Showmanism

It’s been more than a decade since Dickie Beau broke through with his uniquely weird shows that involve him lip-syncing to archival recordings, while he embodies the voices with movement and props and fun stuff like that. But Showmanism, expanded from its first iteration which premiered in Bath in 2022, feels like a reckoning with the form and with himself.

Beau cuts a sinewy, ethereal figure on a dotty set (stunning design by Justin Nardella) where an astronaut helmet, an orange tree in a bath and an iPod suspended in mid-air are just some of the disparate objects that make up his cabinet of curiosities. Lights and drapes and television sets surround him, and a ladder plunges into the floor and up into the ceiling, like he’s in a treehouse in space.

On the surface, the show is a history of acting. That’s what he was commissioned to make anyway. And it starts out on brief: some classic ‘I’m stuck in a box’ miming, recordings about Ancient Greek theatre, interesting musings on audiences and actors from the likes of Ian McKellen and Fiona Shaw. Beau puts on costumes, strips down, embodies each voice in a different way.

These scenes are really enjoyable. When it risks getting up its own arse with solemnity and loftiness, Beau shoves some absurd touch in there – a silly movement, a funny prop – and besides, what’s not to like about listening to a long theatrical anecdote from Ian McKellen while a mostly naked man cavorts in a cosmic treehouse? It’s just that there comes a point when, maybe, the show could offer something more.

And then…it does. Brilliantly. Halfway through, those recordings start to talk to each other, themes and motifs criss-cross (a religious Passion play in an Austrian village! Hamlet! Cilla Black!). There are reactions from the people he’s lip-synced to about what it was like to be lip-synced while being lip-synced. The show, even as it scrutinises itself, also finds its point and those grandiloquent statements about theatre, plays, actors blah blah, begin to shrink and hone. From facing outward, the conversations begin to collapse inwards. One of Beau’s recorded voices challenges him to include his own voice in the show. He starts to question why he’s on stage at all. Why he feels more comfortable there than in real life.

With director Jan-Willem van den Bosch, Beau has created something complex, richly layered, but also something that points out how simple its own magic trick really is; he picks apart the individual things that make theatre - props, people, sound, light - and holds them slightly at a distance from each other, plays with them, examines them and lets them crash back into each other in a very pure, very fun and, by the end, very moving celebration of the stage.