Womb Man

Postmodern. Adj.: A view of the world which maintains that truth is a fiction, and that burning it down is our liberation, our highest calling, and our fate. There are those, mainly Goths and the French, who delight in so doing.

So if you are a Goth (or French) you’ll love Womb Man, a chaotic pastiche of ideas, characters and perspectives that is pure postmodernism; if Derrida, Foucault and Baudrillaud had got drunk and tried their hand at street theatre, this is the kind of stuff that would have come out.

From its screeching beginning to its screeching end, the star of this 50 minute one-man-show, (Brixton’s Ricky Payne) undermines, challenges, shocks and provokes. Like Goths (or the French) he often succeeds. But there is a hollowness here that his feverish lyrical talent cannot disguise.

The problem is that when you treat all truth as fiction, no matter how controversial you are, you are ultimately left with nothing to say. Cleverness for cleverness’s sake is pretension. Once you burn everything to the ground, no one really cares what patterns you draw in the ash.

Annoyingly, although Payne’s street beat poetry shows genuine lyrical talent and total commitment to delivery, it’s unlikely though that anyone is going to see the point of his work, because there is no point – and that’s the point. Frankly, most of the audience leave the venue confused rather than enlightened.