Towards the start of this entertaining two-hander about life-changing moments, performers Jenna Watt and Ashley Smith lose patience with their risk-assessment instructions. They want a show bursting with pyrotechnics, where each explosion symbolises the danger, excitement and fear of breaking your routine. To play by the book is too tame. They throw the instructions away.
As it happens, the fireworks they set off are more beautiful than perilous. Triggered by moments of greatest crisis in the true stories of George, who ditches a dream job that is making him ill, and John, who swaps the daily grind for a foreign adventure, the pyrotechnics create billowing clouds of colour that stand for the characters’ hidden emotional states.
Such moments are both striking and poignant. A jar of yellow smoke magically turns into candyfloss, which Smith eats as if consuming her own inner turmoil. Watt, meanwhile, gives new meaning to the words “smoking jacket” when she hooks herself up to a machine that sends wisps of smoke seeping through the fabric of her coat like streams of repressed angst.
The most powerful image is self-generated. Taped into a boiler suit, Watt places a funnel in her mouth, loads it with paint powder and blows. As she splutters and coughs, she creates a picture that is at once gorgeous and full of jeopardy. It’s a contradiction that sums up the uncertainty behind every life-changing decision we make.
How You Gonna Live Your Dash (the dash being the line that connects the dates of birth and death on a gravestone) reflects and refracts this theme, bouncing it around imaginatively and playfully, half-comic, half-serious. If there’s a downside, it’s that it toys with the ideas rather than take them to a deeper level. For all its dazzle and spark, it doesn’t quite convince you of the importance of the changes it describes.
- Touring until 13 February. Details: jennawatt.co.uk
