Tic-Tacs. That’s what he called them. Tic-Tacs. You might know them as Newton’s Cradles. Suspended ball bearings, endlessly clackering away, back and forth, ticking and tacking, going nowhere at a fairly measured pace.
It’s an appropriate symbol within Tom Wainwright’s swirling dream-sequence solo, which sets its crosshairs on the inane daily grind of the workforce-consumer, as is the goldfish with which he shares the stage. The trouble is it’s also a fitting characterisation for Pedestrian as a whole, which – silver-tongued and well-executed though it is – provides little more than a diversion.
As he recounts a recurring dream, Wainwright’s feet click-clack on the spot, while on a screen behind him a cobbled street sweeps towards the vanishing point. It’s like Stephen Berkoff’s take on Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve, with Wainwright enacting the ubiquity of the Great British High Street – running the gauntlet of chuggers, a pit-stop in Tesco Metro – pursued by an oversized, aristocratic goldfish.
Wainwright is an engaging performer. Well-drilled and resolutely disciplined, he offers an impressive plethora of urban buffoons, all spun from a keen-eyed knack for definitive details.
However, what starts as an intriguing, if familiar, slant on mundanity eventually becomes an observational comedy routine squeezed into shape. Wainwright, not dissimilar to Russell Howard in either looks or style, makes use of the tried and tested species of humanity turn, introducing us to the cling-film mafia, sweaty-backs and snappers. He’s got a nice line in exasperation: beads of sweat begin to burst from his skin as the pressure increases. You swear you spot the vein on his temple starting to throb and yet the explosion never comes.
Rather than going postal, Wainwright drifts deep into the surreal, winding up in orbit. That’s the problem with dream sequences: anything goes. And when anything goes, everything goes. That Wainwright could insert anything undercuts the value of all that he’s included. By this point, floating aimlessly in space, it barely matters. (Besides, does anyone really dream like this, jumpcutting from stock extreme to stock extreme?)
Thanks largely to the computerised animation, I couldn’t shake the notion of a screensaver. Hypnotic and beautiful, perhaps, but little more than a way of passing time that could probably be better used. Tic-tac.
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