Anything With A Pulse
Park Theatre, London, until November 26
Eliana Ostro’s Anything With A Pulse, which began life at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago, is theatre at its most basic and minimalist. The punters are in a room packed around a tiny stage with just a couple of cheap
plastic chairs as props.
Annie Davison and Rufus Love play a random couple who meet at a nightclub, flirt and eventually end up in bed together. Ostro has a great eye for the ridiculousness of the human condition: she has a lot of fun highlighting quite how hilarious the whole human mating ritual can be.
The piece is as much a celebration of the power of good writing as acting. Davison and Love play not only the central lovers, but also their friends and exes. This involves them both crossing genders and class on hairpin bends, but the two somehow never come unstuck. It makes for a mesmerising spectacle.
I hardly need to add that in such a pared-down production, there is no bed – there isn’t even a set designer listed in the credits – but its two actors manage to simulate the act of love fully clothed in a rather hilarious way.
The show ends abruptly, it doesn’t really have anything terribly deep or meaningful to say for itself, and it’s the sort of thing that in a few days’ time I
will have forgotten all about, but, for all that, it kept me mildly amused to the best part of an hour and these days there is a lot to be said for that.
There are, I might add, only six people listed in the credits for this show – that includes the entire cast – and I’ve no doubt, given how difficult it now is raising money for theatre, we will be seeing quite a few more mean and lean productions like this in the months, if not years, to come.
