IT’S BEHIND YOU! (Livestream Recording)
Direction: Hannah Smith (written by Ralph McCubbin Howell and Anya Tate-Manning)
Livestream via Circa Theatre, TACT and Trick of the Light Theatre (May 28 – July 30)
In its first post-Covid production for a post-Lockdown world Circa Theatre commissioned a new work (with support from TACT) called IT’S BEHIND YOU!
The 25-minute pivot-to-Zoom “live theatre” comedy-horror by Trick of the Light premiered May 28th with some 200+ viewers tuning it to check it out as it happened. You can now click here to purchase the livestream recording and it’s yours to watch until the ticket-receipt tells you that time’s up.
Time might by up for one (or more) of the characters in IT’S BEHIND YOU! Friends Chris (Chris Parker), Andrew (Andrew Patterson) and Carrie (Carrie Green) are catching up for a Zoom drinks-chat in lockdown. We’re instantly whisked back to a version of the world we just lived through, the taut writing from Anya Tate-Manning and Ralph McCubbin Howell brilliantly captures the new nuances of the socially distanced world where our drinks sessions were held in tiny windows on screens connecting us with suddenly long-lost chums across town. 
Carrie is a “clown doctor”, so we see her in make-up as she provides her apparently essential service in hospitals. Andrew is grappling with the idea of his new all-of-a-sudden live-in lover Simon (Simon O’Leary). Chris reckons Simon is wonderful. Carrie does too. But Chris might actually be more interested in catching his own reflection in the screen – our first clue that he should be more concerned with what’s behind him rather than looking just and only straight ahead…
It’s not possible to tell you too much more about what happens in this clever wee production – but I do want to highlight sound-designer and song-composer Tane Upjohn-Beatson’s fantastic work ushering in the transition from social satire and silly-fun comedy to the darker tension of pure horror.
And Hannah Smith has done well here to guide winning performances in a new style of show that must remain fleet of foot even though we hardly ever get to see anything much like footsteps – we are mostly concerned with heads and torsos only and yet we get a very full picture from this talented cast and crew.
A funny story that also has hints of gore and creepiness to it in the very best comedy-horror way. It’s also an immaculate instant-flashback to the lives we were just living, or the way we were living them at least, only a few weeks ago. The real horror, that will be no laughing matter at all, is if we are forced back. We can take some solace, I guess, that it might inspire more clever storytelling ideas and devices (or use of devices) from talented teams as with IT’S BEHIND YOU!
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