Theatre review: Trainers, Or The Brutal Unpleasant Atmosphere Of This Most Disagreeable Season(A Theatrical Essay)

Part of the Gate Theatre's USP is that every Artistic Director is allowed free rein on how they interpret the venue's remit as an international theatre. And while I've yet to see a cast get naked and throw food at each other, there's no doubting that Ellen McDougall's tenure is all about channeling the spirit of European avant-garde theatre. It's apparent again in Hester Chillingworth's staging of American writer Sylvan Oswald's Trainers, Or The Brutal Unpleasant Atmosphere Of This Most Disagreeable Season (A Theatrical Essay), whose cast of two greet the audience in a white room filled with random objects which will come to represent people and things in the story. Such story as there is, anyway - as the final part of the title says, this is intended to be an essay rather than a traditional play, and part of the attraction of an essay is that it's a medium without a defined form or structure.

So performers Nando Messias and Nicki Hobday don't so much take on roles as share narration duties for a meandering story loosely inspired by 16th century writer Michel de Montaigne, credited with creating the essay itself after writing 101 of them while mourning the death of his (probably platonic) friend and partner Étienne de La Boétie.

In a story that occasionally seems to be that of Michel and Étienne themselves, but mostly takes place in a parallel present day, the narrator mourns the death of their partner Stephen, a revolutionary leader in a world where queer people are confined to a ghetto after being on the losing side of a civil war. Although it's never explicitly stated, the play centres on gender non-binary bodies, as seen when the narrator and Stephen first have sex, and deal with the awkwardness of not quite being sure how the other feels about various body parts and how they want to use them. This idea of bodies being fluid feeds into a theme about exercise and changing your appearance - the Trainers of the title are personal trainers, an obsession of the narrator's as people who confidently give off the impression of being able to shape and control things in an uncertain world.

But is Oswald able to shape and control these disparate influences of philosophy, critical theory, gender politics and regular politics into a coherent essay? For my money, no. Whether they're exchanging costumes, doing competitive pull-ups, or eating paint and drinking Crisp'N'Dry, Hobday and Messias are watchable but I wasn't buying what they were selling, and Chillingworth's deconstructed production of an already deconstructed text quickly wore out my patience.

Trainers, Or The Brutal Unpleasant Atmosphere Of This Most Disagreeable Season (A Theatrical Essay) by Sylvan Oswald is booking until the 21st of March at the Gate Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Alex Harvey Brown.