Established in 2014, the Yard theatre’s Now festival is a fringe showcase of new and experimental performance, this year opening with a new work from Marikiscrycrycry (the artist moniker of Malik Nashad Sharpe). Goner is a solo show that keeps reminding us – sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly – that Sharpe is in fact never alone: there’s always us, the audience, looking and waiting and wanting.
Throughout the long opening section, Sharpe faces determinedly away from us, presenting a bare back, pink-orange chap trousers highlighting dancehall hips, an embroidered plait reaching from neck to knees so that it dangles between their pulsating buttocks like a macramé tail. The scene is as highly sexualised as it is de-eroticised: no sense of pleasure or person, just the moves, just the parts.
It’s an effective slow-burn tension-raiser, snapped as Sharpe swings round in sudden darkness, face uplit, Blair Witch style, eyes staring at us in fear. Why?
The remainder of the show never quite delivers on the promise of this cliffhanger moment, but instead offers a loosely strung sequence of scenes in which a flat-toned female voiceover identifies Sharpe – Squid Game style – as “player number 222”. In one scene, Sharpe rants about the sunless hellhole they’re in, while clinging to inner memories of hopes and happiness. In another, they ask why we would want to torture them for our entertainment.
I was particularly taken with a kind of shower-scene slasher combined with body-horror birth breakout, Sharpe gouging their way out of a plastic-sheeted cubicle, blood spraying everywhere; but baffled by others in which they unfurl a fluffy rug strewn with crumpled cans, or beat the hell out of a little metal trolley. Was the scene where Sharpe is gunned down in a doorway made before or after the breaking news of the shooting of Ralph Yarl? Either way, it speaks powerfully of the demonisation and killing of Black men.
Somewhere in the pulse of this show there circulates ideas about monsters, fears, fantasies and violence, and the complicities and conflicts between actor and audience in how these play out. Yet the scenes themselves don’t really hold together; rather, it is Sharpe’s charismatic performing presence that holds the stage, regardless.
At the Yard theatre, London, until 22 April. The Now festival runs until 13 May.
