Review: GOBSTOPPERS, Vimeo online

We're tight close-up on a pair of eyes that become many pairs of eyes as single, spat out verbs tell us the emotions such eyes transmit. Done more slowly, it would capture something of those silent movie screen tests from 100 years ago in which Clara Bow would express fear or Theda Bara allure. But, with a nod towards rock duo Godley and Creme's seminal video for "Cry" and, more explicitly, Samuel Beckett's Not I (also done by Angel Theatre in the last couple of years), we get something less didactic and more intimate.

Intimacy - and the ache of missing it has not diminished over time for any of us - is a key element of Gobstoppers, an experimental work that attempts to mimic the immediacy of live theatre by bringing us very close to the performers. In that, it largely succeeds, but it can be gruelling even at 50 minutes or so, like walking against the tide on the steps leading out of Leicester Square tube station. I thought of the Pet Shop Boys' lyric -

"Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it, if so, how often?
Which do you choose, a hard or soft option"

With a format that skips from monologues that sound like treatments for a new collection of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads to poetry (with more internal rhymes than a Sondheim song) to performance art, the piece is inevitably uneven in tone, even if it's brilliantly realised technically from the actors' consistency to lighting and sound. The result is a formidable achievement that much more lavishly funded enterprises would do well to match. Just as a woman is describing stalking (exactly as we have heard it so described this last week), attention shifts and hands appear doing all the things that hands can do. This is how the work is conceived, but it still leaves me - a narrative junkie - left wanting to go back to the woman and find out how she's coping.

It has to be said - and this is no fault of the performances nor of the structure of the piece - that the concentration one finds in the dark collective of a theatre audience just cannot be replicated at home where distractions and associations are always present. Ultimately, as is so often the case, an alternative approach to theatre serves to underline just how powerful the original is.

I'm looking forward to an adaptation of Gobstoppers in a fringe theatre, an environment in which its nuance and assertiveness will find their potential.

Gobstoppers is available on Vimeo until 5 April.

All creatives involved in the project waived their usual fee in order that the piece may be used to raise funds for Acting for Others. Instead of charging a pay-per-view fee, Angel Theatre Company are asking viewers to make a donation to the charity, which is dedicated to offering financial and emotional support to all theatre workers in times of need. They ask that viewers give as much as their circumstances allow as their aim is to raise a minimum of £500 for this worthy cause. They hope money pledged will help their freelance industry colleagues who are suffering through lack of any form of government financial support during this pandemic.

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