IT’S A MOTHERF**KING PLEASURE at the VAULT Festival
★★★★
“The cast are all entirely charming, pushing the audience to a gentle discomfort whilst keeping the tone silly and fun”
VAULT Festival has an offering of nearly 600 shows across three months. I’m reviewing a fair few, and whilst some were picked because the blurb piqued my interest, 600 shows is a lot to sift through. So I must admit, quite a few were picked because someone recommended them, as is the case with It’s a Motherf***ing Pleasure. But as the cast rather gleefully points out, this is the first performance of the show, so how on earth could the ES or Lyn Gardner know if it were any good, or indeed “important”?
Aarian Mehrabani, one of three cast members claims this is a perfect of example of non-disabled guilt, recommending a completely unknown show likely just because it’s created by FlawBored, a disability-led theatre company. In this instance it’s worked in their favour- the auditorium is packed. But It’s a Mother F***ing Pleasure seeks to work through some of the darker consequences of this impulse, and those who are happy to take advantage of it.
They also readily admit it’s a difficult conversation to navigate, spending the first ten minutes desperately ensuring that the audience’s access requirements are taken care of, and the last ten minutes apologising profusely to everyone they’ve no doubt offended.
And somewhere in the middle they tell a story that, whilst not technically true, has no doubt taken place in some form or other in multiple corporate offices: a PR agency has been accused of being ableist after one of their influencers has said something questionable on their channel. And, of course, rather than think about how this has happened and seek to educate themselves, they decide to monetise this opportunity and hire a brown, gay, blind influencer to become the face of Revision, a series of blind ‘experiences’ to sell to the guilt-ridden seeing public.
The cast are all entirely charming, pushing the audience to a gentle discomfort whilst keeping the tone silly and fun. The idea of ICAD- Integrated Creative Audio Description, which describes, not just what’s happening, but the vibe, is genuinely brilliant and I look forward to other shows employing it in earnest.
The plot itself starts strong, funny and relatable, and necessarily takes a sharp turn off a cliff. But it heroically saves itself with lashings of self-awareness. The reviewers in the audience are warned that should they give any less than four stars, everyone will think they’re a c*nt for criticising a disability-led theatre company. And on the way out, the audience is offered ‘I’m an ally’ badges, and printed suggestions of enthusiastic tweets, to show that they’re not ableist.
I, of course, would never be swayed by such things. Sure, I took a badge to show everyone, as Chloe Palmer tells me, that I’m not ableist anymore, and that I’m better than everyone else. But I would never give a skewed rating no matter how blind the cast is. I just happened to really like it. Funny, chaotic and wincingly relevant.
“Technically slick, the lighting, sound, music and movement coalesce to create a West End experience in miniature”
When Ishmael arrives at ‘The Spouter’ run by Peter Coffin, it’s clear Moby Dick’s author, Herman Melville, loves an ominous portent, so he would have loved the fact that the opening week of Douglas Baker’s stage adaptation started with a dead humpback in the Thames. However, with humanity’s disregard for nature a central theme of both the book and this radical new envisioning, Melville would have seen the current climate change protests as just as relevant and a dark testament to his prophetic work.
Rather like Theatre Workshop’s ‘Oh! What a Lovely War’, the full throttle irreverence in the treatment of a deadly serious subject is a powerfully winning formula for this ‘So it Goes Theatre’ production. Accentuating the homoerotic undercurrents and humour of the original while modernising its scope to encompass the problems of junk food, plastic waste and reckless corporate behaviour, the show miraculously manages not only to remain faithful to the essence of this literary leviathan, but to make it fresh and accessible though the inventive use of projections, Baker’s own video design and some corking sea shanties (Alex Chard).
It’s not immediately clear that the approach will hold water. The opening sketch leading to the book’s iconic first line ‘Call me Ishmael’, is inspired, but seems to be based on the trivial fact that Starbucks derived its name (fairly randomly) from the Pequod’s first mate. However, the storyline cleverly pivots into Ishmael’s meditation that whenever life becomes formless and incomprehensible on land he hankers for the sea, where a sense of comradeship, structure and purpose creates, paradoxically, more certainty. Which is all fine until Captain Ahab’s obsession with the great white whale increasingly becomes a madness that embraces murder and waste without conscience.
Charlie Tantam conveys Ahab’s destructive will with increasing force, assisted by a terrifyingly exaggerated limp. Equally accomplished are Rob Peacock as Old Ishmael and Ben Howarth as Young Ishmael; collectively they comprise an ingenious narrative tool allowing the book’s narrator voice to survive alongside the thrill of the protagonist’s journey. Stephen Erhirhi is a distant and disengaged Queequeg at first, though his detachment takes on heavy significance later as he accepts the fate that the humanity of which he is a part has in store. Lucianne Regan plays Starbuck fairly straight too, but as an ensemble they are well balanced and create the movement of the ship in a storm and the hunting scenes with great skill. Technically slick, the lighting (Toby Smith), sound (Calum Perrin), music (Richard Kerry) and movement (Matthew Coulton) coalesce to create a West End experience in miniature, overseen by Douglas Baker’s direction. This format for Moby Dick neutralises the dense 19th Century prose without losing some of its finer passages, whilst delivering quite the topical punch.
