Theatre Souk
Theatre Delicatessen
3-4 Picton Place
Theatre Souk is a curated evening of fringe theatre in the midst of London’s busiest shopping district. Enter a world of theatre bartering: pay an entry fee and find the shows you want to see for an extra price of your choice. It’s a promising concept: in the midst of an artistic climate threatened by massive cuts, a consumer culture shaken to the bones and a serious rethinking of the relationship between money and value, Theatre Delicatessen, the production company behind Souk, have injected into their theatrical curation the power to sell itself to an audience.
Spread over three floors, with a cabaret bar on every level, there’s plenty to choose from: intimate performances, aerial work, challenging drama and interactive theatre. And as marketplaces tend to be, there’s a confusing hustle and bustle of characters, stage managers, bartenders, audience members, and actors on a break.
There’s also some great work on sale. On the top floor of the building you can check in to Mount Royal Hotel (an extract from Laura Wade’s 2005 play Breathing Corpses). Two hotel rooms, two chambermaids, two butlers and two men in a concoction of engagements where time is fluid, bodies are in constant motion, dead men speak and characters play each other in a frenzy of representation. There’s also some focused and confident acting from the cast, particularly butlers Benjamin and Crispin in their darkly humorous interactions. Two intriguing invitations, one for a birthday party and one for an autopsy, lead you to Soft Armour, an intriguingly structured piece of intertwining personal narratives about what marks us, physically and emotionally.
There’s also some less refined work that leaves you unsatisfied and maybe even angry. Half Cut’s piece Half Cut offers the possibility of paying to pluck, tweeze or shave someone’s body hair for various prices. There’s also no warning to the audience member that you’re being filmed, and screened in the bar upstairs. This is dangerous territory for performance; the piece lacks control of the situation or thoughtful intent- and I thought theatre had understood its rules of participation by now, and stopped trying to antagonize audience members for empty pranks.
Theatre Souk is an exciting promise, yet it doesn’t always deliver. There’s a lack of curation to the event that lies in detriment to the performances, an uneven level of quality to the work and a lack of clarity on the rules of engagement. If the performances are on sale, then why aren’t performers selling any of the shows? If gambling is the order of the day, then what are the rules of play? Without clarity and a refined narrative of engagement, Theatre Souk risks blending with the mediocre instead of meeting the expectations set.
Despite its lack of refinement, Theatre Souk is a project to be championed. There is a lot of endearing work and plenty of fine, confident interaction. At a time when our relationship to cultural consumption is challenged, it’s crucial to respond. Theatre Delicatessen have certainly created a worthy platform of work, bringing forward the notion of responsibility to both makers and audiences alike.
Tagged: Theatre Delicatessen