This review is from London, May 2023. ‘The Talent’ transfers to the Edimnburgh Fringe.
A woman is sitting in a recording booth. She’s voicing an advert for some sort of breakfast product (‘oats’, we eventually discover). A pair of crackly disembodied voices – an English man and an American woman – are giving her pernickety, sometimes flat-out ludicrous direction. It’s not un-reminiscent of Matt Berry’s ‘Toast of London’ and the eponymous thesp’s weekly run-ins with twattish voiceover director Clem Fandango. Except here the woman, named Gemma (and played by Gemma Paintin) takes everything the voices throw at her with remarkable good grace.
After the oats she launches into what sounds like the dialogue for a character in a hokey space warfare game. Before long she’s blitzing through jobs – everything from underground train announcements to an automated phone scam – and burning through accents. Welsh, Scottish, American, Australian; at one point she’s asked to make her voice ‘halfway between French and German’ and she does it. She’s asked to make a soothing, wordless sound and she does it. She does it all.
Bristol-based performance duo Action Hero – who have here teamed up with Canadian artist Deborah Pearson – have a history of making shows in which they absurdly push themselves to the limits, from a mock Western in which the pair (Paintin and James Stenhouse) ended up doused in ketchup, to a budget recreation of one of legendary stuntman Evel Knievel's most famous leaps. The difference here is that far from being a fish out of water, Paintin has an absolutely extraordinary way with an accent – a fair part of the charm of ‘The Talent’ is simply how good she is, and her unflappable response to the mountingly bizarre demands.
Not that she’s exactly triumphing over adversity. Clearly there is something off. Nobody would actually be made to do this in real life, and although that’s also obviously funny, it does occur after a while that there is no door to the booth. Allusions are made to some sort of recent disaster. The reception on the line linking Gemma to the two speakers grows increasingly dodgy - why aren’t they all just in the same room together? Are these ludicrous recordings actually going to be used for the purposes that are nominally intended? Could they perhaps be recreations of sounds from a pre-disaster before time? Is Gemma some sort of slave or pet? Are the voices human? Is Gemma human? Is this a big old allegory for capitalism or something weirder? The longer ‘The Talent’ goes on for, the eerier and more existential it feels.
It’s not a show with any intention of offering you answers to the questions it raises. But it asks them in thrillingly strange and funny ways – Beckett’s hip, pop-culture savvy descendants.
