Review: GREG WOHEAD: COMEBACK SPECIAL, Shoreditch Town Hall, March 24 2016

Greg Wohead has seen Elvis Presley's 1968 Comeback Special over 100 times and it's fair to say that it's got into his head and, by the end of his re-enactment of the show (at Shoreditch Town Hall until 26 March and on tour), it's burrowed deep into ours too.

That's the result of a lot of repetition, as the same words Elvis spoke are said again 48 years on, the impact now very different. (It's an examination of the same kind of ideas that Jorge Luis Borges explored in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, in which a man writes Cervantes's original text again, hundreds of years later.)

It's more a show about time, iconography and creation than it is about Elvis (and it's definitely not an Elvis tribute show!) so it feels more like Performance Art than entertainment (as a long opaquely academic quote about "...troubling linear temporality..." in the programme suggests).

As such, the public for such works sits well outside the mainstream and are more likely to be found at festivals or in art schools than on wet Thursday nights in the City of London. and even they, if they're anything like me, would rather read about this kind of stuff than watch it from a slightly uncomfortable chair with no opportunity to replenish one's glass at the bar. Elvis once sang, "When no-one else can understand me..." and I'm not sure that I understood this.

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