It’s movie night, and Olwen Davies and Ollie Smith (LaPelle’s Factory) want you to pop over to theirs for an evening of screen staring. But there’s one minor problem, their home is too small to accommodate everyone so we’re in the theatre instead.
To get us in the mood for the film, they’re offering up a bit of ‘foreplay’ in the form of popcorn, fizzy pop, a hot (or rather tepid) chocolate and general chit chat. The audience have to get involved too, but nothing too drastic - just keep passing the snacks along. The theatre is usually a place of silence so immediately getting to know the people either side of you while making a right racket munching popcorn is a little bit disconcerting – which pretty much sums up the whole evening.
Our hosts want the night to be perfect, just like that happy Hollywood ending, and so inevitably have set themselves up to fail. Instead of our promised movie night we get an exploration of relationships, the idealised ones we consume on the screen and the ones we act out in real life. The relationship between performer and audience is explored too, with roles reversed throughout thanks to a live camera feed. We are all complicit in this fantasy.
The show includes two commercial breaks, but this isn’t a time to switch off and rest. Instead the adverts function as explicit examples of our gullibility, how easily we’ve been sold ideas and how easily we’ve consumed them. These adverts then become part of the show.
Olwen Davies is superb as the unhinged but utterly adorable innocent; she’s like a hybrid of David Brent and a Bunny Boiler. You don’t know if she’s completely serious, utterly mad or sinisterly disingenuous. When she invites you into her world you can’t resist. She could stand on the precipice of a cliff and beckon you over and you would trust her right up to the moment your body smashed against the floor.
She has a beautiful voice that pitches and drops in all the right places, is a master of the raised eyebrow and has so much enthusiasm it’s like she’s been pumped full of Smarties. When she talks about fire she twirls her fingers and you half expect flames to appear. Never has feeling so uncomfortable felt so right!
Yes, Ollie is alright too…but he’s not Olwen. Clearly I’m becoming a bit obsessed. Confession: I happily boogied an evening away with her immediately after the show and left her a postic note on my laptop. I suspect I’ll be doing the same again tonight. Oh dear.
This show is for smart arses and the danger of being a smart arse is you risk being a bit pretentious. I thought they managed to avoid this by the skin of their teeth, which is pretty impressive given everything they covered. As I left the auditorium, which, incidentally, was a right mess, I heard a hand-holding couple asking if they thought Ollie and Olwen were a couple and that it would be nice if they were. It would appear that cinema is not the only place where we believe everything we see…
Cloudcuckoolanders was performed on 5 June at the Nottingham Playhouse as part of the NEAT16 festival.
Read our interview with LaPelle's Factory here
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