Review: Booty, Baddies and Beasties, Bristol Museum

Standing in the queue outside Bristol Museum, a passer-by stops to ask what you’re queuing for. “An interactive performance of Beowulf,” you reply casually – and then realise quite how pretentious that sounds.

But that’s how Booty, Baddies and Beasties – devised and directed by Bristol’s Desperate Men – was billed. It promised “a monstrous evening of theatrical performance, immersive film, dark sounds and blood curdling storytelling as we slice into the epic poem of Beowulf”. It was going to be interactive. The legendary Doug Francisco of the Invisible Circus had been recruited to play the monster Grendel. Fancy dress was encouraged. Excited punters spent hours lovingly crafting a variety of exotic Anglo-Saxon get-ups. That queue was a striking spectacle, a testament to Bristolian creativity.

Unfortunately, what took place inside the museum was testament to something else. Not a ‘don’t care’ attitude – too much effort had clearly been devoted to the audiovisuals for that to be true. But possibly testament to the habit, sadly widespread across the museum sector, of over-promising and under-delivering. Testament to a profound failure to objectively assess what you’re planning to offer and realise that it’s just not good enough. Testament to an apparent inability to view it from the punter’s perspective, and see that it will disappoint.

Small snippets of performance, often barely audible and apparently unscripted, delivered a Reader’s Digest version of the Beowulf story as abridged for the very young. The audience interactivity consisted mainly of some basic promenading, audience whooping and a lot of sitting on the cold stone floor of the museum hall. And most of the evening was made up of ‘intervals’, in which a few activities were on offer – make your own sword (until the armoury ran out of swords), play an Anglo-Saxon board game, see the Staffordshire Hoard (it’s a tad underwhelming, by the way) – much like the usual kids’ museum craft projects.

Otherwise, the lengthy breaks simply left the punters to mill around in their beautifully crafted costumes, aimlessly clutching a glass of wine and wondering what to do next. One of the highlights of the evening was when two audience members decided to pass the time by engaging in a sword fight. It was the most engaging and realistically Anglo-Saxon moment of the night.

Booty, Baddies and Beasties was not really a theatrical performance, and so it can’t be reviewed as such. But then it shouldn’t have been sold as a performance either. It was a museum ‘experience event’, of the kind with which desperate parents fill rain-soaked days during interminable school holidays, with less theatrical content than the average historical re-enactment society. It felt, in many ways, like it was aimed at children in Key Stage 1, not adults seeking a different and interesting evening’s entertainment.

And it was utterly disappointing, both as an event in itself and because it failed to live up to its own hype, the amount of time and effort that had obviously been spent, and the amazing space in Bristol Museum. There was potentially a brilliant evening here. But it needed some theatre.

Booty, Baddies and Beasties took place at Bristol Museum on Thursday, March 23. For more info, visit www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/booty-baddies-beasties