Reviews Performance Published 22 October 2014

Schlock!

Camden People's Theatre ⋄ 8th October 2014

Cut-up performance.

Alice Saville

Hannah Silva opens her performance literally tearing into 50 Shades with her teeth, and spitting the pages round the stage. She’s devouring as well as tearing into her source text here, splicing E.L. James’s Twilight-inspired narrative with Kathy Acker’s experimental punk poetry and writings about her own cancer, set to a loop-peddle music of sighs and moans. As the furore cloaking 50 Shades of Grey moves on to tut over the results of Great British Bake Off, this most mainstream of masochistic narratives endures a more radical kind of discussion in Hannah Silva’s cut-up performance.

Kathy Acker plays with subjectivity, appropriating other author’s texts and narratives to add to her own. Silva’s technique is full of subtly shifting “I”s, too, as she inhabits both Acker and 50 Shades narrator Ana’s voices in turn, and adds her own subtle voice of criticism or disruption. Although there are plenty of inevitable moments of humour from a narrator who can primly announce that “I don’t remember reading about nipple clamps in the Bible,” Silva resists letting an audience just laugh at separated out, stray sheep lines -“chocolate starfish” et al. Instead, she reads passages in intense, distinct experiments, each with a mood and music of its own.

One is a reading of a contract Christian writes for Ana, with queasy-comical proscriptive rules that set out the rules for their “arrangement”. These specify that he may do almost anything he wants to her, whenever he wants, bar family commitments or health problems on her part.They oblige her to be demure, not answer back, and forbid between-meal snacks except fruit. Silva appends the list with an irreverent “without hesitation, deviation, or repetition” – then, as Ana, devours a pear with the satisfaction of being able to take control over something, even a proscribed and deliberately sensual snack.

Christian is agonisingly po-faced – a kind of sadistic Brit-flick amalgalm crafted from (of course) Robert Pattinson, Hugh Grant, with just the faintest dose of Pride & Prejudice’s Mr Collins for good measure. “I found some baby oil. Let me rub it on your behind” he announces, while Ana replies in QVC-tinged tones “from makeup remover to soothing balm for a spanked ass, who would have thought it was such a versatile liquid.”

Here, Silva chokes out the lines between an euphorically bubbling, child-like kind of laughter – but not at their stilted, involuntary humour. She’s re-imagined Ana as a baby, and Christian as a mother, reframing their interactions into a disturbing take on the dominant-submissive dynamic. Another passage accompanies an assemblage of fragments from the novel which mention the word “pain” with a loop-pedal chorus of Silva’s sighs with a plainsong purity. Her voice has an incredible intensity, able to gasp out words in agony or ecstasy, channel a pornified girlish rapture, or fill with sadness. Like Christian, Silva has her captive audience hanging on her every breath.

During the post-show discussion for this preview performance, Hannah Silva explains that one of her inspirations here was the sense of sadness she found underlying the book — it’s a novel of sighs, as much as gasps. Ana states that she wants to be her own person, that she doesn’t want the kind of relationship she’s ended up in, and Silva’s conversations with BDSM experts have reinforced that Ana and Christian’s relationship is far from the idea of enthusiastic consent, and borders on manipulative and abusive.

There’s anger here, but the calculated intensity of Silva’s performance subverts it into a kind of ritualistic magic. Silva has deliberately scraped away the village book club, illicit tube-read naughtiness of this breakout erotica hit to reveal a poem of quiet desolation, shot through with a cut-up collection of unsafe words.

This was a 20 minute preview of a piece which will premiere at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on 8th November 2014

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Alice Saville

Alice is editor of Exeunt, as well as working as a freelance arts journalist for publications including Time Out, Fest and Auditorium magazine. Follow her on Twitter @Raddington_B

Schlock! Show Info


Produced by Penned in the Margins, Aldeburgh Festival

Written by Hannah Silva

Link http://hannahsilva.wordpress.com/

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