Review: One on One Festival, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Time Out

Short of shelling out a fortune to spend a fortnight exploring every nook and cranny of the Battersea Arts Centre, there's no way to get a complete, or even a wholly satisfying, experience of the One-on-One Festival. Nonetheless, it is a necessary and exiting laboratory and the results, though not unanimous, are hugely positive.

Here, 'audience' is not a collective term, but a personal pronoun. Every piece is designed to provide an individual, bespoke experience. You might find yourself lying in a coffin or jutting out of a first floor window. You could be interrogated, serenaded, masqueraded or exfoliated. Revealing any more would ruin the pleasure of jumpy anticipation that makes a butterfly house of your stomach.

It would also be to overbrief, as the pieces are best experienced blind (often quite literally). All that needs pointing out is their shared intensity, which makes even the more banal and inconsequential pieces seem like gifts. Even those that think the Emperor naked will have to admit that he's never looked sharper.

On arrival, each attendee receives a personalised timeline outlining their allocated appointments for the evening. Most are set down for three or four of the thirty-six pieces that make up the festival. That leaves a lot of potential longueurs, spun as “time to explore, refresh and reflect,” and a nagging sense of missing out on the greenest grass.

In a smorgasbord of this sort, there is inevitably a broad spectrum of quality. Of the canapés on offer, some are calorific delights, others are merely titillating titbits. But that's the nature of the beast and to criticize a collection containing some of the most extraordinary, hard-hitting and thought-provoking theatrics in London would be to undermine a vital event on account of insurmountable obstacles. One or two are potentially life-changing and, taken as a whole, it's game-changing.