You (watch) Me (ride the) Bum Bum Train

You Me Bum Bum Train is back; presumably it’s as much of a head-rush as ever. You know what, this time round, I decided not to go. I figured that I’ve said everything I’ve got to say on the subject of the experience. It’s great and all, but it could be so much more. It may be that it is this time around, but I didn’t really fancy repeating myself for the sake of forty minutes of fun.

Anyway, the one thing I’ve not written about is the issue of payment. You Me Bum Bum Train uses – and, indeed, relies on – unpaid performers. Equity are taking them to task. Judging from a quick look at Twitter one night last week while desperately trying to keep my overseas 3G usage to a minimum, it seems they’re not the only ones.

Pilot Theatre’s Marcus Romer has written on the subject here, and basically says that unpaid work cannot be a permanent state of affairs, that companies have a responsibility to aim to pay their employees. At one level, I think that’s very fair cop. It seems unreasonable for the company to grow before it has laid the foundations to pay those it relies on.

However, at the same time, I’ve not got that much of a problem, economically, with You Me Bum Bum Train’s use of volunteers. To put it another way, it seems less problematic that the scale of the event should grow while the same relationships remain intact. Plus, everyone knows the deal. I don’t know what that experience is like, but no one’s under duress, so what’s the fuss? Is anyone really using it as an acting credit? Is anyone under the illusion that performing in You Me Bum Bum Train will advance their career? Is anyone doing it for any other reason than that it might be quite fun? I’m inclined to believe Morgan and Lloyd that You Me Bum Bum Train wouldn’t be possible without unpaid performers. After all, they have to host a ridiculously expensive final performance - tickets £250 each, must be bought in batches of 10 - to make ends meet. I don’t have a problem with them making a living from it – if they even do – despite using unpaid performers, because its their baby and I highly doubt they’re raking it in as a result.

However, I want to put forward an aesthetic argument against the use of unpaid performers. It’s more of a thought experiment than an all-out declaration of wrongdoing. There’ll be no boycott as a result. However, from a critical perspective, the use of volunteer or non-professional performers does impact on the nature of the event.

So, here goes.

You Me Bum Bum Train pitches itself as a safe space to play. Before you start the ride, you’re reassured that you won’t be filmed, for example. You’re also advised that your actions are real and, as such, have real consequences. Fine. Essentially, the message is that, as in Deal or No Deal, this is your ride to do with as you please. But that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility in any way. Your actions remain real and they remain yours.

However, because You Me Bum Bum Train’s performers are unpaid they are, in a very real way, another audience. When the event sells out, for example, emails whizz round explaining that you’re only hope of being involved in You Me Bum Bum Train is to volunteer as a performer. Essentially – and this doesn’t apply only to those who volunteer as a last resort – by volunteering you get to watch You Me Bum Bum Train from the other side.

I would argue, then, that You Me Bum Bum Train has two distinct and entirely contradictory audiences. To spell that out, there is the audience that pays, comes in one-by-one, sits in a wheelchair, rushing through scenarios. And there is the audience that watches them do so, albeit only in part. The first audience gets to ‘experience’ different situations. The second one gets to witness different people encounter and respond to a single situation. In other words, the second audience is watching something akin to a candid camera show – and that entirely undermines the first paying audience’s experience and their freedom to do as they please, unguarded on account of being in a safe space, unwatched and unjudged.

The first time I rode the Bum Bum Train, I held back from further praise because I couldn’t shake the suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the joke was on us. On my second ride, something I blurted out impulsively in response to a question (I think I ran through the Beatles names as a politician facing the press, simply because they leapt to mind despite being a non-sequitor), caused one of the volunteer performers to get the giggles. In that moment, I realised that the relationship was not as simple as the show’s creators would like us to think.

On my last ride, there was at least one scenario that involved being in front of an audience. Here things get even more complicated. Stepping out into a mock-up television studio, set up to look and feel like my own prime-time chatshow, I was suddenly in front of an audience of about 50 people, maybe more, made up of volunteer performers. So, at that point, they are volunteer performers who represent an audience to us, the real audience. They represent an audience by being an audience, sitting and watching, but the two audiences – the real and the represented – are very different: the represented audience is a chat show audience, the real audience is watching the You Me Bum Bum Train audient try to host a fake chat show. The question, at this point, is who is the real performer? Who is the participant and who the audience?

Now, I really liked the heightened stakes that this ‘audience’ added. It made You Me Bum Bum Train difficult and stressful and exciting again, as I said at the time. However, that ‘audience’ is no different in status to any other volunteer performer encountered along the way. It’s just more honest (and at the same time more dishonest) about the relationship. The point is that, however much we might give in to You Me Bum Bum Train, we are being watched at all times by people who have turned up to watch our unwitting performance.

Ultimately, until You Me Bum Bum Train achieves a level of professionalism that means those performing can just perform, it can’t offer the safe space that it claims to. And that, to my mind, is fundamentally problematic. Especially as we’re the ones paying…

(In the interests of full disclosure: I had press comps to my first two You Me Bum Bum Trains and paid for my third, last year.)

Review: A Doll’s House, Young Vic

Written for Culture Wars

Nora Helmer, that staid icon of female emancipation, so often little more than a door slam, has been thoroughly defrosted at the Young Vic. In Simon Stephens’s new version of Ibsen’s classic, as played by Hattie Morahan under Carrie Cracknell’s direction, she is a tangle of contradictions and her final flight is as naive as it is empowered; less a clarion call than a tragic compromise.

The three of them have worked to unbalance us and our presumptions and, in doing so, make us look at the Helmers' household on that fateful Christmas afresh. While it may not be the most convincingly natuaralistic production of Ibsen’s classic, it is among the most legible and, moreover, the most complex in its diagnosis. This is not just standard boy-girl patriarchy, but a swirling eddy of behavioural patterns and prejudices that conflict and contradict one another.

The production’s first trick – and it’s a very good one – is to making the setting unproblematic. This is not Ibsenland (not, incidentally, a place where dreams come true), but nor is it our modern world. Instead, it is a loose hybrid. The silhouettes are period – high-waisted skirts, waistcoats, detachable collars – but the behaviour has none of the accompanying stiff formality. Nor does Cracknell’s production strain for contemporary resonance; it’s quite content to keep the house staff and a gramaphone. She recognises that we have not come, first and foremost, to see the faithful representation of late 19th Century Danish life, with the precise white reflected sunlight of Scandinavia at this or that time of year. We have come to see people, to understand more of what makes them tick and, just for starters, Cracknell deserves credit for letting nothing get in the way of this.

As a story, A Doll’s House is a suspense thriller of sorts. Its drama is motored by the question as to whether Nora will prevent her husband from discovering of her debt before it’s paid off. It is a car crash in such slow motion that it teases you into thinking that impact might be averted. Nora desperately tries to stave off the inevitable.

Seemingly taking her lead from Katie Mitchell, Cracknell puts the Helmers’ flat onstage in full, rather than just presenting the end on living room as per usual. Ian MacNeil’s design rotates, so that we see the sitting room and Torvald’s office on one side of a thin corridor and the couple’s dining room and bedroom on the other. As such, we see the near misses and the noses that she’s operating underneath and the sheer tension of Ibsen’s plot is restored.

In fact, the play’s stakes have been stretched as well. The couple’s third child, for example, is a babe-in-arms and Nora’s fraught desperation is matched in the dizzying spin cycle. Essentially, you see her frantically attempting to compartmentalise her life; to keep her husband, her creditor (Nils Krogstad) and her friendly admirer (Dr Rank) in separate rooms. Morahan has the frazzled look of someone playing three games of table tennis simultaneously.

This is one of the fundamental inequalities in the marriage: Torvald has a private space, his office, and Nora hasn’t. She resorts to keeping things in boxes under the bed, shoving bags into side rooms, concealing sweets. The flat is like an observation lab: every room has large, clear windows, except Torvald’s office with its frosted glass. Cracknell mistakenly lets Nora enter that space on a couple of occasions. It should, like the post-box, be out of bounds.

Nora often seems unsympathetic to start, before we realise the full extent of her debt and the noble reasons for its existence. She looks spoilt and irresponsible, coaxing pocket money out of her husband only to leak it in tips and treats. Ibsen wrong-foots us in order to then reveal the self-sacrificing saint underneath. However, Stephens and Morahan combine to make her less sympathetic and, while they don’t outweigh them, Nora’s negative traits here offset any good intentions.

Morahan’s Nora is a social-climber, a typical middle-class WAG. Manipulative – “I know exactly how to get my own way with him” – and slyly persistent, her repertoire of tricks includes doe-eyes, sulky pouts and a faux-offence that almost always *gasp* RE-SENTs the accusation, whatever it may be. What’s more, the trip to Italy that supposedly saved her husband’s life seems more like a family holiday than ever. No doctor’s orders are mentioned and it looks a case of stress relief, perhaps less for his benefit than for hers. She starts to seem more self-saving than self-sacrificing, and her naivety becomes a lot less excusable as a result.

And it is naivety here. Her downfall is in assuming that Krogstad will, like her husband, play nicely. Failing that, that he will fall for her feminine tricks. She doesn’t account for the fact that pleasing her might not be at the forefront of his mind and, as such, Nick Fletcher’s Krogstad seems unusually reasonable. There is no gleeful malice nor bitter resent in his actions, just a man doing what he must to keep his social standing steady.

However, while Nora’s character flaws don’t prevent you sympathising with her situation – both the hold that Krogstad has over her and her flawed marriage with Torvald – they do temper it. To some extent, she has only herself to blame. She has been quite happy to be the banker’s wife, to coast along in a perfect little flat with her perfect little children, watching her husband’s salary and stature increasing. She’s as complicit as she’s ever been here, working the circumstances of her marriage to her own advantage.

Dominic Rowan’s Torvald isn’t the patronising and gooey version, the infatuated fool gushing over his “little skylark.” If anything, Nora gets the better of him because he’s too sure that he’s got the measure of her. Certainty and self-assurance are his defining features. Rowan’s Torvald believes that he does not need his wife and her role – like the bows on the Christmas tree that match her red dress – is merely decorative. She is regularly framed in terms of performance, and when Torvald calls her his greatest possession, he is thinking along the lines of a Rolex or diamond cufflinks. His wife is an accessory; evidence of his own success and attractiveness, testament to a perfect life with all the trimmings. Yet, when she wears his green jacket, you spot the image of holly, tucked behind a light in the dining room; spiked leaves protecting the red berries. “Take off my jacket,” he orders, reneging on that side of the relationship. This is the moment that Nora becomes wholly aware of their imbalance; that she has tried to play her role and he has failed to do likewise. That the whole nature of marriage is not sacred, but contractual and compromised.

The tragedy is that, to finally break the inequality, Nora must match Torvald’s certainty: “I’ve never felt so clear. I’ve never felt so certain,” she says at the end. Not for nothing does Stephens hook in a little bit of Mrs T. (Nora: “I don’t know if there’s any such thing [as society].”) She knows that she can trust no one but herself, that she is finally alone and that the self-sufficiency of others has forced her to become self-sufficient as well. Yet, even at the same time, Nora admits to complete uncertainty with regards everything else, in particular the institutions that make up the establishment: religion, society, responsibilities, family. As marriage tumbles in her eyes, so too does society and its pillars. Nothing is sacred, everything is compromise, everyone is out for themselves.

Here, Nora’s exit is both emancipation and eradication at once. It is, she says in two consecutive sentences to Kristine, “the most wonderful thing” and “so terrible…it can’t happen.” Nora’s escape is her tearing herself into a thousand pieces. She had initially hoped it might be the IOU, but, in the end, it’s her that gets destroyed. She leaves not only the marital home, but everything she has ever known. Nora walks out on society and its thousand grubby little compromises and slams the door behind her.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Review: As You Like It, The Actors’ Church

An edited version appeared in Time Out

If George Osborne were really serious about relining the country’s coffers, he could do worse than impose a pastoral tax tomorrow. At this time of year, every lawn in the land sprouts a Shakespeare play (All the world… etc. etc.). At 50%, we’d be out of recession by September.

Most such shows rely on generic geniality, and Iris Theatre’s As You Like It is no exception. It is a forward defensive of a production; Ploughman’s lunch Shakespeare with flat caps, floaty shirts and blank verse at its absolute blankest.

That’s a shame because it starts intriguingly, with an Victorian toybox aesthetic that disappears by the time we reach Arden, where there are few distinguishing features beyond Matthew Mellalieu’s bearded Audrey and Tom Deplae strangley jolly Jacques.

Mostly though, this is sans teeth stuff, intended as little more than a charming, tourist trap off Covent Garden Piazza. Emily Tucker and Fiona Geddes are spritely enough as Rosalind and Celia, Joe Forte is a chiselled, Hovis-ad Orlando.

Nonetheless, Tessa Battisti’s sculptural designs of wilting wicker and looming flowers compliment the attractive blooms of the Actors’ Church gardens and – weather permitting – you could easily spend a pleasant three hours alongside Daniel Winder’s production, escaping the bustle of the West End.

Review: you’ll see [me sailing in antarctica], National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

The highest compliment I can pay to non zero one’s latest piece is that on getting home I tried to buy tickets for my two brothers, both of whom are rather sceptical about experimental forms of theatre.

That should tell you something of the show’s tone. It puts you in mind of your nearest and dearest with a final singeing of sentimentality, and that sight feelgood teariness makes you want to pass on a kindly gesture. In actual fact, those are the weakest elements of a show that starts scientific, achieves something remarkable then resorts to pandering to individual audience members to finish. Alright, so it’s rather lovely – that feel good teariness, the intoxication of introspection – but it’s also rather shamefacedly indulgent.

Even so, this is non zero one’s best show since their breakthrough hit Would Like To Meet.

Anyway, like many an emerging company, non zero one are interested in memory. On the roof terrace at the back of the National Theatre, we’re sat around a large round table with a reflective Perspex surface. Floating above, like an oversized jellyfish, is a large helium balloon lit up from the inside. It’s like an urban woodland clearing; a 21st century Fairy Ring. We’re given an earpiece with a microphone and told about the process by which we perceive the world and lock those perceptions into memories.

And, of course, we know all this a bit, but non zero one explain it brilliantly; here it's artfully put and delivered with the uncontainable over-excitement that marks children’s television.

According to neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman, an experience lasts three seconds. The sensory information received in that period of time is parcelled up and banked. Our senses feed us approximations and memory is even more reductive, but nonetheless still surprisingly vivid, as nonzeroone prove by resurrecting a personal memory in each of us. They work as if restoring an oil painting. Suddenly I had the smell of fake blood, its stickiness against my fingers and the temperature of a summer’s evening in 2000 in mind.

With a wonderful rug pull, however, we’re told that up to 60% of this has been concocted in the present moment and bears no relation to actual events. The next day, I realised that I had entirely misremembered what I was wearing. (Or had I misremembered misremembering? Eh?)

Our most accurate memories are formed when we are at our most present and the show morphs into a memory training session, priming one’s sense until they approach a heightened state of receptiveness. Then we are asked to stand up and turn around.

Looking out over the city, as the circular platform starts turning, is a phenomenal experience. All of a sudden, you’re faced with a high-definition panorama. Everything’s crisp. Everything’s vivid. You catch colours – spots of blue or red light – in your periphery. You see spaces under bridges and décor through windows. You see the nuts and bolts and stains on nearby walls, and the flickering of flags at 200 metres, and the aerials silhouetted on the National’s rooftop. You see CDs dangling in windows and lovers kissing goodbye and buses surging over Waterloo bridge.

It’s dizzying, like breathing pure oxygen. It’s not quite a sensory overload, but a new perspective – or rather, perhaps, an old perspective refreshed. Your eyes are newly unaccustomed and your surroundings no longer gleaned through a mist of lazy assumption. It quietly urges you to live a fuller life.

Really, that’s all non zero one need to do. That is quite extraordinary enough. Yet they insist on considering the future in terms of memories to come. They speed you on to the last thirty seconds of your life, asked to imagine the flashback that Hollywood tells us to expect in a game of free association. There’s no denying the pleasure of this – and, even, the benefits of sorting and perhaps being surprised by one’s priorities – but it shares with much interactive work that quality of stroking its audience, indulging them. For all it’s gushy optimism, it feels cheap and, what’s more, unnecessary. I’d have been quite happy to keep turning, taking in all of London’s minutiae instead.

Photograph: Ludo Des Cognets

Review: 100% London, Hackney Empire

Written for Culture Wars

Rimini Protokoll, the Jeremy Vine of the international theatre circuit, have reduced London’s population to fit on the Hackney Empire’s stage. One hundred Londoners, selected (in theory, at least) to mirror the city’s diversity with proportional accuracy, are there to answer question upon question, thus building up a staged portrait of the capital. They are, we’re told, “a body with a hundred heads, a chorus that cannot speak in sync, a choir that cannot sing as one.”

Undoubtedly, the format has two things going for it. The first is spectacle; place lots of the same thing on a stage and you instantly gratify an audience, but here the joy is simply in people watching. They start with introductions. Seventy-something Walter Gutzmore walks out alone to reminisce about the Empire’s bingo hall past. The 99 that follow are all shapes and sizes, colours and creeds and classes. They line up in age order; they split into genders. They start miming their day’s activities - 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock? – so that the youngest bed down and the young adults rave on until the youngsters wake early and drag their parents out of bed.

Inevitably, characters emerge; those that like the limelight, that ensure they’re visible when giving answers. Others slink into the back, to make up the numbers. You start to chart stories and gain a sense of character. In a way, this is just a massive version of hotseating – a Stanislavskian exercise where an actor is interviewed in character. There is too much information pouring off the stage to take in at once.

The second strength is in the individual moments that have a surprising capacity to affect the audience. As direct questions are asked, participants drift towards stage-right to answer affirmatively, to stage-left for the negative. Seven have been homeless. Three describe themselves as gay. Just over half have shoplifted. There are some pretty probing questions within: about burkhas, about the riots, about real opinions that really matter. And, of course, there are some brilliant moments, whether delicate or poignant or startling. Like the 25 or so with a weapon at home or the three cancer survivors stood together in front of an audience, receiving applause that’s first uncertain, then heartfelt.

These emerge from the presentation in a standard 90 minute (though on the night I saw it, the run-time stretched to more than 2 hours) staging. I wonder whether it might work better as a piece of public durational art. Seemingly aware that an audience will struggle to watch the same thing happening for two hours onstage, Rimini Protokoll shake up the format – turning the lights out for anonymity makes sense, as does opening the event to include us (both as questioners and answering for ourselves), but other modes are just arbitrary alternatives with a different feel. You sense a company trying to liven proceedings up and counter against monotony. Away from a stage or even a standard show length, no such pressure would exist.

However, the main hurdle is that 100% London can never be that which it wants to be. A group of 100 – out of 7.5 million – is simply too small to even claim to represent something wider, thus pulling the rug and reason out from under 100% London’s feet. Acknowledging such problems – and Rimini Protokol are experienced enough to artfully include reflexive evaluation – makes us watch critically and not take its content at face value, but it can’t re-inflate a real sense of purpose. Nor does it go far enough in that evaluation: there is no acknowledgement that some opinions come with added weight, while others are ten a penny. If its ultimate purpose is to show the unreliability of statistics and opinion polls, then it doesn’t stress the issue or break the form.

Essentially, Rimini Protokoll have concocted a piece of documentary theatre with too loose a connecting thread, and as you brace yourself for another longeur, it’s the arbitrariness that really rankles. For all its pithy neatness, 100% London a hollow – and almost futile – gesture.

Photograph: Tim Mitchell

Review: Before Your Very Eyes, Unicorn Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Here is a bald statement of fact: You only get one life. It is brief and it is unlikely to turn out as you planned or hoped or imagined.

Here is another: Any artist that addresses this is onto a winner.

Before Your Very Eyes is just such a dead cert. What’s more, that certainty is furthered cemented by the presence of nine children – cutesy, button-nosed Belgian children, at that – aged between 8 and 14. In fact, Gob Squad and CAMPO (formerly Victoria) get double definite points, as their kids seem both wise beyond their years and old before their time.

The title, by the way, is playful. It admits its own blatancy, that its basic provocation is staring you straight in the face, but also acknowledges – with a cool irony – that the show is a minor-miracle, a marvel to behold. It almost needs a drum-roll. Over 90 minutes, these nine children and their little button-noses, will run the gamut of human existence, zipping through the aging process at warp speed and hurtling towards the grave.

You see the formula? Cute young kids + life’s brief candle = coolly detached existential humour + inevitable lump in throat.

Essentially, we’re talking about the live-art equivalent of Hollywood films like Jack, Big or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. These are anti-Never Never Land tales, plots that play havoc with the life-cycle. They tell stories of lives like scratched CDs that skip, fast-forward or rewind to rob the protagonist of the best years of their lives. And like them, you watch Before Your Very Eyes through damp eyes, smiling a faint smile and sighing a light sigh.

It doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know – and, to judge from its title, it has no such aspirations. Rather it looks you square in the eye and reminds you of something all too easily forgotten: that life ought not be wasted and that it’s never too late to change.

Those children are in a box made of one-way mirrors, a crech of sorts, that half-fools you into thinking that you’re watching them in their natural habitat, uncorrupted by the gaze of an audience. The rolling start, signified by the lights dimming and the microphones on the inside starting up but no change in the behaviour of the performers, seeks to stress the point and compound the illusion. The idea is so successfully planted, in fact, that it feels odd to even call them performers.

Actually, there’s a knowingness to the whole thing, a slick slipperiness that already knows the exact effect it wants and pursues it pretty ruthlessly. There is a definite manipulation at play; not of the children, but of us. Doe-eyes are deployed with devastating efficiency.

All that said, frustratingly, it’s so bloody tried and tested that you can’t resist. Essentially, we’re all suckers for this kind of thing. I don’t know; blame the selfish gene or something. What’s more, being completely fair to Gob Squad, it’s tidily, sharply and roundedly done. You might resent its manipulation, you might try and resist, but you’ll still fall for it hook, line and sinker.

So what actually happens? The kids start out as kids, pottering around in the box-room, watching cartoons and playing rounds of the Belgian version of pat-a-cake. (Incidentally, it’s a really canny piece of curation on LIFT’s part to play this next to Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, for these kids are also representing kids and, just like Back to Back’s work, it begs questions their authorial ownership and level of understanding.) A recorded voice – Big Brother as benign schoolmistress – addresses them in questions and instructions. “Have you been practicing?” it asks the smallest girl, who’s hula-hooping respectably. A video of her younger self appears on the television and on a large projection screen outside the box. She hulas abysmally. “This is when we first met,” intones the voice.

As, one by one, the children of today come face to face with themselves of yesteryear, you realise that they are already different people. They have somewhat disowned those antecedents with a small smile, both patronising and embarrassed, at their onetime naivety. “Just look at him,” says one, a Euro-Bieber called Spencer, “He’s trying to be so cute…This isn’t me.”

Then, the ‘aging’ starts in earnest with new teenage outfits (a grungy uniform), playful gothic make-up and, hanging from every set of lips, a cigarette. Just when you think they won’t light them, a jet of smoke darts out of each one. (They’re stage props, but the moment stands.) It’s neatly provocative: a full-on, prohibition-smashing free-reign.

Once again they consult with their younger selves on screen – not so dismissive this time, but removed and kindly in their superiority. Questions – “Is it fun to wear a bra?” – get answers that have the tone of a pat on the head. “Puberty? I AM puberty,” says one. “What can you do at 19?” asks the voice. The usual answers – new freedoms, badges of adulthood: vote, smoke, drink sort of thing – come back.

And so on into middle-age, where identities are expressed through ‘sensible’ clothes and drawn-on facial hair. The voice orders an improvisation; a drinks party with home-made sushi (marshmallows). There are conversations about old wines and new gadgets; everyone is a bit bored, playing at maturity and acting as they think they should, repressing impulse. At 44, there’s a tiredness about possibilities: they can get divorced, pretend not to be drunk, say ‘in my youth.’ Many have a glimmer of the child’s perspective: “I can use a calculator for an easy sum.” “I can make my children wear hats when I’m cold.”

Ok, so you know that most of this has been fed to them. It must have been. No child can see through their parents quite this much, right? These are, essentially, children playing at being adults. It’s a game of dressing up, of mummies and daddies. First and foremost, it thoroughly skewers our own insecurities; that feeling we all share – which presumably never goes away – that deep down we’re ill-equipped and unprepared; that life is nothing but one deep end after another.

Gob Squad make adulthood look absurd. It’s more pronounced in this middle-age section, possibly because teenagers are too easy a target, where adults proper take themselves seriously enough to be a legitimate target.

That absurdity, however, is laced with sadness. It seems a waste. “Are you doing the job you dreamed of as a child?” the voiceover asks. (At least I think it does, though that might have crept in from 100% London.) Even in this childish fantasy version, there is enough familiarity and truthfulness to make it seem a waste of time. This forms a canny concoction: one-part ‘change thy ways before its too late’, another of inevitability and ‘it’s already too late’.

The voiceover creeps in: “What was a mysterious and exciting future is now starting to fade. You realise you’re not special. As the world forgets you, as you learn there is no one watching and there never was, you that the only part of you that remains is someone else.”

This is the heart of the matter, the real thrust of the sentimentality: Before Your Very Eyes tells us the truth that we all try so hard to suppress; that slays us emotionally each time we hear it. That the world will carry on without us. We will carry on without our loved ones and they without us. That this, as David Foster Wallace’s fish discover, is water.

This, Gob Squad suggest, is the elixir and by 77 – with wrinkles drawn on and grey wigs pulled over tiny heads; with life having drifted into the third conditional, ‘can’ having become ‘could have,’ – there is a newfound freedom. There’s a regenerated sense of play, and death, that favourite childhood game, is approached with relish. The nine run on the spot, up and down in time, until, one by one, they drop out for their moment in the limelight, their final flourish. Death, finally, remains a joke. It is long-drawn-out suffocation or a fit of brain spasms or poisoned apples that choke us to our knees. And ultimately, you realise that there’s no knowing that until it happens and, when it does, there’s no longer any need to know.

This, really is the strength of Before Your Very Eyes. It’s a coruscating heartache and a downcast joy that, in spite of all its existential angst, refreshes your lust for life. Even if it is a bit sentimental.

Photograph: Phile Deprez