Red Fox Theatre’s Bill embraces too much confusion as well as chaos at the Omnibus Theatre
“We appear to have three nincompoops”
Creating an ethos called Chaos Theatre which uses “using any resource, style, or stimulus to tell complex true stories in the wildest way we can” is a canny way of trying to write yourself carte blanche to do theatre any which way and also in managing expectations to get away with anything. Red Fox Theatre do follow that with “because if theatre wants to make a difference, it has to be a good night out” though, which ups the ante once again because a promise is still a promise.
Bill is certainly chaotic in its presentation. Music, skits, puppetry, physical comedy, mime, parody, foley effects, monologuing, fact-based epilogues, all this and more is thrown at the wall and some of it sticks. The parody film trailer is particularly good fun as it riffs on any number of movie tropes and a wide range of original compositions gives the company (Rachel Barnes, Callum McGuire, Chris Weeks, Jonty Weston) ample opportunity to show off their multi-instrumental skills and fine voices, alongside humour at its absolute broadest.
But what of Bill, the man whose name is the actual title of the show? Well he’s serial right-wing conspiracy theorist Milton Bill Cooper (Weston), “the most destructive and influential man to ever grace radio” so the publicity tells us but who is curiously absent for much of the first half of Bill. Collaborative playwright and director Megan Jenkins instead turns the lens on those who embrace his conspiracy theories, such as alien abduction, but with all the seriousness that you can imagine ‘chaos theatre’ would lend it. Even as snippets of biographical details about Cooper are doled out, little really registers.
The result is then something seriously confused. A subject matter of such importance as the epilogue points out to us with the rise of a post-truth era with its Trumps and Infowars, and a figure who arguably could have been the trigger for this troubling shift , but zero attempt made to substantively link the two in the body of the show. Even as a sign above flits between true, unsubstantiated and quote in each scene, there’s a hollowness to the interrogation of what it really means that the lines between them have been increasingly blurred.
