In a hotel room high above London, a man lies naked on a bed with only his shadow for company. He is a businessman, who knows about the cut and thrust of the deal brokered in the public spaces of restaurants and bars. Cocooned in the cotton wool intimacy of the anonymous darkened hotel room, the city lights twinkling across the skyline, he gets dressed to go to a conference and reflects on his past.
The latest piece from New York maverick Richard Maxwell is a perfect meld of form and content that uses the illusion of intimacy to explore the desolation of modern life. The hotel room is, of course, a staged environment. A place that is not home and yet is a substitute for home. It is a place of hidden lives. It is full of ghosts. Of lives that fleetingly passed through.
Showcase captures this perfectly. It has a peeping-Tom quality, a sense of voyeurism as 20 or so of us perch on the bed and watch. Like the man's shadow, we are there and yet we are not there. We encourage the confessional.
This is Maxwell's most intriguing piece for some time because it pushes the boundaries of his hyperrealist style and explores the very nature of performance itself. Just as the shock of his early work was in a deadpan performance style that allowed the banal to become genuinely tragic, so here the impact comes from the sense of experiencing something that, removed from the theatre, offers us nowhere to hide.
