The omens were always good for Ohio, which is produced by Fleabag and Baby Reindeer hitmaker Francesca Moody and had a transfer to the Young Vic nailed on months before the Fringe started.
It’s the work of Abigail and Shaun Bengson, aka indie folk duo the Bengsons, aka a band you probably haven’t heard of if you live over here because their oeuvre seems to largely consist of theatrical performance pieces that haven’t toured outside of the US… until now.
I’m not going to pretend I know much more about them than the above paragraph but if I had to guess I’d venture that Ohio was intentionally devised with the object of introducing the duo to an overseas audience. It’s a potted history of the pair’s lives, albeit a dreamy, impressionistic one, starting with Shaun explaining how he lied to his son about the existence of an afterlife in order to cheer him up. It then moves through such subjects as the worm Abigail had as a childhood pet, Shaun’s loss of the Christian faith of his childhood, and the degeneration of his hearing that led to him developing severe and incrementally increasing tinnitus.
It’s hard to describe the show formally. The pair would make good kids’ TV presenters - she’s bouncy and ebullient, he’s dry and courteous. There is definitely a presentational aspect to the whole thing: I learned an awful lot about the mechanics of tinnitus!
There’s also an intoxicating wildness to it all: despite literally beginning with a denial of the existence of God, the whole show feels spiritual, from the linking of earthworms to the death of Abigail’s brother to the way the tinnitus is described in such ecstatic terms, like a choir of dead cells, singing in Shaun’s ears forever. And above all there are the songs: running the gamut from Animal Collective-style freak folk to Sufjan-esque balladry to ominous glitching that vaguely recalls late period Low, the songs are wild and intense, often based around looped sounds and wordless ululation.
It’s not a neat story, any more than the average concept album actually tells a narratively coherent tale. It was forced to take a technical pause when I saw it and the duo’s spirited response - teaching the audience a song - felt congruent with the show as it is ‘supposed’ to be.
On the one hand Ohio is a somewhat twee American couple giving a performance lecture about their lives; on the other it feels like an articulation of the unimaginable vastness and strangeness of human existence. It’s a good combination.
