Peer through a shop window at north London’s Archway Mall and you are in for a surprise. You may spot a young boy and an elderly man playing a game of football in a living-room setting. Or see a chicken clucking around a kitchen where a child and a man are making an omelette together. This is part of Artangel’s triptych of 15-minute performances, created by director Lu Kemp in collaboration with older men in the London borough of Islington. You put on headphones and watch through glass as daily life is excavated by three professional actors and local boys in kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms.
The performances emerged from a community project aimed at teaching older men basic cookery skills. That is surely where the real and lasting value of the project lies, in the genuine interventions in daily lives, rather than these staged performances. Nonetheless, there are some lovely moments.
A boy tenderly shampoos an old man’s thinning hair. Bare cupboards in a kitchen suddenly sprout and bloom. The questions in a quiz booming from a TV start to get personal, and the sideboard becomes a Generation Game-style memory test, perhaps reflecting concerns around dementia.
The play is at its most vivid when the everyday meets the surreal; hence the chicken, or the running water that sounds like thunder. The relationship between the older man and younger boy also has the potential to tug at your heart: does the child exist at all? Is he a younger version of the older man? But the relationship between the past, present and future is never sufficiently choreographed or explored emotionally. The tension between the internal and external is underplayed. What we witness is a series of actions, but seldom the interior emotional texture of them; the glass distances us, so that these snapshots of daily life remain just snapshots.
- At Archway Mall, London, until 2 July. Details: artangel.org.uk.
