Press Review: The Times (Becs Andrews)
November 18, 2004
Theatre
Jeff Koons
Sam Marlowe at the ICA, SW1
THERE’S a deliberate perversity about the work of the American artist Jeff Koons. Wilfully vulgar, it represents the elevation of kitsch to the status of high art, from a gilded sculpture of Michael Jackson with his pet monkey, Bubbles, to canvases depicting his sex life with his porn-star ex-wife. This new play by the German writer Rainald Goetz, translated by David Tushingham, takes some of the questions Koons’s art throws up — what is art, what is beauty, and how do either of them relate to life as it is actually lived — and applies them to human interaction in a pop-culture setting.
The opening night of Gordon Anderson’s ATC production at the ICA was bedevilled by technical problems, which meant that the entire lighting design had to be jettisoned. Even so, it looked ravishing.
Becs Andrews’s 2003 Linbury prize-winning set consists of a platform covered in black rubber, into which circular holes are cut. To a thumping electro soundtrack, fluoro-clad denizens of clubland gather to dance, and share drugs and fragmented conversations. White balloons rise through the holes in the floor, pulsing to the music. Then the cast peel back the black rubber to reveal a white surface, and plug each of the holes with a brightly coloured circle of foam. A couple, dressed in white, step on to the platform to perform a choreographed representation of a one-night stand. Pigment from the foam discs smears over their bodies and clothes. What we are looking at, we realise, is a giant paintbox — and the couple are creating a living artwork in which a potentially sordid encounter becomes beautiful.
This is a reflexive work, without named characters or plot, in which the actors themselves discuss what the play might be about. At its centre is an artist figure, part tortured soul, part clown, whose latest work is a huge model of a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg — which could mean anything or absolutely nothing.
But there seems little beneath the play’s flashy surface — apt for a piece inspired by Koons, perhaps, but dramatically unenlivening. When it does try for emotional engagement, Goetz’s script ends up sounding poetically pretentious, which is perhaps why Anderson largely avoids taking it too seriously.
But the nudge-nudge knowingness of his production quickly grows monotonous. Go and feast your eyes, by all means; just don’t expect to feel anything.
Box office: 020-7930 3647