The distinct smell of make up, boiled sweets and cheap champagne hangs in the air. We are unpacking our BAC scratch show of bad jokes, bad acting and bad taste and turning it into a full length evening of misjudged razzle dazzle for the Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam.
Now you see it, now you don’t is essentially the debris of a clown act, a topsy turvy magic show. The principles of showmanship are deconstructed… hence, build up and punch-line are presented in the wrong order, the magical effect pre-empts its presentation. What should be fast and snazzy and glam is rendered through slow-motion, while the actual ‘trick’ is understated to the point whereby it almost escapes attention…
The idea for the show was spurned through a simple fascination for the processes of a repeated joke: its journey from amusement, to becoming a running gag, to becoming a crushing bore and finally through stubborn persistence finding its way back into a warped kind of humour. Now you see it, now you don’t plays with such perceptual shifts and the slippery proximity of laughter and embarrassment, tragedy and comedy, wit and stupidity. The piece also owes a lot to our admiration for Tommy Cooper, and we’ve been watching far too much Jan Svankmajer latley.
And there will be confetti. Lots of it. There will be so much confetti that you will never want to see the bright frivolous stuff ever again.
Two clowns sit opposite the audience. It is the day after the party. After the show. Possibly after the last ever show. Shards of the old act are performed out of context and gags are riffed. An unaffected, lazy, drunken haze seems to lie over the whole thing, which somehow seems to magnify the oiled routines – their absurdity, their construction and their addictive appeal.
Now you see it; now you don’t is a celebration of failure, a bid to give drinking games the title of art, and an attempt to salvage the world through an overabundance of confetti.
- Philip