The Roof (Doon Street Car Park, LIFT)
The name of Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg‘s new show is a little misleading. Based on its spatial reference, audiences might expect to be looking up at or down from a great height, while free-runners scale chimneys and spires. Instead, the roof of the title surrounds spectators who stand in a central arena – a wraparound cityscape. Its effect, however, is more impressive than immersive; visually arresting, but coolly removed.
That distance is perhaps apt. Requardt and Rosenberg ask their audience for both proximity and detachment, inviting us to take on the identity of an avatar whose movements are out of our control. Our "hero" – a slippery, ambivalent word – is Player 611, a newcomer to the strange game world that we find ourselves at the centre of. Reflecting the trend for recorded gameplay, and mimicking that dreamlike quality of being at once in and outside of one’s body, Player 611 becomes our representative in this world, running, jumping and punching his way through level after level.
Technically, the result is accomplished. Using the same binaural headphones technology that they have deployed in previous collaborations, Requardt and Rosenberg plunge us into Dave Price’s soundscape, tricking our senses with footsteps across the gravel or voices over our shoulders. The synchronisation between this soundtrack and the precise, mechanical choreography, meanwhile, is almost seamless. And the bewitching visuals are videogame meets David Lynch – a familiar aesthetic injected with sporadic shots of strangeness.
The challenges of constructing this collage of technical components, however, have distracted from the ideas swimming beneath. There is an intriguing germ of an idea in the implicit alignment of empty gameplay and existential crisis, but a germ it remains. There is also something uncomfortably familiar about the structure’s emphasis on winning at all costs, with the demand that "a man must constantly exceed his level" (a Bruce Lee quote, as it turns out) sounding like a queasy marriage of Tory political rhetoric and videogame advertising blurb.
But the nagging suspicion is that surface – spectacular and technically complex though that surface may be – has taken precedent over substance. We can stand back and admire, but rarely are we fully engaged. Like so much else, the relationship between spectator and show has promise that it never quite delivers on. Isolation in the midst of a crowd, headphones clamped over ears, is a familiarly alienating experience, but that tension between the individual and the collective fails to develop. There are hints at mob mentality, suggesting an exploration of our psychological impulses towards violence, but these too fail to materialise beyond light implication.
I wonder if the problem is embedded, ironically, at the heart of what Requardt and Rosenberg are attempting to do. The containing structure of the game encodes repetition and detachment into the piece, with interesting intentions, but the danger is that it just becomes predictably dull. Men are heroes, monsters are killed, and women are dismayingly cast as temptresses or helpers. Maybe that makes a point in itself about the modern world and our tedious onward march of existence, but it can’t help feeling like a disappointingly flimsy one.
The Roof runs at Doon Street Car Park (opposite the National Theatre) as part of LIFT until 28 June 2014
