Theatre / Reviews
Review: Stand By for Tape Backup, Cube
His granddad not knowing what else to do with him, Ross Sutherland was taken to see Ghostbusters five times over the course of one week in 1986.
The memory has left an impression – and not just because, for a four year-old, “Ghostbusters is not a comedy.” Much later, Sutherland discovered a particularly terrifying scene from said ’80s comedy on an old VHS tape, retrieved from his granddad’s attic after he died.
This and the other clips on the tape became a sort of disjointed diary of his and his granddad’s shared viewing habits, and he wants to share that diary with us now. That’s the premise of this utterly unique show, in which Sutherland pauses, plays and rewinds the tape while teasing out its hidden messages, as if using the grainy footage to commune with the dead.
As the opening credits to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air play out several times on screen, Sutherland’s narration warps the images into new meanings.
Will’s gesture to the cabby becomes repulsion at the stench of death. His mom’s finger-wagging rant to the camera becomes the anxiously imparted parental wisdom that we often choose to ignore. His repeated near-miss on the basketball court becomes Sutherland’s own search for meaning in his grief, a point that remains just out of reach no matter how often the tape is played.
It’s all pulled off with countless small miracles of timing, Sutherland’s beat poet, rapper and raconteur rhythms fitting so precisely over the images that we have to work hard to keep up with every visual pun and allusion.
A bewildering Crystal Maze mission is a metaphor for senile dementia. Sutherland’s impotent rant at the naïve yuppie in a NatWest advert is both comic and desperately angry. Throughout, the 70s and 80s children in the audience chuckle nostalgically at every fresh clip, then laugh delightedly at what Sutherland does with it.
At times Sutherland’s schtick is too self-conscious, his fidgety delivery and pedantic exposition of his grand themes threatening to undermine the joy of the clever tricks he plays. But in meditating so thoughtfully on how we can respond to something as huge as death in today’s media-saturated, performative, often unreal world, he’s created a show that we’ll want to replay in our own memories time and again.
Stand By for Tape Backup was at the Cube Microplex on Friday, April 3.
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