Slap Talk

Two performers (Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse) are six hours on stage.  They speak at each other – and often past each other – but not to each other.  They speak into cameras and they read from auto-cues (so they don’t have to remember six hours of text).  We can see them, on stools or advancing toward or retreating from their cameras, stage right and stage left.  We can see their faces in Close-Up or Extra-Close-Up on monitors down stage.  Their ‘dialogue’ begins as a heightened version of two boxers, pre-fight, attempting to put each other down, to psych each other out, to dominate with words before the actual fight (we never get to the actual fight).  Thus their ‘dialogue’ is combatative, aggressive, confrontational, repetitious and threatening, and, as the show goes on, spiralling into absurdity and metaphor often only tenuously connected to this original, basic, beginning idea - which is a clear exemplar of violent competition and an attempt to intimidate and dominate through language.

Here is the text at the very start, as published by Action Hero in ‘Action Plans - Selected Performance Pieces’: are you ready i’m ready are you ready i’m ready we’re both ready i’m so ready come on let’s hear it come on then i’m ready i was ready before you even sat down on your stool i was ready before you came in the room i was ready before you woke up this morning i was born ready i was ready before you were born

This starting point is a clear reference to Action Hero’s fascination with Sport as metaphor and battleground.  It’s relatively ‘innocent’, ridiculous and fun, but showing a straightforward demonstration of how the need to win leads to more and more hyperbole.  Ms Paintin and Mr Stenhouse do not adopt accents, regional, ethnic or otherwise: they speak (as in their Hoke’s Bluff) in their normal voices which in its way objectifies and distances the craziness of threat and counter-threat.  Very rarely do their characters, who have no fixed identity, engage with a counter-argument or rebuttal.  As the text develops, the interlocutors move into ridiculous boasts and into threats of evisceration, mayhem, dismemberment, cannibalism, seguing into an amusing dispute about how Marlon Brando pronounced the words ‘the horror’ in Apocalypse Now, and the question of for which movie did Marlon decline an Oscar, and seguing again into a sort of therapy session (‘You’re angry I’m not angry you’re angry fuck off see you’re angry let it out fuck off…’)

People are invited to enter and leave at will.  But if you miss the opening set-up or don’t read the premise somewhere, you may wonder what the hell is going on.  Some people arrived after the start and stayed maybe forty minutes – or less.  Perhaps I should not be saying anything about Slap Talk.  The Companion and I only made it to one hour and fifty minutes.  At the start, at 11 am, there were four of us in the audience.  (Too early for hipsters?)  This rose to eight or nine, but people didn’t stay and when we left it was down to four again… It can be impenetrable – or, once you get it (or perhaps you don’t), it can be a little tedious.  Apparently, across the six hours, the text moves on to conflict and the inherent violence of domestic bickering, shopping channel hard sell, fundamentalist preaching, capitalism versus socialism, science versus religion and so on…

But I’ll say something anyway.  The concept per se is valid, interesting and challenging, and the intention is clear – but does it take six hours to realise that intention?  Does it take such excessive (and at times soporific) accumulation and enumeration?  The intention is repeatedly realised, albeit in different and illuminating forms – that is, we get it, and then we get it again.  But each time we get it, we’ve hung on through some very tangential but lengthy connections and then the demonstration goes five or six beats too long.  For example, to demonstrate superhuman strength and ruthlessness, there is a string of boasts about ‘mowing down’ huge trees.  The trees are listed by species – one after another – and it becomes maddening – but possibly intentionally.

Later, Ms Paintin performs a string of examples of the banality of kittens and puppies on the Internet.  ‘Look, everybody, at the kitten fall off the chair – ha-ha-ha… look, everybody, at the kitten playing with the puppy –ha-ha-ha…’  It’s an indirect attack on the Internet per se, and the emphasis on ‘cute’ and ‘sweet’ and ‘aww’ is a denial of the violence of the hidden context.  It too much and disproportionate before we get to, ‘look, everybody, at the giant insect eating the head of another insect – ha-ha-ha…’  ‘During all this, Ms Paintan is in Extreme Close-Up on the monitor, her ‘laughter’ false, forced and grotesque.  It goes on and on until Ms Paintin herself appears sick of it and exhausted – and Mr Stenhouse seems quite uninterested.  All right, yes, enough, already. 

Slap Talk is, it seems to me, an experiment in language and performance and the use of a performance space.  Clearly, as far as Action Hero is concerned, it’s an experiment worth repeating – and they are too thoughtful and intelligent for one to dismiss it.  Not at all.  The claims made for it in the program notes are accurate.  ‘As the rapid-fire slanging match accelerates and exhausts… and words are emptied of meaning, Action Hero invite us to… contemplate our own collusion in language-as-violence.’  But complex as that idea may be, might it be conveyed in a way that keeps a spectator there for longer than forty minutes?  But I was there only for one hundred and ten.

Michael Brindley