Roger is dead. Roger is dead. ROGER IS DEAD. And frankly I could not care less.
The phrase was repeated countless times throughout the hour that The Conker Group meandered through their piece. In all that time I did not feel that I learnt who Roger was apart from a slightly convoluted plot driver. I’m not too sure that the characters that were being portrayed really knew who he was either. Poor Roger.
In all honesty, I’m not too sure what Underhero was really about. Alright, that is a bit unfair. I do know what it was about. It was about a concept of the hero is and what this person represents in our society. Despite this quite simple proposition the narrative was lost under the layers of alternating and half-baked attempts at jamming an extra dose of cod philosophy down the audience’s throat. We’re talking heroes, then friendship, now we’re on gender politics, here’s a dash of socio-economics, postmodernism, and I think I can see something about our information saturated culture peeking out over there too.
For an hour performance Underhero would have benefited from the jungle of ideas being cut back down to the most basic fundamentals and having been worked on from there. I was genuinely curious as to who Roger was and what he (or she – seriously, the 'meta' narrative got just plain silly) represented. It was quite disappointing to never really get to the bottom of his purpose.
During this sprawling performance, the actors were by seemingly lacking in passion for their subject and, apart from the genuinely engaging and funny Third, were wooden and uninteresting. You felt like they hadn’t put out their A-game and were waiting for something better written to come along. Shame really, with some refinement this could have been quite good.
