Writer: Tim Crouch
Directors: Karl James and Andy Smith
Anybody who’s been in the same room as someone using a VR headset knows that if you can’t see what they can, it’s generally a thankless experience. The only enjoyment is watching someone’s real-world limbs flailing about as they attempt to interact with a world visible only inside the oversized goggles.
So an evening of watching somebody wearing a VR headset describe the world they’re seeing may not initially seem like the most entertaining evening. But this is Tim Crouch, so it most definitely is.
In the Battersea Arts Centre’s panelled Council Chamber, with the house lights up full, a headset-wearing Crouch describes another theatre altogether. He points out the audience members in this other world: a group of schoolboys in one area, a block of corporate sponsorships in another, a woman with access needs and her carer sitting at the front, near a gentleman who’s taken a little too much advantage of a pre-theatre dinner combo deal.
Alongside the audience, he also describes the play they are watching: a production of King Lear, in which he is playing the Fool (whose quote is the source of this work’s title). The vividness of Crouch’s words paints us a picture of his virtual theatre, such that it is easy to forget that we are not physically there with him.
It’s all beautifully observed fun, but there are points Crouch is making, not least when contrasting the price of each ticket with the hourly rate of the ushers on minimum wage who are attending to every need of their customers.
From time to time, the VR headset comes off, at which point some of the subtleties of Pippa Murphy’s sound design reveal themselves: the headset-free Crouch is no longer amplified, his voice reduced to a smaller version of himself just as he is returned into a smaller theatre.
During these sections, he picks up a hand mic to deliver jokes, and to talk about the state of theatre, a medium he provocatively describes not as dying, but as dead. Television, the Covid pandemic, and other reasons combine in Crouch’s fatalistic vision – albeit a vision delivered with a smile and jokes. One particular joke involves a version of the classic off-colour “The Aristocrats” joke, transposed to an X Factor-like TV talent show. Crouch replaces every description of something that might possibly be taboo – bodily excreta, sexual positions, incestuous encounters – with “you know” phrases so that all the words are completely banal. But the images he paints are so vivid that he invites us to visualise and witness the depravity. Crouch does not need a headset to place us into our own virtual world.
And maybe that’s the takeaway from this superbly entertaining 70 minutes in Crouch’s company: we do not need clumsy, expensive tech to build ourselves an immersive world when theatre can do it for us. Crouch certainly doesn’t; early on he reveals his headset is not actually showing him anything. For him, and for us, live theatre is capable of doing the same.
In King Lear, Edgar is able to persuade his suicidal blind father, Gloucester, that he is on a cliff’s edge so that the old man will survive a fatal leap. Forming a version of the truth out of thin air like that only works because that is what theatre does. And while he says that theatre is dead, Crouch successfully invites us to believe the opposite: that it is alive – theatre is, literally, vital.
Continues until 18 March 2023
