Do you remember a time before questionnaires? Younger readers will be amazed that theatres could once tell what audiences were thinking by looking them in the eye. Simple as that.
Now we have institutional uncertainty. Organisations set out on a mission to please without knowing who they are pleasing or what they are trying to please them with. All they can do is talk in a soulless corporate voice, showing impersonal concern as they give us another feedback form. That’s when they’re not pummelling us with aggressive jollity, turning “Are you having a good time!” from a question into a command.
At some point, Rosa Postlethwaite has been complicit in this. Now the arts employee-turned-performer is atoning. Her aim is to satirise the funding and commissioning structures that allow shows such as Composed to happen. In a series of self-aware routines, she reels off the names of her funders (from Gateshead council to the student loans company), parodies the platitudes of Tannoy announcements and instructs us in the emotions she, as our corporate host, would like us to feel.
So deadpan is her delivery, however, it’s hard to know when she’s in earnest and when she’s sending it all up. With its audio description, surtitles and trigger warnings, the production is genuinely inclusive, even as Postlethwaite seems to be lampooning an industry obsessed with cushioning us from art’s jagged edges.
Despite her political intent to expose “systems of oppression” and a vaguely Brexity theme about fear of outsiders, this is theatre about theatre, inward-looking and niche. Quirkily amusing though it is, her performance is so laden with irony, she mystifies the very industry she wants to make transparent.
