The first thing to note – and maybe the last – is that This is an anagram of shit. The mud the characters wallow in is a big stinking metaphor: basically, we’re up to our necks in shit. This might be an interesting place to begin a conversation, but as an overarching artistic concept – well, it’s a bit like a sick poo: thin and runny.
David Woods is the director and “lead artist”, which means whatever we feel about This we can blame directly on him. He has an excellent pedigree as the co-founder of Ridiculusmus and regular collaborator with Back to Back Theatre. And This had a brief, albeit aborted, run as an immersive art installation at the Newport Substation in 2021, before being rewritten and remounted here at the Old Richmond Power Station. All of which is to say, we should expect great things from the work.
The new venue is certainly a fascinating liminal space for a performance of this kind. Built in 1891 and decommissioned in 1976, it was redeveloped in the Kennett era as a corporate space and stands now as a grand, ruinous emblem of soulless privatisation. Naomi Milgrom is about to redevelop it again as a major arts space, but in the meantime she has generously handed it over to Woods and his team of artists to soil and besmirch as they see fit.
There are a lot of artists involved – it’s eye-watering to remember This received $243,000 in government funding – including a 20-strong cast and almost as many writers, and while Woods tries to assemble these disparate artistic visions into a cohesive whole, the overall result is a bloated, miserable mess. The satirical targets are blurred, the political point-scoring indulgent and the humour wearingly undergraduate. Momentary flashes of brilliance do occur, but the night is long and dreary.
This begins in the theatre foyer, with a string trio playing pleasantly above us and the various officials buzzing around officiously. We can tell they’re cast members by the overacting in their hushed conversations, and this faux-corporate parade eventually coalesces into a series of speeches satirising the uneasy relationship between art and money. Some of this parodic material is very funny, especially Kerith Manderson-Galvin’s self-obsessed festival program director and Ben Grant’s clowning with a microphone stand.
Unfortunately, like everything in This, the gags outstay their welcome and become increasingly tedious. The satire has an uncanny tendency to be simultaneously abstruse and obvious – as in an extended scene of a woman ranting outside the foyer doors about racism and cancel culture – and it is somewhat of a relief when the audience is ushered upstairs to a new space, a long corridor fitted out to look like a Covid-testing site, all plastic chairs and people in PPE.
It’s advised to “get tested” during this deliberately prosaic longueur, because those who don’t are punished by being made to stand in the balcony above the final playing space for the remainder of the evening – as if we all weren’t being punished enough. This is where the mud comes in, and where various characters degrade themselves in boggy dissolution.
There are a father and daughter (Angus Cerini and Nicci Wilks) enacting visceral but also incomprehensible scenes of violence; an avuncular cannibal obsessed with canning (Grant, in the only performance that feels rounded and vibrant); and a politician (Vince Crowley), who rather ingeniously falls from the ceiling and then finds himself on a spit. Above this playing space is a house where a bunch of migrants gather and play music, half-heartedly railing at the state of housing.
So many ideas are suggested, then either abandoned or indulged into meaninglessness. People hurriedly cross this wasteland to get into the house above, in a commentary on the myopia of the middle classes. But then we are encouraged to see the people above as a kind of eulogised migrant community of squatters, ennobled and yet still othered, still exoticised. Woods and his team of writers are constantly attempting to subvert cultural assumptions they end up reinforcing. The result is a work that feels smug, glib and self-satisfied.
There is an underlying attempt at inclusiveness in This that can be applauded – the creative team is refreshingly diverse and multicultural – but the work is crying out for a singular galvanising artistic vision, one a sole playwright might have been able to deliver. For all its ambition and scale, for all the resources that have been poured into it like effluent into a sewer, This is frankly pretty shit.
This is on as part of Rising festival at Old Richmond Power Station until 18 June
