REVIEW
COLD WAR 2.0
the following is a transcript of THEATRE THOUGHTS VIDEO REVIEW
Last night I saw a production that I actually hated, but I also think that that was the point.
This is a production called Cold War 2.0. It’s presented by a theatrical company called Doppelgangster.
Now, Doppelgangster are one of those companies, those theatrical troupes, that there’s no fine line on where you sort of sit with them. You either love them or you hate them, and there’s not really, like, a massive spectrum within there. Cold War 2.0 kind of sits in this realm of the theater of cruelty as well as deconstructivist theater. In a nutshell, those two forms of theater explore avant-garde and post-modernist theater, breaking down what we know about texts in their entirety in order to get across a message.
There is a mix of light, sound, noise, all these different elements that are used to unnerve or shock the audience. In terms of the storytelling, there is no story. It’s a mix of jumbled conversations that overlap one another, that touch on elements of aristocracy, that touch on elements of capitalism, that touch on elements of this post-oversecurity surveillance world that we live in. They touch on elements of AI. They touch on elements of pop culture. They touch on elements of Russia, of the actual Cold War, of the Berlin War.
So everything they do is set to unnerve you. The sound is this really intense rock, heavy metal music that honestly hurts your ears.
The only true issue that I think I did have that didn’t sit in elements with theatricality is this notion of consent. Now, I mean consent in terms of when do you touch the audience? When do you take props and personal devices off the audience with a very clear element of consent? So in that regard, that’s where I think I had personal issues with Doppelgangster’s performance in terms of their line of consent.
But in the rest of that, I was leaving it feeling very uncomfortable- I am honestly still thinking about it, and so I think the fact that I was uncomfortable and I wasn’t sitting there saying, “I love every single element of this”, actually was the point of the production.
And if you want to engage in this conversation- you don’t really know exactly what I’m talking about – You can go and see see Cold War 2.0, which is playing at the Sydney Fringe. But just be warned, this is a very divisive piece of theatre. And if you like this sort of content, be sure to follow so that you see more of it and we can engage in this conversation more.