The Roof

Stoners, gamers and stoned gamers will totally dig this whimsical dance-theatre show, presented in a car park outside the National Theatre as part of LIFT 2014. Folks who didn’t grow up taking bleary turns on ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ or ‘Super Mario Bros’ or whatever young people play these days may wonder what the hell is going on.

‘The Roof’ is the third collaboration between choreographer Frauke Requardt and theatre-maker David Rosenberg (of Shunt fame). It shares a fair chunk of DNA with the duo’s previous collaborations ‘Electric Hotel’ and ‘Motor Show’, insofar as it takes place in the open air, late at night, with audience members wearing headphones so that some elaborate sound design can bring them closer to the relatively distant action.

Put simply, ‘The Roof’ is a live version of an old-fashioned sideways-scrolling platform game. Stood on the ground, the audience is surrounded by an elevated rooftop set, which a faintly gormless-looking ‘avatar’ (an athletic chap in a silly costume) traverses, slowly and jerkily at first, but with increasing speed and skill, building up to some genuinely impressive feats of free-running.

The show is based on repetition – basically it’s the avatar doing circuits of the set for an hour. But there’s variation within that: the sinister psychedelic monsters he has to kill change each time; new developments occur in the Lynchian nightclub the avatar visits in between ‘levels’; a charmingly shambolic series of original songs by Tim Price play through our headphones; there are subtle suggestions that away from the monster killing, the avatar is slowly losing his marbles, that possibly this whole game is an allegory for an unseen player’s disintegrating home life.

It looks great, in an ironically retro way, and buoyed by a couple of beers, a high tolerance for whimsy and fond memories of the crappy computer games of the ’80s, I found ‘The Roof’ a charming if insubstantial night. But it’s unquestionably diminishing returns after the fantastic ‘Electric Hotel’, and if you’re not nostalgic for the pixelated worlds the show homages, you may find yourself wanting to jump off fairly sharpish.

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