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Review: Cold Sweat (Southbank Centre)
Review by Phil McCullough
⭐️
Experimental theatre should challenge conventions and our expectations of what a traditional production can be, and at its very best it can offer something illuminating, fresh and exciting to the theatre going experience. Cold Sweat promises to be comic, absurd and subversive, but can a production be so original and bold that it pushes conventions too far and essentially becomes a hot mess? When experimental theatre really works, it can feel mind blowing, like a genuine stroke of genius, but does this production have that Midas touch, or does it descend into something tedious and frustrating for the audience?
Cold Sweat is a new piece of performance theatre from experimental company Forced Entertainment, featuring original sounds and texts from artistic director Tim Etchells. Founded in Sheffield in 1984 by an ensemble of six artists, the company has toured extensively across the UK and internationally over the past forty years. This latest work layers musical loops with AI generated voices, which three performers lip sync to repeatedly over 90 minutes. Set at the end of a riotous party, the production follows the final three revellers as they mouth along to computer generated voices imitating the kind of conversations you might hear from people who are completely intoxicated. Etchells aims to create an uncanny effect by bringing these unreal, computer generated voices into collision with real people on stage, making the performers seem more like digital ghosts or what he describes as ‘almost humans’. The production was conceived and devised by the company, with Etchells responsible for the text, composition and sound design.
The production begins with the stage looking like the aftermath of a chaotic party, with paper cups, wine bottles, inflatable chairs and a flamingo rubber ring strewn across the floor. Each performer repeatedly lip syncs to the same dialogue in an exaggerated manner, wearing ridiculous wigs and outfits. At first, the concept feels mildly amusing and there are a few scattered laughs from the audience, but the problem is that the same phrases and speeches are repeated so relentlessly that the novelty soon wears off and watching becomes tedious. Within the first ten minutes, the laughter had completely stopped in the auditorium.
The show moves between different sections of AI generated dialogue that seemingly have no connection to one another, with little character development and nothing more than the drunken ramblings of people at the end of a party. The problem is that, as an audience, we are neither drunk enough to enjoy sitting through this nonsensical conversation nor invested enough to care about these characters. If I had actually been at that party, I would have ordered an Uber and made a sharp exit after eighteen minutes. The entire production feels as though it could easily have been a five minute sketch, by which point the audience would have understood the concept of these AI driven digital ghosts. Stretching the idea across a full length show simply does not justify the running time.
Director Etchells has the three performers carrying out repetitive tasks throughout the production, from randomly rearranging wine bottles on a table to organising paper cups, throwing them on the floor and then picking them up to arrange them all over again. These constant movements create an unsettling atmosphere, but they also become increasingly frustrating to watch. The production is clearly intended to be funny, with the performers regularly changing their ridiculous wigs and outfits, yet the effect often feels more pantomimic than genuinely absurd. Yes, the production breaks traditional theatrical conventions by having performers lip sync to AI voices, but the result is a bizarre piece of theatre that misses the mark, misjudges its audience and becomes frustrating rather than insightful.
The trio of performers, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall and Terry O’Connor, do their best within the constraints of this lip synced production, but their exaggerated performances are simply not as funny as they are intended to be. There is little emotional connection with the characters, largely because the performers are lip syncing to computer generated voices in such a slow and deliberate fashion. Perhaps this disconnect is precisely the point, with the performers intended to feel artificial and detached from the voices coming out of their mouths, but the end result is an exhausting experience for the audience. As the production draws to a close, the AI voice begins to slow down in a way that recalls HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The final speech is repeated over and over, getting slower and slower until it becomes an excruciating watch. By this point, the audience has understood the concept within the first five minutes, so dragging it out for the remainder of the performance feels less like a clever theatrical experiment and more like being trapped in a loop with no escape.
Richard Lowdon’s stage design is simple, depicting the aftermath of a big party with mess strewn across the stage. Tim Etchells’s unsettling sound design helps establish the bizarre environment inhabited by the AI voiced performers, creating an atmosphere that is deliberately disorientating. However, while the technical elements succeed in making the audience feel uncomfortable, they do little to develop the ideas behind the production. Rather than illuminating our understanding of AI in modern society, the experience simply becomes tedious theatre.
Overall, Cold Sweat is certainly absurd and experimental, but it lacks emotional depth, narrative progression and enough variation to sustain its running time. The production feels trapped in its own AI voiced loop, pushing theatrical conventions so far that it becomes tedious, frustrating and increasingly difficult to watch. One of the AI voices repeatedly uses the phrases ‘slow motion car wreck’ and ‘it’s a disaster’, and unfortunately, those words perfectly sum up my experience of this production.
Cold Sweat plays until 10th October at the Southbank Centre. Tickets from: