Review of Red Bastard – the case for drama-workshop as ‘show.’
Red Bastard and the case for drama-workshop as interactive show.
Visually, Red Bastard, dressed in a red stretch-suit covering fake belly and buttock bulges, is the modern relation of so many antagonists. He is the The Devil of early religious drama, the Harlequin-Trickster/ crude Clown of Commedia-dell’arte and the character most likely to sport a phallus in Aristophanes. He observes, provokes and takes pleasure in others’ discomfort…with a joyful grimace. Springing on stage with light-footed physical theatre virtuosity, he proceeds to demonstrate his embodiment of all vices – horny self-stroking, bumb-function miming, all the while throwing out little tests to the audience. He identifies the most beautiful, most suspect people in the room as objects for bantering, observational comedy.
His agenda within a small-scale arts centre show, is therefore comfortingly predictable for the regular performance attendee. In engaging us with various exercises, he makes us face ourselves. We break the ice by licking fingers in front of our audience neighbours, we compete as audience sections to see which can be ‘as big’ as possible…covering space, height and the complicity of strangers.
At this point I am taken into flashback. Every drama school graduate of the last twenty years will remember those staple lessons…the ones that eaked out the best and worst of us with cringeworthy broad-strokes. There was the particularly confessional Acting lesson in which a bored director asked us to bare our stories of pain and vulnerability to the group before working on something loosely related. There was the lesson in which we silently and physically decided who of the group were to be idols and sacrifices, (Lord of the Flies style) as a reflection on mercenary ‘group dynamics’, and there were the countless Voice and Movement workshops in which we ‘released’ our primaeval natures through bloodcurdling grunts and stampedes. Woven through this gauntlet of incestuous exhaustion was the voice of various tutors freestyling about Truth. ‘I don’t believe you…do you believe you? Make your truth bigger! What is your character’s Truth?
As Red Bastard pounces upon our dreams we are encouraged to shout out our most cherished or else let it fester in the bag of unrealised potential forever more. There were a lot dancing with dolphins in far parts of the atlas dreams and some frustrated ‘breaking out of the system’ dreams. Red Bastard then turned CBT coach (in the guise of Red Bastard), asking individuals what they needed to make these dreams manifest…steering conclusions to towards the theme of money and the illusions of what we ‘must’/’need’ do.
For a Norwich audience this mode of musing was probably very pertinent. In a city where graduates and artists significantly outnumber the amount of interesting job prospects, how one channels aspiration is a constructive question. How does one invent oneself in a world of potentialities limited by money and mind-set? The potency and high-energy application of this question makes Red Bastard’s show compelling. The workshop form used to grapple with this is beautifully simple and whether or not such content should be reframed as a ‘show’ is academic. From a moral perspective, Red Bastard wins.
