I went to see the Michael Clark Company show Mmm… at the Barbican last night. It was great in all sorts of ways, including the fact that it left me unable to describe how it made me feel or what it made me think so I won’t try.
It couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the production of Metamorphosis that I saw at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith a couple of weeks ago. That was the worst show I’ve seen for ages: undisciplined, carelessly directed, full of cheap, meaningless acrobatics and crowd-pleasing jokes that the silly audience found hilarious. I felt like I was watching a school end-of-term production in which the Head of English had done his very best to use the performers’ talents in whatever way he could. “Smithkinson is very acrobatic, let’s have him bouncing on a trampoline and then he can do that thing on those BBC ident films where they kind of roll their body down a long length of fabric.” It was one of those shows where it looks like the performers are having a marvellous time, the audience are enjoying the spectacle and I’m feeling like a gooseberry. I got the impression that many of the people watching had come to hear the soundtrack, which was done by Nick Cave and was occasionally OK but generally pointless. I suppose the management at the Lyric think it’s a Good Thing to encourage ‘young people’ into the theatre. Not like this it isn’t. Go and see Michael Clark, young people, even the music’s better.
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