Writers and Directors: Belle Bao and Jiazheng Li
The Camden Fringe is certainly the place to experiment and, although many of the plays included are straightforward narrative dramas, Bodies for Rent Theatre Company presents a philosophical piece musing on reality, truth and bodily functions. Bubbling, written and directed by Belle Bao and Jiazheng Li is consciously absurdist and references Samuel Beckett in its promotional material, but the trick to creating a piece of seemingly unstructured drama is that it needs a great deal of structure to make it work in practice.
Three strangers are trapped in a room, or maybe they are containing themselves. When an unexpected fart breaks the ice, a flow of conversation begins that explores the things they want, the things they feel and their influence over one another.
Bao and Li’s existential drama is not an easy experience to navigate with all of its purpose and connection with the audience seemingly just out of reach. A series of interactions take place across this 45-minute show; most are conversations between two of the characters who actively acknowledge each other’s existence while a third speaks in existential monologues. At times, they move each other’s bodies around, either physically placing them or implying puppetry with invisible strings until eventually the three form a unison of sorts.
The piece is confusingly set around a rectangular storage box with a plastic lid, the only prop, which comes to represent many things including the containment they experience as well as a freedom, offering a portal to the world beyond. One of the characters lovingly inhales from it while rhapsodising about the human sense of smell and the whiff of fabric cleaner on washed sheets; at some point, all of the actors put their heads inside the box and wear it. The box has such a central position in this show, so it’s a shame never to really understand what Bodies for Rent want the audience to see.
The jerky conversations are just as elusive from the opener “Can you smell my fart” to discussions of what superpowers they would like, the freedom of fish, if reality exists and what truth is. The combined effect is exhausting and takes the audience no closer to understanding what these people are doing in this room or indeed better comprehending the human condition in the way that their idol Beckett manages to unfold in his single-room plays. His characters may talk nonsense, but they do so in ways that move the drama forward to an unresolved resolution, the paradox missing from Bubbling, which is just unresolved.
Performed by Siyu Chen, Lorraine Yu and Timotheus Widmer, there is potential here, the company has its characters, they have a scenario and they have nonsense conversation content that could run deeper than it currently does. What Bubbling needs is meaning to bring it all together.
Runs until 22 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
