In autumn 2019, the married couple Frauke Requardt and Daniel Oliver toured a performance called Dadderrs, which featured audience interaction and participation. Amid the coronavirus crisis, it’s hard even to imagine what that might have felt like. Now, in a collaboration with film-maker Susanne Dietz, the piece has been reimagined for online viewing. Filmed during lockdown at Requardt and Oliver’s home, it is an hour-long playlist of 11 mini-episodes (plus an optional extra episode of “grown-up stuff”), playing on a small screen, very near you. Mobile devices will be fine; just be sure to use earphones.
As with many series, the first couple of episodes are expository: Requardt and Oliver are a “neurodivergent” couple (she has ADHD, he dyspraxia); they have two kids; they’re doing this show at home with no live audience, which is a bit weird. A bit? They’re wearing shaggy orange trousers, yelling “welcome to the Meadowdrome!” and stage mist is pumping in from the kitchen.
The piece riffs on the frisson between them, and between mundanity and absurdity. Great white balloons fill the hallway. They costume up as a kind of double-headed pantomime llama, conjoined but at cross-purposes: she sings a ditty while he blathers about the nature of discourse, or suchlike.
To this cocktail of surrealism, domesticity and performance-art lampooning, they add a shot of bitters. Requardt wants to uncouple from the double-headed creature. She wanders around the garden on her own, and meets the cameraman’s Covid-19-compliantly gloved finger, which tickles her furry ear. Oh my! What is to become of the Meadowdrome? What about the kids?
Do watch the whole series to see how this plays out. For if Dadderrs is one more version of an oft-told tale – marriage – I’ve never seen it told quite like this. Simultaneously self-aware and apparently artless, it’s trippy, deadpan and befuddling as well as brave and true. Also hilarious: I was hooting with laughter.
What it’s not is filmed performance: it’s the transmutation of a performance into a web series that has not jettisoned its live roots. Surreality TV, perhaps. I wanted to applaud, which felt a bit weird.
