Lippy

broadwayworld.com

It's taken me a while to put finger to keyboard on this one. At first I was unsure if there was something I'd missed or if actually, The Young Vic's 'Lippy' was just surrealist at the core with no real statement about the world worth finding. On pondering upon it for over a week, I feel I may finally be able to write something. If I was to draw sentiment at all, it would be that our words define us. Those left without a voice, are given to others who speak for them, but who are we to put words in other people's mouths and say that we understand their plight? Now I'm getting it.

theartsdesk.com

The play begins in a light-hearted format, with a well-staged Q&A where the 'presenter' has no qualms about breaking the forth wall. He engages us with uncertain laughter and hints towards things we are unsure of holding any meaning. Our director speaks of his days as a lip-reader for the police, in a case involving four women and a suicide pact. He explains how he'd had to read their lips from CCTV and recreated the last existing images of them, filling their pictures, with his words. He had been used to lip-reading, raising a deaf daughter, but even so, we are let in on the fact that no lip-reading is easy. Words have many meanings, and as our presenter demonstrates, as he talks and our director lip-reads, the conclusions we draw and the things we THINK have been said, are in fact, often wrong. 

heraldscotland.com

newyorkirisharts.com

Beyond this set-up, we then transition into a dream-world where as an audience we are unsure of what really happened within our story within a story, or what was assumed to happen - essentially putting words into the mouths of our victims. With clever staging, intriguing set-design and audio/visual effects that left us searching through the dark for an end to the rise in noise and  in atmosphere, we were thrown into a pit much like a nightmare, where the only thing to emerge were few words that made us feel any better. I enjoyed the UV outlines of the victims, 4 bodies each holding a balloon made from the plastic bag that contains their paper lives - credit card bills, rental payments, payslips - their entire identity, on paper, shredded into a million pieces in an attempt to sever the tether to this world.

theguardian.com

There were a lot of unanswered questions:

What was the significance of the third person not showing up to the Q&A?

What was the deeper relationship, if any, between our writer and the women?

What was it that the two youngest girls saw with their father, 'what she saw, I saw'.

Why was he in the room with them, when it was the scenes at the shopping centre that he had lip-read for. Why did the other characters interact in the scenes with the women?

All of the answers to these, we can only guess at answering, as there is no commitment to exploring any of these eventualities.

whatsonstage.com

It was a piece filled with stand alone sentiments, with surrealist non-linear elements, like a table being turned on its side to reveal a birdseye view. Holes in the side of set to allow objects to be passed through for use. A leaf blower to clean up shredded paper during the scene, allowing yet another character to invade the women's realm. Rainfall, inside the house. And a rather lengthy spiel to conclude, from a video of a mouth, close-up. We watch the imperfect mouth as it moves and works up saliva at the creases, as it tells us the story of the women, speaking in-depth but somehow not telling us anything at all. 'What she saw, I saw', BUT WHAT?!

It is sad at times, allowing time in silence to reflect upon the women's actions. Like the trip to the shopping centre, where one sister returns with a chocolate bar. The women are starving themselves to death and you can almost feel their desperation, their longing for just that one bite. We watch as they sit at the table yet do not eat, as they destroy their possessions, as they distract themselves with television, as they continue to feed the cat, as they struggle to stand, as the flowers die, as they sit and stare, as they turn to harm to find some distraction from their hunger, as they no longer travel to the toilet, just use a bucket. And as they die. But we are pulled from these narratives that humanise our victims, and we are instead thrust back ever further into the nightmare.

theupcoming.co.uk

stagebuddy.com

And so, yes, there are many moments to pick out from the piece, but moments is all it was. There was intentionally no linear story pulling it all together. It is suggested but not explained, toyed with but not explored. It is up to you as an audience member to do the hard work. As an audience we felt unsure of whether the performance we'd seen had told us anything profound at all. As the lights came up I tried to think about it, before hearing the lady behind me exclaim, 'What the hell just happened?' - so it clearly wasn't just me then. But then, wasn't that the point? We can never really know the story of these women as it played out, we don't even know if the lip-reading from the shopping centre was correct. As an audience, we are once again thrust into the role of giving these women a voice, of giving their final moments a narrative - because we can never know for sure, we can only imagine, and what is born from that, is a scene as surreal as the one placed in front of us here.

A play full of clever yet non-sensical moments, you're a better man than me if you can pull it altogether but upon reflection, there is meaning in all of it. In fact I can't find a better way to describe the play than this, from TimeOut's Andrzej Lukowski:

'This strange, visceral play isn't an explanation of their mystery, more a monument to it'.