This review is of 'Lie Collector's run at London's Vaults in February
It’s one thing to crowdfund your show, quite another to crowdsource it. Aussie cabaretier Yve Blake has been harvesting other people’s lies on a confessional website and, along with a bunch of cross-art collaborators, she’s turned them into a ragbag collection of comic songs and costumes, animations and anecdotes.
The resultant one-woman showcase, padded out with some unrelated extras to last the full 50 minutes, is every bit as thrown together as that sounds. Blake reads a couple of choice examples from her laptop, jumps into a perky little song about another, then puts on a ker-razy costume (a pizza dressing gown, say, or a wearable emoticon) and runs about a bit. The style is sub-Bryony Kimmings, but where Kimmings finds a potent subject and forces whimsical material to matter, Blake makes do with whatever jumps to mind. Frankly, it doesn’t even feel like a first draft.
These aren’t even particularly juicy lies. There’s the woman who invents UTIs to get out of work and the student who files overdue essays in Wingdings. One mother tells her kids that too much ‘Peppa Pig’ breaks the television. A housemate steals some pizza. Oh my god. Somebody call Lord Hutton.
So why do we lie? Damned if Blake’s bothered. She makes no attempt to theorise about her material or to join the dots beyond grouping lies into categories. She even admits as much late on. ‘The Lie Collector’ has all the purpose of a Lib Dem manifesto.
You know what it feels like? Art, Buzzfeedified. Some stuff thrown together at speed so that people might look. Why? ‘Doesn’t matter. I DONE AN ART.’