THE SHOOTING GALLERY

The Shooting Gallery, a collaboration between literary cult figure and pioneering digital filmmaker Aryan Kaganof and Catherine Henegan, Amsterdam-based multi-disciplinary artist, pays homage to the work of war photographers. It is not light entertainment by any means.

This is a high tech production. One enters, avoiding the dead body clutching a handful of coins, at the entrance, to watch the screen with the ever changing current news from the internet. The angst has started. A news editor sits at her desk and lays out the pages. There is a circle of tealights in front of the screen. Images of violence fill the screen.

The naked “dead” body is slowly hoisted to form a silhouette in front of the screen, images now reflecting on the body as well. A high-pitched whine assaults the ears, even as the images assault one’s mind. I wonder if the nudity adds anything to the play and decide it doesn’t. Nudity doesn’t offend me personally, so I don’t dwell on the issue.

Once the body comes to life, many, many minutes later (the show is short on action other than violent images) the frenetic pace of the images gets worse, not better. The body and the character are obviously two different beings. The character is Jewish. The naked body isn’t. Even if he does phone home to wish his mother a good shabbes.

There is some blood, a beaten bucket, a lot of noise and very little drama. Some graffiti is created at length. It is tedious and not worth the wait.

The imagery is interesting, shocking, horrible, angst-ridden and excessive. The drama is gimmicky, clever and uses real-time images of the audience and e-mail style information, but ultimately it fails to make a statement stronger than the images.

I was left with a vague sense of distaste rather than disquiet or discomfort as I left the theatre. The message did not contain anything which I had been prompted by the show to ponder in depth.

The Shooting Gallery is on at the Laager Theatre at the Market in until 6 August.

Moira, the Faerie Godmother