Written for Culture Wars
For the right price, someone, somewhere will fake it like they mean it. Fancy being kidnapped? Head to Amsterdam. Want a taste of married life? Try Iran. Need mourners to bulk up your funeral-crowd or protestors to kick-start a movement? Both very doable. (Tears and Molotov cocktails not included.)
Alongside this multitude of simulations, listed with the scatty quality of a television magazine show, Third Angel throw up harsh realities from around the globe. A role-call of massacres and poverty lines and sexual trafficking pierces the jollity, and shows the sickness at the very heart of capitalism. What I Heard… makes you question whether we’ve already reached its logical extension, tumbled headlong down its slippery slope into a warped world. Just how much further – sorry, lower – can we go in the hunt for ever-larger profits? And moreover, at what cost and who’s expense?
It’s a well-conceived pincer attack that takes its time in making its point. Allusions to the financial arrangements behind the various fake tales are well-disguised enough to require the audience to make the connection. The problem, however, comes at the other end and, once the penny’s dropped, What I Heard… merely continues in the same vein, arguably only increasing the volume. To really break through it needs more nuance and development on top of its basic stance of objection, no matter how sincere and valid that position is.
Performed with a no-nonsense presentational style, it’s likeably scatty. Admittedly, there’s a tendency to illustrate the instances cited rather literally, so that stories about mid-air hijackings are accompanied by a paper plane being ‘flown’ around the space and so forth, but easily overlooked given the scope of ambition of a piece that’s willing to chase big game. The result is as entertaining as it is unsettling.
Photograph: Craig Fleming
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