It’s three women running round with their kit off and farting about with arse masks.
They don’t care what you think of it. They certainly don’t care what we think of it. It is what it is. Simultaneously a “multi-layered tour-de-force that subverts and plays with the form” (artswank.com, ★★★★★) and exhibit one in the case for immediate de-funding of the arts. Zoe Coombs Marr, Adrienne Truscott and Ursula Martinez want to be beyond all of it.
Wild Bore was billed as a riposte to critics, who, given the nature of the trio’s previous work, haven’t always taken to them. A poster at the entrance explains that with all the nudity and whatnot, you may find it offensive … “especially if you’re a critic”. But keyboard-bashers can leave the kevlar at home. This sticking in of the knife leaves surface scratches only. If a critic really wants to feel their ears burn, they read Fringe Pig, who have reviewer-reviewing down to a fine art.
Coombs-Marr, Martinez and Truscott, on the other hand, appear to have tin ears for actual bad reviewing, but thin skins to personal slights. Many of the reviewer quotes they use seem eminently reasonable, even extracted from context. Fringe bars are full of people whingeing that the reviewer didn’t get them and too much of this sounds like that. There’s reams of self-contradictory or plain bad critiquing out there; these three haven’t looked hard enough. Two critic quotes that do stick are one of Martinez – that a prominent bit of her show was done “for no apparent reason” – and a critic’s rhetorical question of Coombs Marr – “what if it were dramaturgical design?” They take these and run with them.
The trio get their flesh and blood arses out and plonk them on a press conference table to voice the first verbatim reviews. Then flexi-cracked arse-helmets are donned for more complex scenes, in which the arses continue to pontificate while eating and expelling crap. Are they pre-empting all possible responses to this or are they pre-empting people thinking they’re pre-empting… You know what? Who gives a shit?
Half an hour in, higher level brain functions switch off and save themselves for something more productive. There’s so many referential-meta-self-callback moments, you might as well just revel in the silly sight gags. Watching an arse spark up a fag is straight up funny.
See it. Don’t see it.
It’s three women farting about with arse masks and running round with their kit off.