Review: Nicki Hobday Conquers Space, Just the Tonic at The Caves

Written for Culture Wars

Nicki Hobday seems more interested in overthrowing theatre than conquering space. Such is her cynical disdain for the ‘magic’ of the medium that she never gives it a chance to function. From the moment she begins the demystification process, speaking of the empty stage and our expectations, it seems a pale imitation of Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular, half-conjuring an absent show without the craft and comic edge of Etchells’s text. She mocks the notion of wings, for example, having fashioned her own out of two flats. Essentially she’s setting the whole thing up in order to knock it down.

The result is a cyclone of self-references, painting pictures within pictures within pictures, such that the lecture eventually swallows itself and disappears from view. In lacking an eloquent conceit, it lacks anything resembling an argument. By the time she attempts to shatter the show entirely, introducing the usher as an intruding fiction-cum-reality, she has tangled herself in knots.

Admittedly, Hobday offers a sleek, robust performance and achieves a few neat moments. Her manipulative engagement with her audience, refusing to accept anything offered, is a droll examination of power play and she manages a smooth turn of phrase, but a thesis consisting only of assorted musings is ultimately no thesis at all.