I really enjoyed We Are Ian, which is surprising, for I do not dance; never have, really. I suspected that I was the last person who should have been asked to review a show about the Acid House music of the 1980s; a show that claims it will get the entire audience to ‘bounce around like idiots’. I saw this as a threat, not a promise. I never liked the music at the time, I shrink from all kinds of audience participation apart from a little polite clapping, and I’m much too old. But my initial resistance evaporated in the face of some formidably funny clowning. Co-presented as part of Tobacco Factory Theatres BEYOND programme, Exeter-based company We’re In Bed With My Brother have created something that defies easy categorisation. We Are Ian may be hard to define, but there is no doubt whatsoever that it is very noisy, and that it is great fun.
In Bed With My Brother is three women in their twenties who make theatre from real-life stories. They have a Mancunian friend called Ian Taylor who was a DJ back in the late 1980s, the era of Acid House and illegal raves. They have found a noisy, frenetic and decidedly crazed way to tell his story; and in the process they make a few sharp comments about the politics of his time, and politics today.
Dressed in shapeless, white overalls and wearing white shoes with illuminated soles, the three women enter the bare stage. They look a little like benign female versions of the droogs from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. They seem lost, bemused, unsure of what to do next. A bare lightbulb dangles above them. Suddenly they hear Ian’s disembodied voice, and the lightbulb pulses in sync with each word. This is a moment of Damascene revelation; they have seen the light, the countdown to 1989 starts, and the dancing begins.
What follows is a kind of lunatic Dadaist ballet, featuring arcane steps like the hot potato and the cold spaghetti. Sound designers Bizarre Rituals, Ben Hudson and Jimi Stewart, have cleverly edited Ian’s voice, mimicking the reverberation and repetition that characterises Acid House tracks like Human Resource’s Dominator. Accompanied by flickering back-projected newsreel footage, Ian nostalgically recalls raves, fights at football matches and his loathing for Margaret Thatcher. The women respond to Ian’s often expletive-strewn musings with unhinged wide-eyed enthusiasm. When he talks of drugs they reveal a lunatic passion for brown biscuits. Don’t sit in the front row unless brown biscuits are your thing.
Ian is now a middle-aged painter and decorator who looks back to his Acid House years with a kind of defiant pride. His encounter with a psychiatrist sums this up: ‘He wanted to rehabilitate me – it didn’t work.’ There was craziness, he got into trouble, but at least he felt he was doing something true to himself. If We Are Ian has any kind of a philosophy it is perhaps little more than ‘We have got f*** all, but at least we can dance like idiots.’ But this message is delivered in a precisely choreographed and impressively skilful manner. Kat Cory, Dora Lynn and Nora Alexander are very accomplished clowns, and We Are Ian is a perfect show for the Wardrobe. See it if you can, and be prepared to stand up and bounce! ★★★★★ Mike Whitton 3rd March 2017
