House Mother Normal

What duty of care does theatre have towards its audiences in the wake of the pandemic? It’s a question sure to have preoccupied Tim Crouch, whose plays are as interested in investigating the ethics of authorship and spectatorship as experimenting with form.

Directed by Crouch for innovator in lockdown drama New Perspectives, this video installation has been crafted and safety-managed with exacting care. An adaptation of BS Johnson’s avant-garde 1971 novel set in a care home, it merges and sound-sculpts nine concurrent monologues that are presented consecutively in the book. You can watch online or at an empty shop unit in Brighton.

Yet there is scope, at this time, to feel emotionally mishandled by a piece that involves the sadistic institutional abuse of ageing care-home residents, and is rendered in a form both over-stimulating and potentially bleakly isolating.

Crouch unites the characters temporally, but separates them visually. Already trapped in their ageing bodies, disintegrating psyches and degrading routines, each now stares out at you from one of nine screens. While their monologues slip in and out of the present, in and out of lucidity, Giles Thacker’s video work holds each face in merciless, high-definition focus.

Because of the bubble system, booking a single ticket means I find myself unexpectedly alone with this wall of talking and groaning heads. Afterwards, you can watch the individual monologues online. This would probably underline the pained humanity of the performances, the surreal lyricism of the text, the dialogic impassivity of the residents’ inner worlds, however fragmented, but emotionally, I’ve had enough.