The Talent and We were promised honey! – Theatre reviews

HOME Manchester Theatre 2 summer season

On the day I went to see The Talent, my employer released a communique on corporate communication. The tone being struck will be familiar with anybody who has seen advertising from . Friendly, open, and very occasionally levity. Talking like you’re mates.

On the way home, I pick up a ready meal from the Tesco down the road. All but the most committed have long since stopped noticing the voice of the automated checkouts, but I find myself tuning in to one aspect – the twinkle in the eye. The sound of a smile behind the words.

I thought of how long it may have taken to record that line, for producers and PR experts to pore over the exact inflection which really makes a person feel comfortable as they buy their pasta.

The Talent opens with a voice actor named Gemma (performed by Gemma Paintin), sitting in a recording booth set up in the middle of the stage. Behind glass for the entire show, Gemma is instructed to perform voices for advertisements, video games, spam calls and train announcements, all at the whims of two distant producers whose instructions leave both Gemma, and the audience, puzzled.

She’s already in there before the show, as we file in. Taking advantage of having got there early, and with limited inhibitions, I sat in the front row. A couple metres from me is Gemma’s booth, and Gemma herself. The booth is a tiny space with two microphones – one for standing and one for sitting – and dark grey acoustic baffling across the walls. We never hear Gemma’s voice naturally, only how it comes through the microphones. I wouldn’t be surprised if the booth was mostly soundproof.

The set is excellent. I loved that the lighting was entirely isolated to the booth, and things were done with this lighting throughout the show that made the most of this. Hearing Paintin’s voice through the microphone created a delicious sense of distance that maintained an otherworldy, oppressive feeling to the piece. As a presentation gimmick, it’s top-notch.

I’m enraptured by this from the beginning. With the glass between us, I feel able to simply stare at the woman in the booth. I was delighted by this as a way of setting tone. Already she is made less than human, an exhibit, before saying a word.

To set the tone, the first recording that Paintin gives is one of those distinctly British adverts where the voiceover seems to be winking at you, claiming that $BRAND knows how complicated and difficult life is, but we are $BRAND are willing to infantalise you until you’re all happy and cosy and lovely, eating our breakfast cereal or using our bank or whatever.

Side note – I used to watch a lot of NFL, and half of the enjoyment was watching American adverts. They don’t do this in the same way. The tone of voice that British adverts take is very distinct in how they speak to customers.

It is funny. There’s laughter. It’s funny to see somebody in a box, talking enthusiastically about a cereal on demand. We recognise the “that’s great Gemma, but could it be brighter? You know, like, you know life is complicated, but that’s alright?” as the kind of direction that would actually be given in this situation.

But, wait, hang on, do we? How many of us have actually been in recording booth and know what direction in those circumstances involves?

I’m getting this out of the way first despite – as will become clear – me enjoying this play. This is not a character piece. That’s fine, I did not expect it to be. But the humour in it comes primarily from two sources. First, watching somebody voice acting often appears absurd, and that’s funny. Secondly, the producers are the standard “showbusiness moneymen who give vague directions.”

They’re stock characters, and stock characters we’ve seen dozens of times before. And we’ve seen that so many times before, that the humour comes from reference. We’ve watched TV shows of films set in Hollywood where that kind of director is everywhere.

How genuine is it? Maybe it’s completely genuine. But given that these characters aren’t fleshed out at all, it seems lazy to include this humour and a blemish on an otherwise fine script.

Not least because The Talent is not a comedy. I decided fairly early on that this was a horror.

“Glitch horror” is a genre of computer games and spooky online folk stories where the reader is unsettled by a computer program glitching out. These started out as copypasta about haunted video game cartridges and are now fully-established in actual games.

It’s understandable. As we spend more of our lives at computers, programs glitching out in unexpected ways becomes less like a broken-down appliance and more like our sense of reality distorting.

Gemma’s world gets actual glitches eventually in the form of her connection to her producers breaking down, but long before that this production bears the hallmarks of glitch horror. She is taken at breakneck speed from her cereal commercial to a Commander Shepherd-like character, forced to repeat over and over increasingly more ridiculous death noises. Her producers come across as not-quite-human, indifferent to the feelings of the eponymous talent and talking amongst themselves about how to use the human part of the machine.

From this we move to Gemma recording each line of a robo call, directing only by a beep to send her to the next line. Some lines are simply light-hearted, reassuring laughter. Others are standard “Um yeah I’m told you’ve been in an accident?”, before eventually glitching out on reassurances to the future scam victim that she is human.

“I have blood in my veins.” Beep.

“I have blood in my veins.” Beep.

“I have blood in my veins.

I have blood in my veins.

I have blood in my veins.”

It’s impossible to talk about this play without talking about two elephants in the room. The first is that this has elements of a pandemic piece. The producers aren’t in the room, they’re on a call. There are references to some unspecified tragedy. The call occasionally drops and there are technical issues. I’m torn on this part – like the comedy, it adds some elements to it that an audience may find familiar but ultimately don’t do much to serve the underlying point.

The second room-elephant is AI. This is not a story about AI. Gemma is the human in the equation. She is, at least for now, required in order for her producers to capture that human element needed for their projects.

From the beginning, though, when she was a zoo animal for me to stare at, she is not treated as human. She may be even less human that the disembodied voices of her producers on the call, at least in their views. A single pot-plant in her booth does little to obscure the fact that she is a cog in the machine, and that her job is to carefully inject a human voice into faceless corporate communications, ultimately to manipulate, whether benignly or maliciously, other humans.

Inevitably, the system breaks down. The glitches become more frequent. The lighting in the booth – excellently changing from moment to moment to make Gemma appear strident, feeble, or isolated depending on the moment – starts to strobe aggressively as the stage is flooded with repeated, out of context lines from the producers.

This is not a show about AI, because we do not need AI to be dehumanised. We have done it to ourselves.

We were promised honey! Is very different. Performed in the round in single-file seats, I briefly had the horrifying feeling that I would be sat with two seats empty to either side of me, having chosen to sit in the corner nobody else was but being one of very few who had come alone. This did not come to pass, but given the performance that was about to take place, it would have been quite funny if it had.

As we sit, an recording of a conversation between Air Traffic Control and a pilot is playing alongside dream-like, ambient music. I have a lasting interest in ATC and immediately recognise it, immediately telling one of my seat neighbours that I think this is a recording of “that mechanic that stole a plane and flew it without experience”. The neighbour politely thanked me, saying this was useful information he wasn’t aware of, and looked away. Going to the theatre alone turns me into my parents.

Sam Ward, the founder the theatre company YESYESNONO and the performer here, rises from among the audience. A well-worn technique, but still effective, Ward brings an intoxicating energy from the get-go. His unassuming, practical trainers, t-shirt and shoulder bag immediately put me in the mind of an enthusiastic hike leader – half wilderness guide, half cult preacher.

Ward explains to us that we are listening to the conversation between Richard Russell and Air Traffic Control, and that he was a ground handling agent who stole a Bombardier Q400 and flew it, without piloting experience. I allow myself a small point of pride at the accuracy of my recognition, and shame at having misremembered Russell as a mechanic.

He tells us that this story is not going to have a happy ending, and says that for us to proceed, one of the audience will need to say “I would like to hear this story”. Otherwise, we can sit in silence.

At first, the show seems as though it is going to be something akin to improvised comedy. Billed as involving communal storytelling, I was not prepared for how much audience participation there was. As well as repeatedly being asked to affirm that we really did want to continue, in three parts Ward involves members of the audience, using them as props, additional actors, and eventually simply asking two of them to read from the script into the microphone.

Memories of a classroom full of people awkwardly not wanting to be the first volunteer, I was the first to put up my hand for the first part. Clearly intended to introduce the concept to the audience gently to the concept, all I had to do was provide yes and no answers. This section felt like improvised comedy, though a look at the script afterwards does, of course, show that it was anything but. Entirely scripted, my answers were ultimately meaningless, but this gentle introduction allowed the audience to get the awkward laughter out of their system as a self-selecting outgoing person – myself – was the centre of attention for a little while.

It was somewhat surreal hearing my name said over and over by the only performer in a one-hander, Ward making eye contact with me throughout. While knowing that this was not truly improvisational, it achieved its goal of creating a feeling of communal storytelling. This feeling carried into the second and third parts, where the thrust of the piece really took hold.

It’s all laughter until a certain point in the second part, when it becomes clear that as well as not being improvisational, this is definitively not comedy.

This story will not have a happy ending.

The Talent depicts a world where emotion is sanded down, portioned out, and mechanised in the service of capital. Paintin’s booth is claustrophobic, its lights blinding. Watching it, I felt as though she, I, and all of us were trapped in these booths, that we have created a world where genuine experience and expression cannot exist. I’m reminded of a quite well-known quote from The Great Dictator when I think about this kind of mechanisation – “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts.” It felt overwhelmingly bleak. There is no escape. Humanity has been suborned to capital. It is hopeless.

We were promised honey! is apocalyptic in a different sense. Once the piece gets up and running, it dashes through great spans of time. The periods that Ward says are passing is meaningless, his eyes bright with his cult leader energy as he tells us breathlessly what will happen one hundred years, two hundred, one million years from now. He describes what we happen to each of us in that time, relationships failing, worlds crumbling. Past, present and future mixing together into a meaningless soup, every choice that we have made amounting to nothing in the face of unyielding, brutal time.

“This story will not have a happy ending”. Richard Russell crashes his plane. He does not survive. Eventually, everything we know and all that we love will be forgotten. Our choices will be meaningless.

And yet, repeatedly in this show we affirm that we wish to continue.

It’s not a unique message, but it doesn’t have to be. We were promised honey! rejects the hopeless, suicidal impulse of a meaningless life. Both plays look into this meaningless during their “breakdown” segment. The Talent has Gemma’s producers glitching out, her lights flashing, as it becomes more and more clear how she is lost in the machine. But she does not escape, and we are not left with anything other than horror at the world that we have made.

When Ward breaks down in honey, it’s with a frentic energy, that of a plane in a tailspin. We can see the ground coming towards us but are exhilarated by the rush of our flight. And after the wreckage, we are allowed to pick ourselves up. In a final flourish that for plays that had not done the communal groundwork would have seemed absurd, the audience is asked to sing, despite the indifference of the universe, and to do so alongside our friends and strangers, in spite of the unhappy ending that we all face. I think the choice of song – Country Roads – was a little odd, but I can see why it was done. Everybody knows the chorus.

To be clear, I enjoyed both plays. But I am going back to think about honey’s script and message more and more – I bought the script on the way out, which I don’t think I’ve ever done before. The Talent is a far more interesting technical achievement, but ultimately says less and is somewhat unbalanced when it’s trying to be funny. Both are more than worth the £16 that I paid for one hour of your time, and I would recommend seeing them if they’re in your city.

The Talent has ended its UK tour and will next be performed in the UK Edinburgh at the Horizon Showcase at Summerhall, 22-27 August. European tour dates can be found here. I saw it at HOME Manchester on 1^st June 2023.

We were promised honey! (YESYESNONO, written by Sam Ward) will continue at HOME Manchester on Sunday, then move to Liverpool and Keswick. Tour dates can be found here. I saw it at HOME Manchester on 8^th June 2023.

Next week I’m trying out a new theatre and seeing HAVE A BREAK, HAVE A KIT KAT at 53two – this time at the start of its run so the review will be in good time!