How to Occupy an Oil Rig

These days, Google can furnish you with instructions for almost anything. How to boil an egg. How to assemble a bookshelf. How to cope with grief. This playful yet complex show from Daniel Bye picks up on the modern day ubiquity of the ‘how to’ guide and brilliantly applies it to acts of protest, creating a series of demonstrations, in every sense of the word.

The title itself, like the show, is a mixture of provocation, instruction and irony. While the notion of providing simple instructions for an act with so many personal and political implications is somewhat ridiculous—and acknowledged as such—there is also a sense in which simple advice and information can play a role in demystifying political action. Reflecting the cocktail of hope and childish naivety in Lucy Crimmens’ Lego building block set, protest is both celebrated and problematised.

Bye lends the piece the same straightforward delivery and wry humour as his performance lecture The Price of Everything, while his co-performers and devisers Kathryn Beaumont and Jack Bennett add warmth to what could be a coolly detached series of statements. The desire for human interest is at once admitted, indulged and subverted, recognising the danger of reducing knotty issues to emotive narratives without denying the possibility of stories.

And in the end, it is in the stories that the real hope lies. Standing up for what we believe in will never be as simple as a step-by-step guide, but Bye and his collaborators suggest that talking about it is a start.