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The Yard seems to have got verrrry into shows about the aching vacuity of modern life lately, and live art duo Made in China strike again with a smart, stylish look at social media and self-loathing, the anxiety bubbling away beneath carefully composed surfaces.
It’s created and performed by Jess Latowicki, with Tim Cowbury as dramaturg; most of it is filmed live and projected above the stage. Naturally.
Latowicki gives a great performance: she begins in a dry-baked, deadpan, millennial monotone, accompanied by stiff ritualised little gestures – a drolly funny and cuttingly astute internal monologue for the Instagram age. But her performance both loosens and intensifies as she gets further into a spiralling existential crisis, until ‘Super Duper Close Up’ rises to a poetic, even mythic crescendo.
She plays a theatre-maker waiting for a meeting; chuntering on about things she can’t remember, trying not to Google them, worried she’s losing the ability to remember, which in turn makes her convinced she’s got Alzheimer’s – like her often-mentioned dead Jewish grandfather. She tells us what she does Google instead, from the cost of plastic surgery to Greek myths to bad reviews of other artists. Sure, it’s meant to be as overwhelming as her relentlessly scrolling brain, but we’d get it with less.
Latowicki may break into a sweat – seen in glistening, intimate close-up – but she has command of the stage, given its own sugary veneer in Emma Bailey’s fun design. Latowicki stands in a shiny Quality Street wrapper of a dress on a pink fluffy carpet, in front of glitter curtains and a cheesy waterfall backdrop.
Dramaturgically, however, Cowbury could have kept his end up: at an hour and 20 minutes, the show is too long and too baggy. It feels a draft or two away from something more focused and more rewarding. Too much flies by before you begin to get the point.