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German playwright Falk Richter’s ‘Trust’ is a wantonly outlandish grab bag of a show. It starts off with a monologue about late capitalism so wilfully dense that you half fear the whole thing is going to be an unbearably obtuse exercise in Euro froideur. But then the realisation dawns that it doesn’t take itself very seriously, and things click into place.
Returning to the Gate after recent success at the Royal Court and beyond, director Jude Christian also performs, taking on the role of a sort of droll emcee, narrating stories, bantering a little with the audience, and padding about in the background facilitating various skits of varying weirdness as performed by actors Pia Laborde-Noguez and Zephryn Taitte.
Initially, it seems like a show about how romantic relationships buckle and warp under the weight of time and baggage. Its amusing central skit – told in three instalments – follows an erstwhile couple unable to determine whether they went out for three weeks, 14 years ago, or if they split up after 14 years, three weeks ago.
What ‘Trust’ is really about, I think, is the way in which humanity is defined by its baggage – romantic and emotional, for sure, but other flotsam and jetsam, from cat videos to complex financial systems to Brexit. It’s difficult to see that Richter is trying to make a grand soapboxy point, but at the same time ‘Trust’ is surely celebratory of our mess – something exemplified by Bethany Wells’s glorious set, which starts off virtually bare, and ends up clogged with a veritable jungle of daft ephemera.
There are a couple of genuinely maddening bits, and occasionally the slight air of ‘serious’ theatre people dabbling in well-trod live art territory and expecting a medal or something. But for the most part ‘Trust’s eccentricities are loveable – there’s a genuine euphoria to its survey of humanity’s nonsense.
Returning to the Gate after recent success at the Royal Court and beyond, director Jude Christian also performs, taking on the role of a sort of droll emcee, narrating stories, bantering a little with the audience, and padding about in the background facilitating various skits of varying weirdness as performed by actors Pia Laborde-Noguez and Zephryn Taitte.
Initially, it seems like a show about how romantic relationships buckle and warp under the weight of time and baggage. Its amusing central skit – told in three instalments – follows an erstwhile couple unable to determine whether they went out for three weeks, 14 years ago, or if they split up after 14 years, three weeks ago.
What ‘Trust’ is really about, I think, is the way in which humanity is defined by its baggage – romantic and emotional, for sure, but other flotsam and jetsam, from cat videos to complex financial systems to Brexit. It’s difficult to see that Richter is trying to make a grand soapboxy point, but at the same time ‘Trust’ is surely celebratory of our mess – something exemplified by Bethany Wells’s glorious set, which starts off virtually bare, and ends up clogged with a veritable jungle of daft ephemera.
There are a couple of genuinely maddening bits, and occasionally the slight air of ‘serious’ theatre people dabbling in well-trod live art territory and expecting a medal or something. But for the most part ‘Trust’s eccentricities are loveable – there’s a genuine euphoria to its survey of humanity’s nonsense.