★★☆☆☆
The performance art group In Bed With My Brother bring lashings of Amazon energy to this multimedia ragging of the world’s richest shopkeeper, Jeff Bezos. For a start, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory perform the show topless: they are a pair of arthouse warrior queens in blonde wigs who sometimes smash lemons with baseball bats; at other times — well, most times, to be honest — they teasingly abuse Bezos, the multibillionaire boss of Amazon.
Made after winning the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award last year, PRIME_TIME is a howl of rage rather than a nuanced critique. It is puerile by design. “Alexa, why is Jeff Bezos’s head so round and shiny?” they might ask in an extended sequence in which they try and fail to get Alexa to speak ill of her master. Or later, as they contemplate flying to Bezos’s home in Medina, Washington, to sort him out: “Alexa, how do you dispose of a body?”
Their ribald brio carries them a certain way, as does the inventive staging they have worked out with their director and co-creator Nora Alexander. They perform behind a plastic screen, as if working at an Amazon depot. A voice sporadically counts down their hour on stage towards the moment when their package arrives. Loud music, by the late electro artist Sophie, adds bleeping foreboding. Writing, too much to take in at once, rolls down the backdrop where Amazon-ish listings are also projected. If you feel dispossessed from the tech giants that run the planet, this could be your shindig.
Memorably extreme though it is, without more ideas to propel it, the show loses its lustre long before the hour is up. Why is Bezos such a baddie, except for being so preposterously rich? And never mind Bezos: what does our love-hate relationship with cheap, reliable, efficient, ruthless Amazon say about us? Yes, this is art, not an essay, they’re out to express frustration primarily, but even when you are trading in vibe like In Bed With My Brother you need to give that vibe more depth and variety to sustain it.
“To us, Jeff Bezos is the epitome of the capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal violence that’s destroying the planet,” they say in the programme. Phew, big statement. And one that, even if no one is going to unpack it entirely in an hour of performance art, calls for more than just name-calling.
To November 6; barbican.org.uk
Advertisement
https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2021/event/in-bed-with-my-brother-prime-time Follow @timesarts on Twitter to read the latest reviews