“Hastings’ performance is complicated and heart-rending”
As the audience files in, we’re initially greeted with a collage of screens playing wholesome random snippets- a merry-go-round, a dance troupe, pastries rising in the oven, a man juggling for the entertainment of a fluffy rodent- while ‘The Moon Belongs to Everyone’ plays on repeat. As soon as the lights dim, however, the screens switch to a news report about a bomb used in Vietnam. This is pretty much the order for the evening, splicing seemingly innocuous memories and feelings with deeply disturbing information. In a nutshell, “While I was at senior prom, I didn’t know my mom was being strangled.”
It’s hard to pin down a single narrative or message. Everything seems to be linked for writer and performer Rhys Hastings, but it’s impossible to unpick, or even understand everything being thrown at us. Hastings appears to be both trying to work through his trauma, as well as being completely immobilised by it; by telling his story he hopes that it heals something, but equally in remembering it all, he’s only reliving it.
According to the programme notes, this is supposed to be an exploration of ‘safe spaces’, but really it seems to be saying there’s no such thing, particularly in the world of creativity.
Hastings’ performance is complicated and heart-rending. It’s hard to know quite how autobiographical this story is, but either way, his character presents as confused and confusing: trying to be a good person, failing a lot, trying to work out what that even means.
Directed by Nastazja Domaradzka, Caceroleo is daring and brilliantly aggressive in its execution, placing the audience in the centre of a tornado with little to no explanation. It’s both hard to watch and hard to look away, and I leave the venue feeling confused myself, and not a little fragile.
“It’s a sunny outlook on a very bleak landscape, but somehow it does the trick”
After singing along to two choruses of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ with writer-performer Sam Ward and the rest of the audience, my theatre buddy takes her arm from around my shoulders as the lights go up, turns to me, and, smiling blissfully, says, “I didn’t get it.” That’s almost as much as you need to know really.
We Were Promised Honey! is a calmly conveyed confusion: In August 2018 a baggage handler, Richard, stole a plane and, after performing some amazing stunts, inevitably died on crash landing. Ward interlaces this with some very controlled audience participation, and long surreal monologues about what will happen after the play is finished- in five hours most of you will be asleep, in eight hours, one of you will send an email saying, ‘Great, thanks Claire’ before walking into your boss’s office and quitting to become a farmer. In fifty years, one of you will think you’re Jesus. In 500 years, when the sky turns black, one of you will turn to your partner and say, ‘Why does it always end like this?’
The evening is split into three, and before the start of each section, Ward gives his audience a choice: We can sit here in silence until the advertised runtime of the show is over, or, even though you already know it’s going to end badly, you can hear what happens next. I can’t imagine there’s ever been an audience so hive-minded and strong-willed not to say ‘I would like to know what happens next’ so it’s not much of a risk, but it makes the point Ward is, I think, trying to make: Yes, we are all going to die, and the world will eventually end, and one day the last black hole will eat itself and there will be nothing left. But in the meantime, there’s plenty to see and do and say, and we needn’t sit in silence, waiting for the end to come.
It’s a sunny outlook on a very bleak landscape, but somehow it does the trick, and rather than feeling despairing and solemn, the audience leaves the auditorium heartened, in an almost festival atmosphere. Of course, that might not be Ward’s point at all, and maybe I just didn’t get it. But paired with David Doyle’s seemingly godly lighting, Carmel Smickersgill’s contemplative soundscape, and Ward’s smiling self-assuredness, it doesn’t really matter how it’s supposed to end. The point is I enjoyed the journey.
