Two hours before Motor Vehicle Sundown I realise it’s an audio piece for two people – not just me. I quickly scrabble around to find a partner. I find one in Graeme. We climb the stairs of Trenchard Street car park and are directed to the roof. Mp3 players and headphones administered, we step out on top of the deserted multi-story and look out over a muggy, fertile Bristol. A lone car looms and, instructed by the voices in our head, we wander on over. It really is rather like a movie.
We start in the back and move to the front in due course. Before the show starts, you decide in your pairing who will be the driver and who the passenger. I drive (fitting, given that I can’t). The thirty minute audio piece that transpires taps two substantial wells: childhood and “America.” It’s a soporific experience that invites – instructs – you to lean your head against the cold window, close your eyes and imagine. Imagine you’re heading off to exotic sounding locations (“Sierra, Cordoba, Fiesta….”) Unnervingly the moment I do open my eyes I’m reminded to close them again.
There are two relationships being explored here – the one between you and the voice in the headphones; the other between you and your partner. The former is relatively straightforward: play along, or don’t; the latter more complex. As you nestle (as instructed) into a clinch, touch one another’s arms, and fiddle with gear sticks at the drive-in movie theatre there is a charged negotiation of intent. Inevitably Graeme and I snigger like schoolboys, but the class of this show allows the intimate experience you have to be one that would work whatever your gender, sexuality, age or relationship. You could do it with your Mum. Better still, someone you’re dating – not the first one, though: that might be weird.
With every invitation comes a lovingly laid trap. When my partner storms from the car, slams the door and takes a back seat, that (admittedly manufactured) imagined complicity is shattered. (Driver and passenger have divergent, but fully integrated instructions). Were it someone I actually wanted to be intimate with (much as I love Graeme) this betrayal would be all the more palpable. Of all combinations, two heterosexual men is possibly not the richest, by dint – generally speaking – of the lack of complexity these relationships tend to offer.
Motor Vehicle Sundown is not so much a narrative as a meditation: on the memory of being driven, of wanting to be able to drive (as a child not a teenager) – and the peculiar movie-centric fascination we have with the States (given our overexposure to Hollywood in our pre-teens). The America it eulogises is, from a British perspective, both familiar and exotic; tangible and elusive, and the success of this piece is that its form mirrors its dreaming content, ending as it does in a twilight of windscreen wipers and rain. It is a romantic, nostalgic, non-linear experience. Admittedly, it does require a degree of generosity of spirit on the part of its audience to accommodate the slightly arch nature of the show, but none more than is required to sit in a dark theatre whilst actors shout at you. And like everything else in this swaggering festival, it does so without apology. It’s a pretence: and a rather wonderful one at that.
