Artangel’s new show could hardly have a more suitable setting. Have Your Circumstances Changed? takes place in the windows of a disused shop in a mall in Archway, north London, built to hum with life, but now battered and disregarded. Three wordless scenes feature elderly men, watched close-up but through glass by a maximum audience of 18.
As each man goes through a daily routine that has become as cumbersome as picking up a needle with a crane, he is visited by a young boy, who cavorts acrobatically around the living space, balancing on the side of a bath, break-dancing past an armchair. These boys are part genies, part destructive imps: reminders and glimpses into the future.
Domesticity looks surreal when magnified. We seem to be watching the slow unfurling of a strange species in a wildlife film. Ordinary sounds, heard through earphones and amplified, become terrifying.
In a not very full, not very clean kitchen a man sits at a table with a pillbox beside him; he wears a wedding ring. A cupboard contains a giant box of Rice Krispies; when he drops it, the sound explodes in the earphones like a hailstorm. So far, so recognisable. But then the cupboard door opens on piles of fresh earth and a drawer turns out to be full of growing seedlings. Out of the fridge steps a youth, followed by a very live chicken. The boy replaces ancient pot noodles with fresh eggs. He conducts a cooking lesson as if he were a martial arts instructor. By the end of the scene there is an omelette. And some hope.
In the next-door window, life on and off the telly becomes fused. An elderly man’s treasured possessions start to slide along his sideboard like prizes on a quiz show. In the third scene, the most static and the boldest, our star is helped into a bath. Not, however, before he has pulled and probed every inch of his face, watched the lav explode, and seen a gargantuan snake of gooey hair get extracted from the plughole. Dudley Sutton is outstanding as he faces these daily terrors. He has often played sinister rogues and engaging scamps. Sitting stoically in the bath he looks as if he would have made a good Roman emperor.
