Review: The Last Hour, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

Time, clearly, is of the essence. With an hour designated as final, only a single rotation remains and it’s already disappearing. How ought we to fill that time? Ticking of to-do lists or preparing for whatever follows? Perhaps, like husband and wife artistic partnership plan b, the only possible option is to reflect: to ask what it is that’s ending? That’s not to dub concrete answers and tidy definitions as all important, but rather to highlight the search for answers, the act of answering.

Two blank faces sit behind two glass of water on a white tablecloth. If there are traces of expression, it is the slight peevishness of librarians. Projected behind them, magnified and abstracted, are the two clock faces of a chess timer, each displaying a perfect half-hour. After a coin toss, a game of question and answer or call and response begins, seemingly improvised but with some forethought around subject, style and structure.

Given the microphones peering down on them, the event has the dynamic of a press conference, as if their private matters have slipped accidentally into the public domain. Part awkward last date, part trial by media, the couple dissects their relationship as if to retrospectively evaluate their compatibility.

Most striking, then, is the inevitability of their falling out of sync. They only exist on equal terms, temporally, before the game has begun. From then on, it is shadowed by a looming lopsidedness, whereby one or other will be left talking out the seconds, posing questions without response and answering silence. It is a striking, even horribly depressing, metaphor for total interdependence and the centrality of love in life.

That said, the conversation that precedes this draws dangerously close to sentimentality, occasionally straying into fawning affection and ponderous pillow-talk. Questions such as, “What clock face will you be looking at when you die” seem somehow too vague and brooding. The couple are at their best early on, when spritely and combative, variously vying for our attention, coyly accusing or, even, ritually humiliating each other.

However, the piece makes a virtue of its simplicity, simultaneously conjuring a plethora of individual understandings about the time of your life and a universal desire to share it with another. Not necessarily The Other, nor any old other, but an other somewhere in between.