Simon Ward reviews Philosophy of the World at the Yard Theatre

The newly refurbished Yard Theatre re-opens with a show that was a big hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe – Philosophy of the World presented by In Bed With My Brother. Confused? You will be. In Bed With My Brother are Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory. Together they have been creating anarchic punk theatre for about ten years, and this piece is no exception. Assisted by Nigel Barrett playing all the male parts, In Bed With My Brother present the life and times of 1960s band The Shaggs, and in doing so, seek to ask how we become the people we are.

We are invited to be complicit in the project – the actors come on stage before the play proper begins to explain that they will soon be playing their roles and we, in turn, will play the role of the audience. Some audience members will be named characters, one will have a hat to wear. They want to make sure that we are all in this together.

The play consists of three acts – Fate; Free Will; Philosophy. The Fate section is amusingly recounted in a series of overhead surtitles. They explain how the whole sorry mess was foretold to an impressionable child in the 1940s. A boy named Austin Wiggin received a palm reading which said that his daughters would form a world famous rock band. So when his daughters arrived he set about determined to make that happen, whether they liked it or not. His method was to lock them in a basement to practise, with no outside influences. The result was predictably and painfully awful – the women had no interest in learning their instruments and had no talent as song writers. Their frankly demented father made them perform weekly in their local town hall and ultimately paid for them to make an album, entitled Philosophy of the World.

Although this early life has a relentless, percussive forward momentum, all that is lost when Austin dies and the women suddenly have the Free Will that has been denied them all their lives. But how can they deal with it when they have never been allowed to make any choices for themselves. They don’t think they want to be The Shaggs, but that is the only life they have known.

When it comes to Act Three, Philosophy, the gloves are off and In Bed With My Brother let rip with a kind of manifesto. It is long, and we can’t catch all of it as it is delivered to a noisy musical background, but it seems to be railing against both the world that basically imprisoned and tortured the Wiggin girls for years and the potential re-invention and re-packaging of their lives. Since their music found some acclaim with the likes of Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain, and since Tom Cruise acquired the rights to the story of their lives, it seems that they cannot escape being the victims of men using them for their own ends. Who should have the right to tell their story if not themselves, and yet what if they simply don’t want to have anything to do with it?

This is a chaotic show, which tries to do too many things at once – is it an anti-patriarchy diatribe, or a celebration of feminist girl-power avant la lettre? I have a feeling too that the venue does not quite work for them – there is an attempt to involve the audience in a way that can’t be done with so many people. The core story of the band is interesting, but they don’t seem to trust that, or want us to engage on that level, so there are always layers of irony and misdirection. These may serve their philosophical ends, but make for a disjointed and ultimately strangely unengaging show. I wanted to like this. I think I probably agree with a lot of their ideas. But I don’t think that this show was the best way to put them across.

Philosophy of the World is running at the Yard Theatre, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, London E9 5EN until Saturday 1st August