By the time the audience realise they have stumbled into a therapy session and not a piece of theatre it’s too late. Caceroleo is a tasteless take on domestic abuse lost in a theatrical maze of its own making.
The one man show penned and performed by Rhys Hastings doesn’t know how to handle itself from the outset. On one level it’s about an actor processing the trauma of growing up in a household plagued by an abusive father and calling on men to address domestic abuse. On another level it seemingly wants to criticise “safe spaces” in the arts for failing to protect against triggering content. Tonal gallimaufry ensues as Hastings fails to synthesis the two into anything worthwhile.
We witness him fluctuate between tasteless flippancy, witless humour, and unearned self-righteousness, all in the flip of a coin. It’s very uncomfortable when it’s unclear how biographical the play is and when the heavy subject matter demands sensitive handling.
The production trips Hastings up with its meta-theatrical fervour. His first interaction with the audience sets a dangerous precedent exploring a question about authenticity and belief in the face of AI generated art. Belittling trust in the narrator is a foolish card to play. We don’t know who to believe as a result and without a concrete grip on the narrative’s reality the audience struggle to find footing.
Nothing that Hastings confesses feels genuine, again almost excruciatingly awkward with such a tender subject matter. His demeanour doesn’t help either. He seems to delight in bewildering the audience as if he knows what he is saying doesn’t make sense; cue many terse pauses and jokes that don’t land.
Director Nastazja Domaradzka it is keen to impress with edgy aesthetics. Montages of random videos are projected onto screens behind Hastings. Superfluous filmed sections featuring actors rehearsing scenes that Hastings describes on stage do little to clean up the theatrical entanglement. It’s exacerbated by how clearly traumatic sequences are played bizarrely for laughs. Jarring at best. Tasteless at worst. A pale imitation of a Lars Von Trier film stretched over a cumbersome hour and a half.
Dumping trauma on stage and expecting drama to simply bleed from it is a careless thing to do. Caceroleo may very well come from a place of horrific darkness, but in lacking the necessary schematics to explore domestic abuse on stage the production comes across as crass and exploitative.
Of course there needs to be room in theatre for experimentation, and there is no better place for that than fringe spaces like the Vault festival, but some experiments don’t need to see the light of day.
