Phobiarama is fucking brilliant

And I’m about to tell you what happens in it, so if you’re planning to go, think carefully before you keep reading.

Phobiarama, the theatrical installation thing by Dries Verhoeven that’s in LIFT this year, is a bit like a ghost train. In pairs, we get into small cars on a fixed track that loops around a central island of walls which are broken up with various doorways and corridors. The cars start moving very slowly, in almost complete darkness. There is some of that generic bass rumble so beloved of theatremakers but it’s really the dark that’s most frightening. Slowly, small tv monitors kick into life but there’s little to see on them— the images are so distorted and flickery that they’re really just shapes. We hear bits of dialogue from terrorist organisations about the fall of the West, which gives an indication of where the whole piece is going, but really it’s the dark that’s most frightening. For most of the first 5–10 minutes you really can’t see much at all, other than the shape of the space, and that only flickers into view whenever one of the telly screens allows it to.

I was tense as fuck right from the start to be honest, waiting for some drama student to jump out at me at any moment. I was forcing my eyes open so wide that honestly I think I strained an eyelid. But when performers entered the space it was way creepier than that. Have you seen It Follows? I’m not going to pretend I’m some expert on the horror genre here because I fully am not, but I did watch It Follows a couple of years ago and it got me, bigtime. I thought it was one of the best films I’d seen in forever, and felt completely haunted by it for months. Mad respect for It Follows. But anyway, if you’ve seen that film you’ll remember that at one point the creature/demon/metaphor/whatever takes the form of this strange giant carnivalesque man, something almost but not quite human. Well, in Phobiarama, the first things we see after the telly screens are bears, lurking in doorways and behind walls. They’re kind of slow and benign in their movements, but they have these ever so slightly elongated necks. Like, they’re bears, but not quite. They’re bears if bears had been drawn from a blueprint found by some fucking terrifying evil horror spirit that’s never seen a bear before and is obviously only pretending to be a bear to suck your soul into a mason jar or something.

So in the flickering darkness, these slow almost-bears loom out at you, bend over the cars with their claws inches from your face, and let’s make one thing very clear — I was already maximum hysterical by this point. I kept thinking I’d got used to the whole bear thing and knew what to expect from around the next corner, but then suddenly one that had previously been still would bend down towards me and I would FREAK OUT. No joke, my heart rate was through the fucking roof.

It was around this point that I turned to the poor bastard who was sharing a car with me (he was called Michael or something I think — apologies Michael) and kind of scream-shouted ‘THIS IS REALLY WELL PACED INNIT’ before I shrieked again and headbutted him in order to get out of the way of another bear.

Anyway, that WASN’T EVEN THE BEST BIT.

After a while all our cars stopped, and the bear in front of us lifted his head off to reveal a scary clown mask. Classic stuff — Pennywise, John Wayne Gacy, that one from Slipknot. It’s a brilliant moment, I’m almost sad that I had already heard that clowns would be involved before I got there. Imagine not knowing that was coming. He just kind of smiles at you for ages. Creepy. as. FUCK.

Then there iss a slightly awkward bit where the guy has to unzip and remove the rest of his bear outfit to reveal a white boilersuit underneath (they should’ve found some kind of quick-release costuming thing probably) but I’m not going to dwell on that because what followed was honestly a fucking spectacular piece of dramatic choreography. And I don’t mean dancing (although there was some of that), more that the images that were created by these clowns running about and hunting us down were some of the most brilliant, perfectly timed and paced of any show/experience I’ve done.

It helped that our cars had started moving backwards, and faster, so we got the real sense of being chased. One clown would march after us, gaining on us then dropping away, only for another to jump out right into our faces, and then we’d also pass these lone clowns, just dancing by themselves. Like it was about to break out into some kind of murderous costume rave. The perspective of it all was just so perfectly composed — it reminded me of that Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker work that Beyonce ripped off for the Countdown video, but because we were moving backwards the whole time, it also had this weird recursive montage thing going on too, something like the Seven Nation Army video, except obviously you’re desperately backing away from everything, not tunnelling deeper.

This clown bit was the most exhilarated I’ve felt by art in a long, lonnnnnnggggg time. Of course I recognise that I was being manipulated by it, and the tactics of that manipulation were not rocket science, but fuck me it worked a treat. I remember my first experience of Punchdrunk, at It Felt Like A Kiss in Manchester in 2009, was a similar thing — the slow rising fear generated by classic horror imagery and the signs of political conspiracy, followed by the pure adrenalin rush of a real, physical pursuit. We can be as snotty as we like about lowbrow Hollywood entertainment versus the supposed cerebral stimulation of the great British play or whatever, but for immediate and visceral impact, give me a clown chase any day of the fucking week.

But the thing about this highbrow/lowbrow argument, right, is that those who turn their noses up at the kind of immersive experiences designed to frighten and thrill — or maybe those who *raise their immaculate eyebrows* at it, whatever — do actually want to be thrilled and exhilarated by theatre. I mean, I can place the Phobiarama clowns in exactly the same Venn circle as the post-rock at the end of This Is How We Die, or even the rhythms of Not I. Each one generates this kind of breathlessness, this feeling of being overwhelmed and insignificant, whether through fear (in the case of Phobiarama), or awe (This Is How We Die), or even through a fruitless attempt at comprehension (Not I). There’s sublimity in these things, a gratification that comes from facing our own powerlessness.

Yes, okay, maybe it’s a stretch to put some scary clowns on a ghost train up there with looking out onto an ocean or contemplating infinity or whatever, but this wasn’t just those clowns. They weren’t just hanging around looking for something to do, being accidentally terrifying in the meantime. The experience had been designed and choreographed for us by an artist who had a vision for their work, and for our experience of it. Each moment of that clown act was a like a single perfect frame of classic cinema. Every time we opened our eyes it was onto a view that had been composed perfectly. The feeling of powerlessness that runs through Phobiarama, and This Is How We Die, and Not I, is as much about the mad fucking props we should pay to these artists as it is to the actual sensations produced by the live experiences they have constructed.

But anyway, that’s not even the end of it.

There is a politics to Phobiarama, and it’s really only when the clowns remove their masks and boiler suits to reveal that they are all men of colour — some large (they work OUT), many with tribal tattoos, many with facial hair we might recognise as Muslim — that it emerges. Whereas when they removed the bear outfits it was just a slightly awkward logistical necessity, when they strip to their pants it becomes a fairly powerful statement of vulnerability. They carry their boilersuits in their hands and walk at a similar pace to our cars (which are now moving forwards again, slowly) and suddenly the men become prisoners and we are cast as their guards.

Now, it was only last night, so I’m honestly a bit surprised at how my memory has already mashed up the order of things at the end, but I’ll try my best. There was a bit of a speech from Theresa May’s response to terrorism in the UK (maybe Westminster Bridge or Manchester Arena?), and a bit where the men rode with us on the back of our cars. But there really important bit was another power shift — some clever video editing made it seem like there were dogs patrolling with the men, and one of our audience members might have been taken to be tortured in one of the central rooms. The guard/prisoner thing is flipped around, and at the end we are kind of abandoned there, not knowing what to do or where to go.

I guess there are many other works who deal with these kind of privileges and prejudices in a way that is more nuanced, more detailed, perhaps even more caring/careful, but I’m 100% not here for any takes which disregard this kind of visual/visceral immediacy — in a show about power, fear, race and religion — as gimmicky or simplistic. Sometimes being clubbed over the head with The Point is precisely what we need. The efficacy of subtlety is limited.

Phobiarama actually reminded me of another of my favourite ever performance works, Jamal Harewood’s The Privileged, in which a bunch of zookeepers petting a cuddly polar bear twists into the power play between a black slave and his white masters. Likewise, the politics of this show are confrontational and unavoidable, and yes, as audience members we are perhaps forcibly positioned as bad guys against our will. But even this can be admired — for its motivations, definitely, but also for the details of its construction. Bear in mind that, after the clowns, our hearts are still Massively Fucking RACING. We watch the men undress and feel the shift in tone, our brains sense the seriousness of this final act, but our left-liberal sensibilities take a while to bring our bodies back in line. I remember watching these muscular, semi-naked, black men walking around me, understanding what it was trying to tell me about white privilege and fear of the other, and desperately wanting to visibly express my calmness, as if to reassure myself that I am one of the good guys, that these men don’t scare me because I am a good and kind person who gives to charity and votes Labour. But I literally still had the shakes from the adrenalin rush that had gone before. I could hear my own heart and my mouth tasted weird. I was breathing like I’d just run 20k. I could pretend all I wanted, but I was a bag of fucking nerves.

If that’s not the perfect exemplification of certain demonstrably right-on white liberal attitudes, I’m not really sure what is.