If Internal presents you with a distorting fairground mirror, A Game of You walks you inside an infinity triangle. Everywhere you look there’s an image of yourself reflected back. Moreover, it provides unwarped, honest reflections from every possible angle. Even looking at other people comes to reflect you more than it does them. You see a population of selves, affording you what feels like an outside perspective on the markedly familiar.
Now I ought to admit to needing certain things from A Game of You, which is not a situation that one finds oneself in often as a critic. Somehow, I needed it to make sense of my own bruising experience of Internal; almost to the extent of providing closure or catharsis in some way. Thankfully, that’s exactly what I got. A Game of You provides a well-balanced perspective, allowing you to see things from both sides, as subject and spectator. Even as you look at yourself as others might see you, you come to understand that very process of looking. It has the effect of demystifying the gaze of others, rendering it null and void, powerless to paralyze. Yes, there are moments of discomfort, just as mirror images contain negative aspects as well as positive, but the overall effect is quite comforting in its honesty. What we think of as bad bits and good bits, you come to realise, are all just bits.
We enter one by one at five minute intervals. Again we know ourselves to be part of a conveyor belt, having sat waiting beforehand, watching others enter the machine. To fully explain the mechanics, as with all of Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy, would be to break the show, but once again the company slowly reveal their hand. What you thought to be one thing eventually proves otherwise, until eventually you come full circle and leave with the whole picture. Safe to say, it’s an incredibly cleverly constructed journey, with each segment fitting beautifully into place, elucidating that which has preceded it and simultaneously setting up what’s to come. The dramaturgy is exquisite.
As a piece it deconstructs you to put you back together. What you put in is what comes back at you. In that, there’s no spin and no manipulation of material. Admittedly, that has the effect of making it a more muted, gentle experience than either Internal or The Smile Off Your Face. The recompense, however, is the plain-faced honesty of the reflection. A Game of You manages to be reflexive without cornering you into an extreme situation that twists your arm into reflection.
Yet this is not, I suspect, a show designed primarily to illuminate the self. Rather it serves to negate exactly that need. True, it shows that we reveal ourselves through our behaviour, both consciously and unconsciously, but it also shows that leaked information to be illegible, at least in any objective sense. In asking us both to judge and be judged, it is judgement itself that comes under the microscope and proves, precisely as the title implies, an exercise in subjective projection.
Wise and witty, A Game of You makes a calm and considered conclusion to a turbulent trilogy.
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