particular highlights of this performance include his renditions of superior Sotheby’s auctioneer, unbearable art critic, and guy more interested in his phone than the woman he came onstage to talk to. Projection designer, Christopher Harrison, also gets in on this fun, working in a largely traditional format for much of the show but allowing some light in through the cracks of convention in the form of projected subtext on a corner of a back wall and in one real coup, directly onto a character’s back.
Swan’s smart script and playful direction are occasionally at odds, particularly in Mary Rose’s performance as Catherine, whose self-righteousness sometimes elicits an awkward self-consciousness in the role of the straight man to Huntley-Thomas and Danny Charles’s buffoons. Olivia Egbunike delivers a truly luminous performance as emergent artist Julia Rodriguez but is similarly hindered by the imbalance between the script’s severity and the production’s blitheness. Critical of but nonetheless entrenched in a white feminist perspective, race and class both receive knowing nods in the script but fail to develop into coherent themes in their own right. The cream playhouse style set gives Catherine’s studio an ironically appropriate aura of domesticity but the decision to contain Egbunike in a projection along its muddy-white surfaces echoes the objectification of female artists this show elsewhere so harshly critiques in a way that, due to the strength of her performance particularly when held against the play’s other less compelling forays into dense drama, is frustrating more than it is enlightening.
Concerned equally with dismantling and deconstructing as it is with uplifting and empowering, the singularity of Catherine’s perspective against a multitude of masculine voices and the occasional disembodied feminine one serves the former goal far more effectively than the latter. During one notable early scene two characters carry on a conversation while striking a bit of set, dismantling as it were, the scene they are simultaneously building, and giving audiences a hint of the dressing down that is to come in its conclusion. A play with teeth but no venom, this production ultimately falls just slightly short of its iconoclastic promise and leaves the systems it pokes at ultimately indestructible.
Playing until 3rd February, https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/indestructible/
Reviewer: Kira Daniels
Reviewed: 18th January 2024
North West End UK Rating: