It was impossible to imagine that the Traverse could come up with a more pretentious piece of nonsense than Sniperculture as part of its festival programme, but it has succeeded with the People Show 113 - unlucky for all of us. Inspired by the cult 1960s film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? - in which two ageing film stars (Joan Crawford and Bette Davis) played two former movie star sisters - this has four actors supposedly locked in a room and acting out scenes from the film at the behest of someone at the end of a telephone.
Intended as a deconstruction of the original movie, but one that sheds little light on either object or its surrounding cult, this turns out to be a perverse and pointless exercise that doesn't even have the virtue of being funny, despite its many camp possibilities. With the cast initially telling us the story of the film, and the movie then relayed on TV screens throughout the performance, the question is, why watch actors pretending to be actors pretending to be Joan Crawford and Bette Davis pretending to be the Hudson sisters when we could just watch the movie itself?
There is some tap-dancing, which provides the smallest of compensations, and the actors work very, very hard, but this is a desperate 70 minutes that puts the con into deconstruction - and a hole in the Traverse programme.
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