As founding artistic director of the New Diorama, Byrne sprang surprises, not least with For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy and the ultra-vivacious Operation Mincemeat.
Ten days ago, playwright David Byrne was announced as the new artistic director of the Royal Court, taking over from Vicky Featherstone in 2024. Yet you are slowly immersed in another place, and emerge with an extra set of eyes. As throughout Alter, there is no evident plot or purpose. The audience is enticed, without hectoring, without words, to dance. A lamenting drone becomes frisky, then wild. In one glade, other lights gradually appear from all directions, as if the dazzle of stars had fallen into people’s hands. Jerky videos flicker on the lids of suitcases, on pieces of cloth, on bales of hay: snatches of forgotten lives a couple dancing merrily a house smashed into ruin by the catastrophe of earthquake or bombs. We are led to an underground hoard of baked potatoes, and swap our uncooked items for delicious, salt-cooked ones. Yanked free, he joins the procession we move on. Our guide tries to dig him out of the ground slowly, audience members begin to help. Handing out lanterns in glass jars, she leads us through a forest, towards an extraordinary eruption: a man, buried up to his waist in earth, is watching what looks like an old home movie. At the end of a muddy, blackberry-hedged lane, spectators meet a young woman, her face unvarnished with anything but candour, carrying a suitcase like a second world war refugee. The Catalan company Kamchàtka have made a show that, unearthing suggestive histories, evokes political displacement and wild individual dreams, a blend of the personal and the far-reaching. Even Milton Keynes carries echoes of a long-ago culture who, these days, would name a new town after a poet and a leftwing economist? It’s a long time since I have been to a site-specific performance that was so truly absorbed in its geography – and so freewheeling in what it offers.
You don’t know when you get into the van (phones off) where you are going you are asked not to speak to your fellow walkers. You are asked to wear stout shoes and bring an uncooked potato.
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