Difficult to categorise, impossible to forget
Power, by its nature, demands an audience, and what better place to conduct its autopsy than a theatre. BULLYACHE, the choreographic duo of Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel, understand this instinctively as A Good Man Is Hard To Find is a ritualistic dissection of the men who broke the world in 2008. That it manages to be, in places, darkly and uncomfortably funny speaks as much to the inherent absurdity of its subject matter as it does to the duo’s considerable wit.
The inspiration is drawn from two on the surface distinct sources. The first is the 2008 financial crash; the second is the Bohemian Grove’s annual Cremation of Care ceremony, in which members of the global elite gather each year to symbolically cast off their guilt amongst the California redwoods. TOR Studio’s set makes the metaphor architectural, dominated by a vast boardroom table and office windows smashed outward as though something enormous has forced its way through. We arrive, like Deyn’s blue-uniformed cleaner, only for the aftermath.
It is a compelling one. A naked man crawls across the ash-covered floor while another stands, trousers at his ankles, whisky glass in hand, surveying the wreckage of the night before. BULLYACHE are not subtle about what these men represent, though whether that constitutes a flaw or a feature depends on one’s appetite for ambiguity. When the show pivots mid-work into a bit resembling a gameshow, revealing these figures as the architects of financial catastrophe, it is difficult not to be won over. This gleefully camp sequence was added late in the process, when the duo recognised a transition was missing between the brooding opening and the darkness of the finale, and yet it slots in with the ease of something that was always meant to be there.
The choreography consistently earns its place and it is the five dancers who truly carry the evening. Each one is a distinct and fully realised presence, commanding the stage alone before becoming more unsettling as part of the whole. Ballroom-inflected movement is wrested into something predatory and when they converge beneath Bianca Peruzzi’s flickering lights the effect is nothing short of electrifying – every ensemble passage lands with an alive and dangerous force rather than merely well-rehearsed. These are not dancers in service of a concept but performers operating at the height of their considerable powers, and it is difficult to imagine another cast making this work feel quite so complete.
BULLYACHE’S own compositions sit alongside Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony in C minor, a work originally conceived as a protest against Stalinist terror and here re-contextualised with awareness of the political moment. Deyn’s singing performances, most strikingly Schubert’s Ave Maria, could rupture the atmosphere, which speaks to just how BULLYACHE have command of the atmosphere they have created.
The final third is the most uncompromising section of the work, and if it asks a great deal of its audience, the dancers make that task feel entirely worthwhile. They are magnetic to the last, and one leaves wishing there had been more of them.
What remains is an ambitious piece difficult to categorise, difficult to forget and performed with a commitment that is difficult to overstate. In a landscape crowded with the safely provocative, BULLYACHE have made something urgent of this moment.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find runs until Saturday 9th May at Sadler’s Wells East, London. Tickets here.