17 - If Destroyed Still True, Sedated by a Brick at Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol

Sedated by a Brick is a performance company featuring Fraisia Dunn, Neil Puttick and Gareth Mayer, who has been my friend since we were both five. Gareth and I have a long-standing agreement to differ on our views of theatre and performance: Gareth thinks I don’t ‘get’ his kind of contemporary performance and I think no one does and people pretend to ‘get it’ because they are pretentious and anyway can’t we just go and see a nice Shakespeare? In the good natured spirit of this long-standing clash of perspectives I hope he won’t mind me reviewing their latest production from my perspective.

All three members of Sedated by a Brick are talented performers and they have a knack for presenting strong imagery on stage. If Destroyed Still True is a classic example of their style: a collision between theatre and performance art. However I felt that it was just missing the most vital elements of both, and reinstating these would turn it into a more powerful theatrical experience.

Theatre is about telling stories. This performance hinted at a story, but didn’t present us with any characters so we were not emotionally involved enough to care. And there were not quite enough hints for us to piece together a story out of the string of vaguely connected images we were shown.

Performance art on the other hand, and actually I think all art, should be about emoting an emotional response from the person watching it or putting across a message or thought of some kind. When I have seen iconic performance art in the past I have felt strongly afterwards: whether disturbed, upset, amused, drained. Here too I don’t think this performance quite succeeds. Because we didn’t have any context for the events or characters, we didn’t know what was happening and couldn’t derive anything from it. An image I particularly liked involved Gareth breathing into the mouth of an inanimate Fraisia who is lying next to Neil with their necks overlapping. Gareth then compresses Fraisia’s chest and this action inflates Neil’s chest. He compresses Neil’s chest and as he breathes out, Fraisia’s chest inflates again. This action seems to imply Gareth is resurrecting the inanimate figures and bringing them back to life, but this conflicts with what he does shortly afterwards- removing their clothes and wrapping Fraisia, Neil and the clothes in bin liners. This left me confused and with the impression that the performance didn’t actually communicate anything.

In the bar afterwards another member of the audience said it a disdaining tone of voice ‘there were a lot of people laughing in the audience.’ I said ‘yeah, it was funny.’ And at many points it was. Whether developing this piece further or working on their next project, Sedated by a Brick should look hard at the audience’s response and build on it. Organic performance like this can’t be about deciding how the audience should respond to something and then, if they react differently, dismissing them as not intelligent enough. Happily Sedated by a Brick are a company that is interested in the audience’s reaction to their work, to the extent that in the foyer after the performance we were invited to react to it by finishing a basis line drawing of a face which was printed on the back of the programme. These were put up on the wall for everyone to see and added to the mood of creativity among the audience who had just emerged. Conversations about interpreting the piece were flying around the bar and I liked the way the performance had provoked discussion among so many different people.

Sedated by a Brick are a talented and experimental group. By polishing their production and feeding from the audience responses they have provoked I think they will continue to develop and produce divisive and challenging work. Go and see their next production and let me know what you think, I’ll be there.