Penny Arcade is angry. She’s angry at the gentrification of cities like New York and London, but she’s also angry at the gentrification of our minds.
That young people aren’t young, and care about things like expensive wine. That Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, the illusion of everyday life, has come true and anybody born after the 80s believes that facade to be real. That no one questions anything anymore.
Penny’s mission is to make you think. She does so through a laconic New York drawl, a neon pink bob boasting a charismatic stage presence almost as big as her humungous bust.
Her delivery is punctuated by slick lighting changes and musical backing tracks spun by her DJ – and, we learn, ex-husband – Steve. It’s essentially a lecture, albeit one designed to encompass the soul and spirit as much as the mind.
The script is sharp and full of wit, as you’d expect from a contemporary of Warhol and Quentin Crisp. A particularly effective section is where she launches into a tirade against cupcakes, her chosen symbol for the banality of modern society. She’s proud to have not seen Star Wars.
What words she uses are so contentious, there are undoubtedly going to be parts where each spectator will be provoked into mental argument. Which means Penny has achieved her goal. Like fellow performance artist David Hoyle, who was sitting in the front row of this show, she uses performance and art to challenge conventions, and erase passivity. It’s an invigorating experience, charged with electric colour.
We are so wrapped up in the world as we assume it: that we must work, have a job, buy a house and that’s how our lives must run. Yet that’s how society works, not life itself.
Penny is not nostalgic for a different time, she longs for an earlier time; not for her youth, but for the world of her youth. She wants her spectators to wake up from passivity, go out there and grab life with their hands. Touch it. Taste it alive on the tongue. Life does not come in advertisements, products or Netflix.
Go see this show to be provoked, beguiled and perhaps walk out with a little longing for something else, yourself.
• Penny Arcade is running at the The Soho Theatre (21 Dean Street, W1D 3NE) until Saturday 21st November, 7.30pm. £20 (£17.50 concs). For more information visit www.sohotheatre.com.
