Revolution Now!

Samuel Beckett Theatre ****

WHY IS it that contemporary theatre is often criticised for not being “political” enough, while politics is routinely dismissed as “theatre”? They both share similar ambitions – to represent the people, to effect change – they each make occasional, wonderful achievements, but are too often marred by disappointments and outright failures. Clearly it’s time for a revolution.

Cue Gob Squad, the Nottingham-originated, Berlin-based multimedia bricoleurs, who enter the space in bandanas and military jackets, striped tight pants and keffiyeh scarves – a radical chic that owes as much to Mother Courageas Pirates of the Caribbean.To the tune of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin',they begin their near-manifesto: "Come writers and critics who prophesise with your pen/ Unsure of revolution in 2011."

That line must have scanned better when the piece debuted last year, but time has added two awkward syllables, not to mention one London riot, the current Occupy Wall Street protest (and its international offshoots), and the not insignificant matter of the Arab Spring. These really are revolutionary times and Gob Squad – the charmingly playful, self-deprecating ironists – are caught between movements, trying to “stage” a revolution without a cause.

Instead, they have an aesthetic, enlisting the audience to emulate radical iconography: we pose with flags or super-soakers or samizdat literature for an emergency broadcast live from our barricaded theatre to a television on Pearse Street. This is all tremendous, giddying fun: hugging strangers or an electric guitar (try to sit next to one) while shredding for whatever it is that we’re supposed to achieve or overthrow.

But such distracting, materialism-addled busyness replicates precisely the pacifying superstructure created by late capitalism, which now makes revolution seem so inconceivable, comrades! True, Gob Squad merrily implicate themselves in their own critique (“Would you surrender your iPhone 4 for the cause?” a doe-eyed Sean Patten is asked) but any revolution without an agenda can be hijacked or subverted. “The process, not the platform, is the point,” wrote one commentator of Occupy Wall Street. Here, it’s the other way around.

The theatre might achieve something revolutionary, Gob Squad suggest, if they can unite an audience and persuade at least one passer-by on that lightly populated, generally disinterested street, to join – nay lead – our ambiguous movement. It’s a wonderfully goofy and very cute idea, and our part in the game is beguiling, believing that theatre can reach beyond its confines and change somebody’s worldview, however modestly. When, on opening night, an unflappably good-natured pedestrian named Rory joined a long historical procession of student radicals and became our liberator (the show only concludes when they find one), it felt for a stirring moment as though theatre and politics had forged a non-partisan alliance. In an irony that not even Gob Squad could have anticipated, however, it turned out that Rory is an acting student . . . Revolution soon!

Ends Saturday

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