Review: TRUTH'S A DOG MUST TO KENNEL, Battersea Arts Centre

For a few minutes I thought I had died and gone to purgatory. Tim Crouch's Truth's a Dog Must to Kennel is grey, misty, and a bit dull. Dramatically and aesthetically austere, stripped back to almost nothing but a room and a man ungarnished by bright lights. Like limbo, it is not quite good but it's not wholly bad either.

It's meta-theatre at its most post-modern, a meditation on the nature of theatre as a piece of theatre: where does the truth of a world within a world within a world really lie? If that sounds like it is lost in the gloomy abyss of its own navel, it is.

Everything about it is stripped back to the essentials. It's just Crouch who wonders playfully around the aggressive empty space with a VR headset lost in an immersive production of King Lear. Intricately detailed ramblings paint a picture of his world, the veracity of which bleeds into a fictional audience around him.

He plays Lear's fool who decides to abandon his role and climb over the fourth wall into the audience - who is us, the actual audience, watching multiple narrative worlds cascade and collapse into each other. But don't go expecting explosions or carnage.

The slinky charm of his audacious austerity and fourth wall-shattering chutzpah is short lived. Plot, characters, conflict, tension exist for a reason: they are the terms of dramatic engagement. Without them there is a bloke standing in a room. That's probably the point of the performance, if you can call it a performance.

As seemingly thought provoking as the ideas are, they come at the cost of opportunity for engagement. A number of audience members checked their phones clandestinely. I admire their bravery when the house lights are on for the duration of the performance.

The oddest thing is Crouch's calm yet controlled presence. An experienced theatre-maker and performer, he never relinquishes his grip on the piece. There is an underlying sense of his palpable dramatic skill as he rambles and pontificates whether disarming his audience with deliberately stunted jokes, or leading us down a conceptual dead end only to back us out of it. It's a jarring combination but not an engrossing one. You can see the glint in his eyes as he gazes over the audience as if to say: don't you get it yet?

Call me old fashioned but I suspect that the only people who will enjoy what is essentially a staged metaphysics essay are tucked firmly into the deepest darkest corners of libraries and university Philosophy departments. Sure, the ideas are there, but he throws the baby out with the bathwater. Rules exist for a reason. If it is post-modernism you want, you are better off with Baudrillard.

Truth's a Dog to the Kennel plays at Battersea Arts Centre until 18 March

Photo Credit: Stuart Armitt

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