“Your most horrifying experience of direct address for 85 minutes”
Devised and performed by Cathy Naden and Seke Chimutengwende and directed by Tim Etchells, If All Else Fails brings the curtain down on Forced Entertainment’s 40th anniversary celebrations. Having enjoyed and relished the brilliance of L’Addition, If All Else Fails comes across like an unexpected car crash, chaotic and jarring, shattering my mind into miserable and disjointed fragments.
“Fragments of a language lesson.” Says the programme. It is indeed a lesson, as the performance duo directly talks to the audience with repeated stuff like “You are bad people. We are good people”. The language starts to variate when more adjectives are added, but the mode remains unchanged. When it comes to a certain point where the duo pretends to ask the audience to make a choice, you cannot help but sneer disdainfully: not only because it is out-dated, but also because of its apparent insincerity.
To be honest, there might be some conceptual underpinnings worth our reflections: gradually and vaguely, you may sense that those repeated pronouns “you” and “we” clearly denote the performers and the audiences, and in those repetitions, the show awkwardly attempts to explore their relationships, as well as the nature of performance. Till the very end of the show, they finally point out the significance of feeling. However, what they have claimed is exactly what they fail to present. Strangely, you cannot “feel” anything throughout the performance, because there’s no genuine engagement even in the moments of direct address.
While we all know Forced Entertainment demonstrates expertise in repetition and endurance, this could be executed in many ways other than enforced preaching. Why don’t I just go to the church? The lack of directorial staging has further exacerbated the issue. For most time in the 85 minutes, the duo remains standing still. When one of them starts to move around, it feels rather perplexing and unnecessary.
Given show’s nature of direct address, Jim Harrison’s lighting mostly remains natural shared light with a set of Source Four and Fresnel lights. At the beginning of the show, the shattered Source Four lights, together with the soft wash of the Fresnel lights, creating a fragmented effect on the stage that embeds a poetic montage. To some extent, it is the lighting design, combined with Tim Etchells and John Avery’s soundscape, that burdens all the theatricality of the show, mending up the performance’s dull, mechanic repetition.
If All Else Fails bills itself as a lesson and a test. But how can a lesson or test able to ignite emotions or feelings? Ultimately, this is a show that contradicts its own claim, leaving its audience disengaged and its message unfulfilled.