Review: FIB, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

From the white lies that allow us to co-exist amicably to the more barbed, malicious and even motiveless, there are simply so many types of lie that deception makes for an impossibly broad subject matter. FIB makes the mistake of tackling it head on, meaning that, aside from scratching all over a large surface, it rarely manages to offer anything beyond the obvious.

Stood in a corridor of numbered doors, each leading into an individual booth, we enter each one by one to be confronted variously by live performance, video, installations and vaguely interactive micro-situations. In one, we’re screamed at by an absent spouse, who seems to tower above us. In another, we’re asked to scrawl “dirty little secrets” on the wall of a toilet cubicle.

Admittedly, there are some nice strands of thought within – particularly its musings on the performative qualities of art, in which manipulated versions of the self can be presented as truth, and the stories we concoct to soften the world’s edges and make death palatable – but overall the form isn’t probed to its full. Though it manages to place us in the judge’s chair a couple of times, attempting to ascertain truth from falsehood, FIB fails to thrust a real dilemma upon us, which the compartmentalised structure certainly has the potential to do. One wonders what Ontroerend Goed might have done.

The techno-music and swirling spotlights of the corridor – presumably there to up the adrenalin – are irritants, giving the whole the feel of a mid-nineties gameshow, and there’s a tattiness about the actual construction itself, which nags at you throughout.

If anything, the forced half-smile I wore on encountering one of the three performers so as not to offend says it all. In most of the booths, when alone, my eyes rolled at the tedious inanity of it all.