The challenging strangeness of daily life has been rich territory for performance artist Bobby Baker. Now, she turns from chaotic dysfunction to fixing things with the launch of her 11-step self-help programme, How to Live.
The show is a glorious spoof of self-help mumbo jumbo - specifically, the practice of cognitive behavioural therapy - yet it has a serious side. For all the laughs, there is the fact that Baker herself has been helped by therapy, and that makes the chortles a little uneasy at times. Also, in a large auditorium, she succeeds in creating creepy echoes of real self-help seminars, and it's hard not to get caught up in the atmosphere. We find ourselves doing as we are told, even when the instructions are preposterous (rolling a pea around in our mouths and then biting into it), and there is something moving about the rousing, spiritual finale - even though it involves a swaying curtain of peas bathed in a rainbow of warm light.
Baker plays the therapist, launching a credo that is in turn common-sensical, vague and menacing. Her patient on stage is a pea - apparently mirroring how small and insignificant Baker felt when she first went into therapy - and much fun is had with this surreal detail ("I'd love it if you chipped in," she tells the pea). But the core of the performance is Baker's portrayal of a therapist floundering as she tries to live by her own programme, stumbling at every step.
This is where the biggest laughs are, as she jumps over a course of crisp packets to demonstrate the value of the ludicrous second step. But it is also where the abjection and tragedy lurk. Once again, Bobby Baker melds these moods uniquely in a performance that is farcical and dark - but, as she promises at the outset, does make you feel better.
