Lost in a Sea of Glass and Tin
We had already waited for a good while, puzzling over the detritus strewn across the stage, before the performers had taken to the stage. Nonetheless, they immediately confounded the idea that they had started, or even what that meant, by fiddling with the props, adjusting sound equipment, and generally faffing about, while a projected countdown informed the audience how long was left to wait before the show began. Very little happened for what felt like a long time, and a palpable sense of unease descended - nervous laughter quickly filling the vacuum as audience members grabbed hold of the slightest movement on stage, investing it with a humour and meaning barely detectable. I was reminded on John Cage’s insistence that 4’33’’ did not consist of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but instead was meant to focus attention on the sounds of the environment in which the performance took place. I’m guessing that Gary Winters and Claire Hind had something very similar in mind during the first five minutes of “Lost in a Sea of Glass and Tin” - it certainly proved to be an apposite start to an evening that sought to question what theatre can and should be.
Having cheekily inverted the idea of performance, by having us watch one we were told wasn’t happening, the disorientation continued when the show proper turned out to be Gary taping a cardboard drinking cup to his head while Claire went through a check list for looking after the house. Perhaps I should say at this stage that a major component of the performance was confounding expectation, something that is hard to talk sensibly about without compromising the element of surprise. So if you’ve fallen across this review with the intention of finding out what the show is all about, you might want to think about stopping reading. If you are about to go see “Lost in a Sea of Glass and Tin” then you really should go in blind.
With the spoiler alert dealt with, let’s start by saying Gary Winters and Claire Hind are certainly a striking pair. Winters, hirsute and dressed all in white, his angular frame frequently writhing across the floor, offered a striking contrast to Hind, who in homely blue party dress, with matching blue face, politely curtsied between increasingly fraught anecdotes. There was a simple homespun artistry to the tableaux the pair created with back projections of windmills juxtaposed with Clare spinning a chair on its hind legs, while Gary sang Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, and it was remarkable how quickly this bizarre set up became normalised. I found myself thinking that Gary had quite a decent voice, only to realize, with a jolt, that I was watching a man with a cup stuck to the side of his head. The instinct to stifle laughter while someone is singing with such heart felt sincerity is powerful, yet this was clearly absurd, and so surely it was fair play to be laughing, wasn’t it? But would I be laughing it at, or with, them? We, the audience, hadn’t been told the rules and the consequent discomfort this caused was, I’m sure, entirely intentional.
Gary now had a balloon and a second cup attached to him, as Claire takes us through the routines of the office. I am conscious I am hanging on every word, desperate to draw a narrative out of loopiness, intrigued by where the character is going and why she isn’t coming back. It’s a sneaky trick and we are swiftly cut adrift and plunged back into further madness. The performance morphs into an explicit nod to the work of David Lynch that so clearly inspires them, with a bare bones rendition of Angelo Badalamenti’s theme to Twin Peaks. Clare plays really badly, something said not out of spite but to further illustrate the ambiguity of what we’re seeing. Is her mis-keying a metaphor for the crumbling persona of her character, or does Claire the performer just need more practice? Such disquieting thoughts re-emerge later when cunningly edited footage of a lawn sprinkler should have provided witty percussion for Tainted Love, but the effect was torpedoed by poor timing, which could have been illustrating a wider point, but to me just felt like they needed more rehearsal time. Some would argue that this is the great strength of performance art – that is so receptive to different interpretations – and it certainly makes it artistically bombproof. But if we are content to project meaning on to whatever happens, rather than have it radiate out from the intent of the artist, then what are we really seeing, and why? It can be safely said is that much of what Claire and Gary presented was both utterly bonkers and great fun, but the harder question is whether there was anything more to it than that.
As the performance drew to a close, the evening teetered close to falling into a pro forma groove for this sort of thing, and boredom and ennui started to win over intrigue and expectation. Claire (inevitably) smashed up the chair she had been spinning all night, and Gary ran out of headspace (and maybe ideas) so simply started letting his balloons roam free. That said, the very last vignette, with both of them enveloped in something akin to Doctor Who Yeti costumes (google Patrick Troughton era for further guidance) was properly nuts. As they led the audience out of the Arts Centre and onto the surrounding streets it felt both subversive and genuinely hilarious. The vision of two Yetis negotiating the traffic round the back of Toys R Us, plaintively calling to each other with concealed tooting devices, while leading bewildered NAC punters ever further from the safety of a performance space, is an image I will long treasure, whatever their intent.
