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DV8's "Can We Talk About This?" at the Lyttleton
Published on 3rd September 2013
You would think that this performance, watched by thousands of people and performed in London’s leading theatre, answers its own question - yes, not only can we talk about it, but we can dance, shout, gesticulate and create innovative multimedia montages about it. But Lloyd Newson’s politically charged attack on militant Islam, pragmatic, urgent and powerful, quickly demonstrates otherwise. Cataloguing the headlines of tension with the Islamic community since 1985, it explores the Rushdie affair, the Danish cartoons, forced marriages and the murder of Theo van Gogh with verbatim interview extracts, illustrated by DV8‘s stylised, often balletic physical theatre. Using Martin Amis’s question “do you feel morally superior to the Taleban?” (Only around 10% of the audience raised their hands) as a springboard, it challenges the commonly-held perception that some parts of Islam can and should exist outside the laws and value systems of normal society, as the natural conclusion of “multiculturalism”. With a jarring coup de théatre that makes the violence portrayed disquietingly immediate, the message is driven home that this “state within a state” is unacceptable. Whether there is any room for dance in all of this is debatable - certainly there were moments when the only forced marriage I could see was that of the text and the movement. Of course, an aesthetically perfect pas-de-deux has astonishing beauty, but when it is performed over an interview about MPs in Bradford, what’s the point? The most effective parts of the evening came together when DV8 stuck to what they knew best - the arrestingly beautiful physical sequences that characterised earlier work like Enter Achilles, without the often tiresome verbosity. Text is creeping more and more into DV8’s work, and, most of the time, they don’t wear it well.
