Writer and Director: Gaynor O’Flynn
Being a woman of a certain age, Gaynor O’Flynn feels invisible on the internet. In an online world where youth and beauty are idolised, if not fetishised, on Instagram that’s understandable. But rather than disappear completely, O’Flynn takes her invisibility as an opportunity to listen, unseen, to what the women she has known – women whose success keeps them visible – are saying.
As a concept, that’s not a bad one. Nor is the idea that O’Flynn will hear those women talking about her if they do not know she is listening. And the idea of using animated avatars to represent the other women, lip-synced to O’Flynn’s monologue, promises to be an intriguing concept.
Unfortunately, TIME fails to live up to its promise on nearly every level. Those avatars – projected to be over 10 feet tall – lack either realism or an engaging cartoonish quality, sitting uncomfortably between the two. The lip-syncing is, at its best moments, in time, but never looks like genuine speech. At other times, there seems to be no correlation between speech and animation at all. Sometimes, the whole head seems to belong to a different body, like someone peering through a photo board on a seaside pier.
If the characterisations of the women were distinct enough, one could overlook a noble but flawed attempt to bring such animation style into the theatrical realm. But O’Flynn’s delivery, delivered offstage, is the same for each woman she portrays. Worse than that, her writing style is identical not only for these women but for her own monologues. Every other sentence is a list – “my decisions, my choices, my life, my path,” or talking about art as “the galleries, the curator, the money, the game”.
The effect is one of relentless monotony, not helpful to the piece overall. It doesn’t help matters that O’Flynn has to duck behind the projection screen each time one of her other characters speaks, leaving the stage to soulless characters twice her height, whose dead eyes look over the heads of the audience.
And the contents of these monologues also lack any sense of variety. One by one, these women talk about O’Flynn – or the version of O’Flynn on stage, at any rate – as if they encountered a god of the arts. The success she sees in others is a projection, but reflected back she is given a wave of recognition she doesn’t see in herself.
And that could be an interesting message to convey: sometimes we don’t see the good in ourselves, and need others to show it to us. But with O’Flynn’s delivery being so flatly consistent, it never sounds like anything other than her own writing telling us how amazing she is. One of her other characters describes her as “never narcissistic”, which doesn’t seem to be laden with the sarcasm it needs, and instead feels just grossly unaware.
So while TIME promises much about the use of innovative techniques that have rarely been seen on stage, what we get instead is a demonstration that technology alone is not enough: if it is to be used to replace humans on stage, it is going to need more careful writing and storytelling than is on evidence here.
Continues until 12 March 2023
