On another level it’s an intricate what-if experiment, an emotional petri dish playing itself out in front of an audience. What begins as a fly-on-the-wall close-up of life in lockdown steadily intensifies into something which is breaking the rules of reality.
It’s ingenious stuff. Real-time camera footage meets the nostalgic clunk of a VHS tape in a machine, with technological magic seamlessly executed by dramaturg and camera operator Christian Byers.
Meanwhile, Saro Lusty-Cavallari’s direction fully explores the space, including offstage, where overheard conversations trick the audience into imagining one thing, before revealing something entirely different in a deft piece of writing. And, of course, the production constantly, consciously, references the rich language of psychological horror movies, using blackouts, white noise, sound effects and silence to build tension.
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The central question of videotape is also its central problem: how to resolve the narrative, how to fulfil the storyteller’s contract with their audience of finding a suitable ending? Videotape hedges its bets: the penultimate scene plunges us into full blown schlock-horror, leaving the final scene as an awkward what-just-happened-there coda.
Perhaps the real ending is after the applause, after the lights go on, when the audience is left watching a blurry, VHS-style videotape of themselves, filmed as we watched the show. Do we watch ourselves? Do we leave? What just happened?
Until February 13
