Mike Pearson |
| Pearson, Brookes, Thomas- Who Are You Looking at? , Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff , February 13, 2004 |
| The title of this strange performance you should recognise as the classic quite from Robert de Niro’s psychopathic taxi driver, but it’s become the opening gambit in many a physical encounter where one drunken male decides he wants an excuse for mindless violence. And it was fortuitous that the second in a series of shows on Cardiff living should be staged when the memory and shame of a tv documentary on the city was still fresh in the minds of the audience – indeed, we could only marvel that a production that relied heavily on video of city street life did not include any aggression at all (but, then, in scenes at Cardiff station we didn’t see any trains). If you happened to walk down St Mary Street on the way home from Chapter that night the reality of the uncontrollable substance- and testosterone-fuelled violence that dominates Cardiff’s clubland was inescapable. But here, in the technology-laden, smart, clean, hushed ambience of Chapter’s black box, it’s absent. The picture presented by Welsh theatrical supergroup Pearson, Brookes and Thomas was something altogether different as nine different screens tracked the movements of selected young women as they sat on a station platform, rode in taxis, gazed out of coffee-bar windows and examined a hotel bedroom – a more structured surveillance than the police CCTV cameras the capture identifiable aggressors. Some women had voice-overs, some remained mute, but there was this troubling image of their ideas, movements, relationships being not simply overheard but monitored and controlled. For this was the setting: Chapter’s theatre space converted into a kind of wartime control centre, at a long desk piled high with electronic equipment two middle-aged men, Mike Pearson (black-suited bald academic with his Apple Mac laptop) and Ed Thomas (charismatic chronicler of Wales’s confused search for its identity), reading carefully-scripted commentaries over and between the video images, all of it technically manipulated by Mike Brookes as he slides controls and pressed buttons. It was unabashedly the male as voyeur. What was ambiguous was the complicity of the female object of the gaze – was this a fiction, a quasi-documentary or something else ? The young women were credited for their appearances and their words and they were presumably performers rather than interviewees, but this is still challenging, dangerous sexual-politics territory. Pearson’s prose, rhetorical, lyrical, expresses the fears of someone who is tempted to moralise about the apparently manic behaviour of the young as he assumes the role of articulate old fogey. Thomas is more concerned with the snatches of romance, loneliness and uncertainty as he imposes possible narratives on so-say eavesdropped moments. In form the piece is fascinating, especially with John Hardy’s haunting music, but in content it veers from the disconcerting to the trivial. What does it say about Cardiff, to what extent is it a re-imagining, another verse in a song for a forgotten city, or is it a self-conscious exercise in artistic meditation ? I’m not really sure since, as I negotiate the vibrant but seemingly uncontrolled clashes of St Mary Street and head towards the station, I too am an uneasy voyeur of the spectacles of this young capital. Because me, I’m a country boy. After twenty years of urban living I now want nothing to do with the city. And I know why. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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