Theatre review: Happy Days in the Art World, Glasgow Tramway

IF YOU’VE ever been to a major political or professional conference, you’ll know that there’s always some jolly band of delegates who take it on themselves, towards the end of proceedings, to present a conference cabaret, stuffed with in-jokes and knowing pastiche.

And if you want to understand the mood of this new 80-minute experiment in theatre by Berlin-based visual artists Elmgreen & Dragset, which previewed briefly at the Tramway over the weekend, then you could do a lot worse than imagine it as the conference cabaret of the international art-fair crowd.

The play is, of course, an artistic cut above the ordinary, in its sources and casting. The form it chooses to pastiche is the two-handed drama of Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot with faint hints of Happy Days; and in Joseph Fiennes and Charles Edwards – who play the two-man team of artists at the centre of the drama – it enjoys the services of two of the finest actors on the British stage.

Trapped in some limbo furnished only with two narrow bunk-beds, the two therefore bicker petulantly about where they might be, and toy with extended jokes about the international anonymity and infinite gullibility of the conceptual art world. The biggest laughs come – from an industry-based audience – when they make harsh jokes about curators; and occasionally they receive messages from the outside world, not least from a courier played and sung with terrific flair by Kim Criswell.

This is a piece of bourgeois theatre par excellence: smooth, beautifully performed, perfectly self-obsessed and completely insignificant. But there were reasons why Beckett, when he wrote Waiting For Godot, made his leading characters old tramps surviving on carrots, rather than spoiled and self-pitying artists. Of those reasons, Elmgreen & Dragset seem to know little, and understand less.

Rating: ***