Kids grow up so fast.
Just a few minutes ago they were so carefree, bopping along to Don’t Stop Me Now. And now look at them – sullen and disaffected, smoking and snogging. And wait, suddenly they’ve aged again. Now they’re glumly attending a birthday party for a middle-aged friend, talking about jobs and schools and homemade sushi. And now they’re dead.
This experiment in accelerated living is the latest from the English-German collective Gob Squad (Kitchen, Super Night Shot), commissioned by the Belgian group Campo. Here, the adult performers of Gob Squad have ceded the stage to an adorable troupe of seven teens and tweens. These kids are stuck inside a box lined with one-way mirrors (we in the audience see them, but they only see their own reflections). As directed by a clever soundtrack and an unseen mistress of ceremonies, we witness their imagined, often disappointing lives in 70 minutes.
As in previous Gob Squad works, there’s an overriding concern with the difference between life as any of us experiences it and life mediated by film and television and our own enculturated expectations. There’s the usual trip-wired search for authenticity, for a reality that transcends performance, and the children here are an appropriate mix of amateurs and professionals.
There’s plenty of pathos available, particularly when the younger versions of the kids (recorded on video) confront their envisaged older selves, asking about young adulthood and middle-age. “What’s it like being a teenager?” a tiny seventh grader asks. “Cool,” says the older version unconvincingly, her scowling mouth wreathed in black lipstick. At each stage one of the children is directed to a microphone and asked to describe the freedoms and responsibilities of 21 or 40 or 80. These speeches resemble an artier version of that terrific number from Matilda, When I Grow Up.
The piece is never as revelatory as an earlier Public Theatre work also performed by teens, Once and for All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, by the Belgian troupe Ontroerend Goed. Before Your Very Eyes tells us what we already know – that life goes by quickly, that we probably won’t enact the futures we envision – and you can often feel the calculation behind the poignancy. More might have been made of the relationship between the children and the voice of the adult minder and it’s never clear if the characters the youngsters play are lives the children imagine or what Gob Squad’s adult creators have designed. But how many works can productively integrate Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage with Queen’s greatest hits?
Throughout, the children are disarming in their enthusiasm and occasional awkwardness. The overarching effect is silly, tender and sad. Maybe that’s just like life. Maybe it isn’t. It’s still pretty wonderful to see.
