90 minutes in two parts
Performed by Caroline Wilkinson and Gary Stevens
Costume: Caroline Evans and Georgina Carless
The two performers stand behind separate pieces of furniture and project onto them different attitudes to being on the stage and being looked at. They slowly emerge from behind the objects and rehearse two incompatible accounts of their relationship with one another. They are alert to being ‘caught’ like naughty children dressing up in someone else’s clothes. The man quickly puts on more trousers, the woman more skirts, as if they are always vulnerable, naked and exposed. Their bodies are transformed as they accrue more clothing. The impression they give becomes simultaneously geriatric and infantile; the man resembles an onion consisting of nothing but layers, the woman resembles a bell. Their difference is emphasised and made meaningless.
Much of the show is about the embarrassment of being on stage without a proper role to play. Their self-consciousness grows out of their lack of place within a coherent representation.
The audience is included in the fiction. Their responses and thoughts are made up by the performers, sometimes plausibly, sometimes as ridiculous flights of fancy.
A carpet is rolled out over a pile of clothes strewn about the floor. It connects the furniture and makes an island of the objects. It works against the idea of a set interior.
Finally the performers are engulfed in clothing. Their separate identities are threatened and lost. In an effort to represent themselves, a small table is precariously balanced on the mound of carpet to represent the stage. Beer bottles are produced to stand in for the bodies of the performers, but as soon as they are placed on the table and released, they slide off onto the floor.
