Aïo: Looking for a thread
Putting on a show requiring audience participation is risky. For a start, there needs to be a large enough audience, as well as a crowd that joins in, preferably slightly drunk. Sophie Joans had a paucity of these factors in her favour when she performed Aïo at the inaugural Heat Festival in Cape Town on Friday night.
Additionally, Heat being a festival premised foremost on the visual arts, the audience was more a gallery opening than a theatre crowd; a bit more reserved than the usual festinos looking for a laugh. But, to her credit, Joans was able to muster the energy to push through the dead zones, turning the key until she got the audience’s engine spluttering to life. She is a brave, and a very good, performer, and bound to get better.
The show, however, is not likely to. Not as it stands. Fun, yes, more so with the right audience (tipsy, young, eager and up for a joke), but Aïo doesn’t have the fuel to go the distance. Simply because there’s not much more to it than the enjoyment of watching Joans. There’s nothing to take home at the end of the 50-odd minutes, and we can’t take Joans home, notwithstanding her strip tease for which she is ironically too confident to perform as a parody of the desire to be desirable. Only for those who were pulled on stage does there perhaps remain a lingering sense of either embarrassment or achievement.
Okay, the cat stand-up comedy might give you a chuckle or an interior smile for a bit as its absurdity sinks in, but that’s about it. For Aïo is a collection of disparate, ridiculous skits that are intentionally amateurishly performed. There isn’t a thread, narrative or otherwise, to be found. At least not without a long stretch into Dadaism, but that would entail looking under the carpet, which we are not invited to do. That the best parts were when Joans ad-libbed in response to the audience (in particular in character to the entitled woman who tried to get the sound desk to turn down the background volume) speaks both to Joans’s ability as an actor and to the weakness of the script.
The technological clutter in which we were supposed to scan a QR code with our phones and send in selfies and WhatsApps to her sidekick monitoring it all on a laptop and projecting it up stage, added nothing noteworthy. It was a distraction.
The first-date scene had potential for vulnerability, but could be more interesting if Joans acted it alone, as a monologue of questions, and responses to questions we don’t hear. And if connected to the striptease, and the stand-up scene was made to be an embarrassment, a conceptual, if not narrative, thread could begin to be woven which would far better serve Joans’s astonishing ability.
However, Aïo is but a memory of harmless, unprovocative clowning that we struggle to pronounce.
Writer, creator & performer: Sophie Joans
Director: Aldo Brincat
Composer: Ryan Stopforth