The Talent

Every time I visit the Battersea Arts Centre, it never fails to blow me away: the building- a grand, high Victorian building that once was Battersea Town Hall- is objectively stunning. The lobby and bar area, too, is one of the most chic yet eclectic chill-out spaces I have seen thus far in London. And finally, the work is always truly experimental. Every artist that is invited into the space is a true scientist of the arts. And so when I learned that Dr. Deborah Pearson and Action Hero had a new piece at Battersea Arts, I just knew I had to grab myself a ticket… and a few for some friends in town, too.

Often, when I share with people that I am a dramaturg and an aspiring academic, they bring up Pearson as a textbook example of someone who is both a brilliant theatremaker and a brilliant scholar. You can see this scholarship at play when considering the piece as a whole: it has all the elements of a good and proper post-dramatic play. It’s full of cycles and repetition that vamp and re-vamp. A little bit is added each time as we keep returning, just as Maria Irene Fornes saw it when she claimed that life was like a spiral shape, not a mountain (Ahem, Aristotle). Perhaps theatre should be the same.

The premise of The Talent is a simple one. I mean, it’s in the title. And for this performer turned dramaturg (though I’ll still be a performer if it’s with the right people), it was all too painfully relatable. A person (Gemma Paintin) sits in a sound booth. Large headphones cover her ears. The booth is so small, claustrophobic. It could fit no more than one person. She begins with a gentle, meditation-like vowel warm-up before jumping right into “Breakfast is complicated!” And so begins the cycle of (frankly) stupid advert after stupid advert after even stupid-er advert. Incessant, impossible demands are made of Gemma- the voice, the talent- such as, “can you make it even brighter?” (this is a common note in the voiceover community, but when you really think about it: huh??!) and “She’s authoritative, but she’s sexy,” and I believe someone along the lines of “Can we make it a little more space-y” (this was for the bit where Gemma takes on the voice a female space cadet of some sort).

Throughout, Paintin completely goes. for. it. And you get the sense that the performer, alongside the other writers/creators, Deborah Pearson and James Stenhouse, had a lot of fun with this one. Gemma plays a colourful cast of characters covering an insane range that only someone with true prowess in voice, speech and body can muster. In addition to a sexy space cadet, she also takes on the life of other characters such as: a crying baby duck, an older Northern lady cosying up with a cuppa, and a disembodied, riveted, pumped-up voice that at first appears to be selling “the great outdoors” post-Covid, but it turns out to be just another car commercial. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for someone outside of the entertainment industry to witness this, but for myself, I found it to actually be quite sad. Here is someone with a massive talent being subjected to consistently crappy (brilliantly crappy though…that is the point) material, and this is much of the life of a performer. No amount of direction can alter the state of the objectively horrible writing, no matter how hard and hilariously disembodied voices (Pearson and Stenhouse themselves) try.

As the cycle of adverts ensued, little pieces of a plot began to sprinkle themselves in. It’s a plot that, I think at this point, many of us might groan a little about: life in the post-pandemic world. The disembodied voices drone vaguely about the state of the world and how hard it is out there. It’s hard not to think about it constantly. “I’m just trying to get on with my work, really,” Gemma says, dismissing them. What they’re doing is not all that important, but Gemma and the audience are the only ones who get the hint— who are in on the joke. Later on in the piece, there are moments in which the voices cut out and sputter as they begin working from home. It’s impossible to hear how they’re directing Gemma, but she still performs as well as she did before. Here is where we really approach the definition of “inessential worker.”

And here, perhaps is the point of the piece. It is, quite simply, about the talent. It’s about how we try so hard, we learn lots of new skills. We actually become very adept at what we do. But does that amount to anything if the work is inessential?

I was speaking with my friends after the show, and we couldn’t stop gushing about how great Gemma was as a performer. Me and my friends all went to the same performing arts high school, and we were all in theatre. 2/3 of us ended up pursuing theatre in college. Only one of us still has performance at the centre of our career aspirations. I was considering my work as a reviewer:

You know, after I see a performance, I don’t really write much about the actors at all. If it works, then it works. Unless it’s really shit. Then I might say something and agonise for hours about how to say that not-so-harshly. My friend, who still really wants to be a full-time professional actor, looked so confused. Really? Really, I said. Good acting can’t change shit writing. And that’s why I’m now primarily a writer, I think.

There is so much wasted talent out there. And it seems that this sentiment would make the talent feel a little worse about themselves and the writers, a bit more optimistic.

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I still do feel really bad for the talent though.

The Talent was on at Battersea Arts Centre from 3-20 May 2023, and it shall tour again! Follow Action Hero on Twitter for updates.