Watch Me Fall

Bathos is standing beside a home-made runway in an old drill hall, I Wanna Be Your Dog by The Stooges blaring at a volume that thuds your chest while a backlit stuntman whips the crowd into a frenzy at the anticipation of a grand feat he is about to perform.

And then he spits ping pong balls into a bucket.

Great, we get it. Here’s the hyperbole-soaked world of stunt performers and the eternal masculine promise of going one bigger and one better, and there’s the deliberately pathetic pay-off. Nice contrast, duly noted.

Bathos is also a show that promises to build on this genuinely interesting premise but which completely fails to do so.

Watch Me Fall is a wilfully obtuse, frustrating and gratingly smug show – only occasionally by intention. The dialogue is fragmentary and non-linear. The low-fi ‘stunts’ are at best absurd. Rather than encouraging you to lean in, engage and try and make sense of proceedings, it ends up being just a bit annoying. It is so satisfied with itself, it can’t be arsed to fully craft some of its satirical subversions.

Take for example, how men jacked up on testosterone and delusional self-hype treat women. This is a potentially interesting subtext the play toys with, before botching it. One scene where the ‘glamorous assistant’ is doused in cola while spread-eagled on the floor aims to satirise demeaning behaviour. Instead it is just demeaning.

The whole thing ends up feeling like a theatre happening in Shoreditch. And not in a good way.