Every 15 minutes, with rocket-launch precision, two visitors are ushered into a tiny theatre – an intimate cinema nestled within Matt’s cavernous gallery. Seated side by side, you and your companion find yourselves at eye level with a pair of illuminated blue balls. Next, these spherical screens (as this is what they turn out to be) present their audience with the same image, doubled. Another intoxicatingly fragmentary documentary from contemporary myth-maker Lindsay Seers begins.
With verve and vulnerability, actors on screen perform the roles of two male impersonators, Hetty King and Vesta Tilley, who shot to music hall stardom just over a century ago. As the twinned globes tell their story, intermittently transforming into disco balls, dandelions and winking eyes, the work pulls its coupled viewers deep into a rabbit hole of dualities, where tangled tangents send you off in entirely new directions. One such departure has an actor explain how heterochromia (eyes of contrasting colour) can be the result of non-identical twins fusing together in utero to become single being – a chimera.
Through ideas of merging and separation, dichotomies – between an actor and the role they play, female and male, fact and fiction – are teasingly picked apart. Is there such a thing as a coherent whole? After your allotted quarter of an hour, you and your fellow viewer will emerge: the same, but subtly different.
Charmian Griffin
Please note: as only two people are admitted per screening, booking is essential.