The Audience. The Host. The Guest. The Band. The Ants. Read more …
On the set of a live TV chat show, the host interviews the guest, the film rolls, and the band plays. People and power and pop music. We’re here to get to the heart of the matter but everything keeps on changing. Including time, space, and the audience.
Them! is a visionary new performance event from Stewart Laing and Pamela Carter exploring identity in a changing world. Can we ever really change who we are? Or, if change is inevitable, then what are we so scared of?
A production that is consistently entertaining but is still a bit up itself to be taken too seriously.
The end result is a bold, playful and ever-expanding theatrical mash-up that provokes, meditates, sings, shouts and dances its way through a mixed-up, muddled up, shook-up world with glorious abandon.
Pamela Carter and Stewart Laing's new NTS show is an iconoclastic triumph.
While I don't want to reveal too much about Them! - I will confess that I don't entirely know what did actually happen...! I know that I enjoyed it (despite the nearly unbearable heat inside the venue) but I'd definitely struggle to tell anybody what it was actually about.
Existential ant-ics about identity and change leave us with more questions than answers.
Laing’s production offers more questions than it does answers and that intellectual courage has to be admired. But in a difficult climate like the one we’re living through, where helplessness seems endemic, now seems an odd moment to remind us of our smallness.
The “Them!” experience is delivered with astonishing flair and class throughout.
The mix results in some fascinating moments, even if the disparate elements don’t entirely cohere.
Ends up being noticeably less than the sum of its parts, concluding with a dissipated whimper, not a focused bang.
Suffice it to say it provides an appropriately original ending to a fascinatingly unconventional and highly imaginative theatre work.
Carla J Easton--Them!
National Theatre of Scotland's Them!: 'Theatre that recognises the multiplicity of identities'.
Tramway, Glasgow from Thursday June 27, 2019, until Saturday July 6, 2019. More info: www.tramway.org
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