A man and a woman, each on a podium. He is drinking beer, she is asleep. Behind each podium is a screen on which pre-filmed sequences alternate with live footage shot by assistants with video cameras.
In the course of the next hour we follow the two characters as, without leaving their separate spaces, they mime their respective days. He, we learn, is a nurse, she an ergonomist. She wakes late, and mimes running to Kentish Town station. He reads the small ads. She applies make-up on the Tube. He sleeps. She types in an cramped office. He receives a text message. She visits a swimming pool. He jogs. She visits Bella Pasta. He visits the bottle bank. And so on to their inevitable meeting. At intervals portentous apophthegms appear on the screens (Space: That in Which Material Bodies Have Extension). Roland Barthes, meanwhile, is quoted in the programme.
Because their activities reveal nothing about either character, we are indifferent to their fates. Why do two strangers, whose meeting is void of erotic charge, become lovers? Why, with 15 conceptual and technical wonks credited for this indulgent production, did none of them remember that it is the paying audience which completes the theatrical equation?
London/My Lover: London International Mime Festival
