Writer: Victor Esses
Co-Director: Yorgos Petrou
Victor Esses seems like a very nice person. His one-man performance (the talking in the show comes mainly via home video of his auntie, with patches of narration and a bunch of almost indecipherable projected text blocks) credits six people in the programme whose roles are not readily discernible. He has a very busy on-stage guitarist, making tunes and sounds and looping stuff, so he (Enrico Aurigemma) deserves a mention. But movement director? Victor Esses painstakingly dons a pair of hard-soled shoes and walks back and forth across the fore-stage, and at the end, he takes a fez down from a cord, puts it on, and does a deliberately ungainly, exhausting, vigorous dance for far longer than the audience is comfortable with watching. Does that need movement directing? Or basic improvisation by a solo performer who is well aware that they can’t dance?
It’s a well-intentioned overlong hour of family anecdote and a modicum of self-analysis, with badly designed tech and a lot of blurry grey home video. Victor Esses is charming, and his little patches of audience participation are by a considerable distance the best thing in the show, and his auntie seems like an interesting auntie that it would have been fun to meet. The spine of the show is Victor’s filmed interview with his great aunt Marcelle, who had remade her life several times, moved from Judaism to Christianity and Lebanon to Rome, and provided her lost nephew with a template for self-renewal. That is an affecting, pertinent story, that gets very lost in a welter of bad projection onto orange screens and bumpy walls.
The performance elements – the marching across the fore-stage and the self-flagellating dance routine, the perfunctory audience participation, the wash of looped guitar phrases – are frequently a bit floundering and desperate, and that may be the point, demonstrating the lostness of a boy growing up Jewish and gay in Lebanon, and having to remake himself, but they are still hard to watch. And if large passages of text, which possibly illuminate the entire show, are to be employed, they need to be brighter, clearer, bigger, and without a mic stand obscuring the centre of the screen for anyone sitting stage right.
Runs until 13 April 2024
