Just as there’s no consensus on what leads to cases of demonic possession (mental illness, an over-fertile imagination, or the devil’s work?), so, too, Ross Sutherland’s solo show could be one of several things. Is it a comedy, a piss-take or a heartfelt spine-tingler? It certainly makes you jump, as lights flicker, wild squawks puncture the silence and Sutherland’s Father David Smith tries to drive evil out of a traumatised family home.
But this is no straightforward bone-chiller. The dramatic register switches as unpredictably as the temperature in Sutherland’s haunted house, as deadpan ghost story becomes broad comedy becomes knowing onstage cultural critique. I only ever had a fleeting sense of what Sutherland was getting at, but it’s got something to do with the theory advanced by Father David’s exorcism guru, that demonic possession is a form of conceptual art.
And so the show unfolds as a battle between a disembodied artist, forever embroiling his victims in new conceptual and narrative worlds, and a priest-cum-critic, dispelling them with – well, a pop song, as it happens. Presumably that’s the exorcism equivalent of a one-star review. Sutherland by turns narrates and acts out Father David’s gruelling journey, which messes with his (and our) heads. Is he an apprentice exorcist at all, or is this a fever dream in which he must slay the demons of a lifetime of guilt and mediocrity?
I couldn’t answer that question with any certainty, but I can promise that Sutherland’s show – in Rob Watt’s taut production – makes for intriguing, distinctive viewing. When he needs to, Sutherland gets just right the slightly numbed cadences and thousand-yard stare of the survivor of spiritual assault. Real tension is stoked at what might be round the next corner – even if that’s another comic set piece, as the artist/demon starts dredging the bottom of the creative barrel.
The meaning of it all is elusive, which is partly the point, I suspect, of an enterprise that’s cynical about trite narrative closure. It’s a show that pulls the rug out from under you so many times you begin to doubt there’s anything solid underfoot whatsoever.
