Review: A Suffocating Choking Feeling (Omnibus Theatre)

Review by Hywel Farrow-Wilton

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I do have a small confession to make… this is the second time I’ve seen A Suffocating Choking Feeling. I know, how scandalous! But truthfully, I was really excited to have a second viewing so that I could experience the strange world of chronically online Instagram singer Simone Hamilton once more, and live out my influencer dreams. It might actually be more apt to say influencer nightmare as the world that the show’s Performer and creator Simone French inhabits is anything but a wholesome dream.

Simone French is one half of TomYumSim Theatre, the company which created the show. The other half, Tom Halls, is the Director and Technical Manager of this production. The duo aim to create ‘sharp, playful and unpredictable theatre that collides technology, music and performance art… to explore how we connect, perform, and pretend.’ A Suffocating Choking Feeling leans into all these aspects, especially human connection. Or rather, how people desperately seeking connection often turn to social media when they fail to find that connection, end up creating parasocial relationships with their followers, and what happens when the line between truth and lies begins to crumble away.

A Suffocating Choking Feeling began life during the COVID-19 Pandemic as part of the Melbourne and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals as an online performance, due to the social distancing rules at the time. TomYumSim Theatre have since expanded on that production to the current tour, but its roots as an online show are extremely evident. The show follows Simone Hamilton, a young, aspiring influencer who is trying to make it big on social media. She has the account and the singing talent, but she’s missing one thing: followers. This is where the audience comes in.

The audience is invited to experience the show not just through watching it in the theatre but also by commenting along on Simone’s Instagram livestream. This creates a lot of the comedy in the show, and the audience has a lot of fun commenting along and competing for laughs by trolling the performer in front of them. This engagement blurs the line of audience and performer much like social media does and makes those people who participate in the livestream feel complicit in the character’s downward spiral into social media hell, which leads her to take some drastic action in an attempt to gain more followers.

Direction and Technical Management by Tom Halls is expertly done. There are many obvious pitfalls with streaming a show live on Instagram, projecting that stream into the theatre, and both times I have seen it, this has worked without a hitch. Designer Ruta Irbite has used minimal set, but to great effect. It looks perfectly influencer-esque with ring lights, tri-pods and small backdrops that, to the audience, show a cheap, haphazard influencer style bedroom studio whilst also making the different locations Simone is saying she is in look convincing when viewed through the livestream.

Lighting Design by Caitlin Clarke & Amy Daniels works fantastically to create the darkly colourful, otherworldly space that Simone exists in, somewhere between the online world and the real one. The whole design makes the audience feel transported down an Alice in Wonderland-style rabbit hole into Simone’s twisted online reality, and conveys just how intoxicating that feels for her how desperate her search for human connection has become.

What is great about this show is that it is unafraid to be out of control and slightly unhinged. It is very brave of the creatives to stream the show live on Instagram as the often-crazy comments that get posted on the stream do sometimes distract the audience from what’s in front of them and at worst could derail the whole performance if something contentious was posted. However, it is these very comments that is what makes this show so exciting. There is something very alluring about the endless possibilities of a comment section. You can say whatever you want with very little accountability and even when the person you are talking about right in front of you, a human’s natural instinct is to troll and insult.

 Granted, the audience is very aware of the state of fiction the show takes place in and so there is a very heavy sense of irony in many of the comments but Simone expertly challenges this with some meta-commentary that genuinely had my heart in my throat the first time I saw the show as the audience was confronted with the real world and its consequences breaking through the fiction of Simone’s online world.

Ultimately, A Suffocating Choking Feeling is a darkly comic, interactive show about the pitfalls of influencer culture, how highly valued online connection has become, and the kind of psychological impact this can have on the people who participate in this game of competing for viral fame. It certainly isn’t a wholesome, easy evening watch with the family, but if you enjoy theatre that leans into a more conceptual performance art style then this will certainly tickle your fancy.

A Suffocating Choking Feeling plays at the Omnibus Theatre until November 29th

For tickets and information visit https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/suffocating-choking/

Photos by Darren Gill