When multidisciplinary artist Peter Smith first performed their piece Diana in New York in 2019, it was a long-form lip sync piece using extensive segments from Diana, Princess of Wales’s Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.
Though a show of the same name has now arrived at the Soho Theatre, it is necessarily very different. Smith tells us that the BBC has refused the rights to use the material. “The BBC has its own problems at the moment,” Smith tells us, though whether they are referring to controversies over how Bashir gained access to Diana or some other recent scandal, we can only guess at.
And that sense of never quite knowing what Smith is on about pervades throughout this hour. Shorn of their original material, Smith takes a few phrases Diana used in the interview and weaves them into a completely new, not always coherent narrative.
Smith’s monologues are self-analytical, introspective and not without repetition: recurrent mentions of their children, and a husband who wants to spend more time with his own family, are spread throughout. Whether these are allegorical versions of Diana and Charles, or of Smith themselves, is unclear.
More cogent is a riff on the relationship between performer and audience, and the symbiotic, if not parasitical nature, of such co-dependency. But just as that starts to get interesting, Smith is off on other tangent altogether.
In Smith’s ramblings we get other swiping allusions to Diana’s life – a comment about conspiracy theories elicits a mention of Parisian tunnels – but the attention never sits on anything long enough to make an impression. And so we go from a discussion of women’s names ending in “-A” – from Diana, Athena, and Clytemnestra to Lady Gaga and Dua Lipa – to the subject of Ghislaine Maxwell’s birthday, or an anecdote about a Barbra Streisand concert.
Smith also throws up ideas about the LGBTQ+ experience, from how the AIDS epidemic may have contributed to the gay male pursuit of the muscular ideal to how testosterone levels tend to be suppressed in wartime. Any one of these ideas might have made for a useful focus: as Smith flits from one to the other, though, the impression is not of a coherent hour but a frenetic brainstorming session.
Smith’s monologue is split up by a number of original songs, which are pleasant enough. If you ever wondered what the Ramones would sound like if produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Smith delivers a reasonable approximation. But like the rest of the work, everything seems too fragmented for any one point to land.
It feels a shame that Smith’s hour here does not work, for there’s something unashamedly charismatic and warm about the performer. But Diana, in this form, is far less personable and demanding of our attention than its creator deserves.
Continues until 29 July 2023
