Peggy Shaw is powerfully vulnerable in RUFF (image Michael Conti)
RUFF is a show about having a stroke but it’s also a show about control and authority, fragility and vulnerability, songs, names and being underwater. It’s the latest production by Split Britches, the experimental lesbian performance company that began work in New York in 1981 and comprises performer Peggy Shaw and director Lois Weaver. The co-written work tends to use Shaw’s life as a springboard; past shows have engaged with parenthood, butch lesbian identity and menopause. RUFF is a diffuse, sprawling response to the stroke Shaw had in 2011 and it’s part memoir, part lopsided public service announcement, part appeal for help and part self-consuming artefact.
The performance takes the shape of a monologue about the experience of stroke – the event and its consequences – that is at once enhanced and compromised. It benefits from Split Britches’ characteristic assets: deeply personal experience is channeled through sharp and elegant verbal expression; eclectic forms and subjects are confidently knitted together; Shaw’s huge charisma compels our attention. The monologue is enhanced by a range of technical gambits. Shaw stands before a large green screen – the great digital blank space – onto which are projected videos of archival music performances and an all-star queer-perf back-up band as well as motion-capture schematics of Shaw’s body in motion. There are also three flatscreen monitors that serve as additional screens and as autocues – since the stroke, Shaw’s memory for lines isn’t what it was. The monologue is compromised by her sometimes faltering recall, and by other things baked into the show: the video material interrupts her as she struggles to get words out; what seems to be a live rendition of Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man turns out to be lip-synching that itself breaks down into stillness. Failure now comes as standard.
There’s power and poignancy in this tension. Shaw’s performance persona is so solid, so planted, so damn tough that it jars fruitfully to see her struggle to stay on her toes. It reminds us of the struggle that has always been under that solidity. She floats the idea that the stroke was triggered by seeing for the first time a video of her 13-year-old self in a dress – an experience sufficiently traumatic to undo her queer grown brain. Instability proliferates in song: Shirley Ellis’s Name Game is all bonanafanafofeggy while a version of Brel’s Jacky roves from Frank to Jacko to Klytemnestra à la Ethyl Eichelberger. It’s not just gender that wobbles here but identity, memory, life itself. As Godfather-era Brando, Shaw gnaws at an orange – symbol of death in those movies – and has fun with the word “horror”. Mortality bites but we can still laugh, still be together. It’s the togetherness that makes the whole thing work. The audience is a willing arm around Shaw, supporting her strength, loving her weakness. She knows it, she’s grateful, and so are we.
RUFF is at the Barbican until Saturday April 16. Full details here.
