★★✰✰✰
Do Ludwig Wittgenstein and Andy Warhol have much in common besides being considered iconoclastic in their respective fields and having surnames that start with the same letter? Martin Crimp seems to think so. His new one-man play Not One of These People evokes the spirit of the philosopher and the artist in performance that is much a thought experiment as it is an installation. Crimp even bears a good resemblance to the snowy haired artist.
There is very little in Not One of These People that resembles a traditional play. Narrative and setting are out the window. All that remains are characters, 299 of them in fact, all of whom appear as a range of artificially generated faces on a projector. Each face has a statement, an anecdote or opinion that Crimp reads out in the same pacified fatherly tone from a clinically lit small set up on the side of the stage.
He makes no attempt to conjure any artifice. It is the audience who instinctively do the heavy lifting for him in imbuing each face with a character. We watch with sympathy imagining personalities beyond the screen; we laugh at their foibles, awkward idiosyncrasies, and murmur at their little dramas as if they are real. They are empty speech acts, a Wittgensteinian thought experiment inviting us to contemplate the act of speaking.
A strange dichotomy ensues. Crimp’s performance is hypnotic, doused with charm and humour. But it is clear that he has curated the faces to reveal something deeper; he touches on contemporary moral issues which are curated to draw out themes on racism, queerness, the duty of storytellers and cultural appropriation. If there is a central question it is that, who has the right to speak and perform? And the right to speak what? None of the faces are real. It’s all fiction. It’s all theatre! A show about shows and showing. The play even ends by coming full post-Modern circle by revealing Crimp in a study tapping away presumably writing the words he is performing.
Not One of These People gets a little bit lost in its navel gazing profundity, especially when you realise that the central premise has a gaping hole in it (a gaping Warhol if you will). Who gets to speak? The answer is right in front of us. Crimp does. There he is on stage speaking as characters with different ethnicities and genders to him. The meta-theatrical deconstruction trips over its own ambition nullifying itself in a performative contradiction. The question is answered as Crimp asks it.
Perhaps he ought to take a leaf out of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Words by Alexander Cohen
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