Culture cancelled at Oxford's Offbeat Festival

Offbeat Festival: Bad Boy Disco at the Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse, on Wednesday, July 13. Review by JON LEWIS

Cardiff-based CB4 Theatre’s frivolous 60-minute two-hander Bad Boy Disco is framed around a dilemma faced by fans and audiences: What do you do if the creative idol you have worshipped subsequently says or does something that you fundamentally disagree with?

Frankie-Rose Taylor and Alice Rush’s devised show includes vox pops from unnamed respondents who are questioned about cancel culture. Some of these views, which are projected on to a screen, are more historical than the examples proposed by the actresses. One man cites Wagner, whose writings and works are openly anti-Semitic whereas Taylor and Rush are more concerned about contemporary artists such as Morrisey, JK Rowling, Graham Linehan, Rolf Harris, Michael Jackson and Kevin Spacey.

The play explores the impact on diehard fans. Taylor and Rush give anecdotes about their youthful first experiences of going to gigs and festivals, following bands like the Lost Prophets around the country. They also chat about the communal student evenings watching Father Ted. These rose-tinted spectacled days come to an end when scandal erupts around an artist. Do they stop attending the live concerts, stop wearing the T-shirts and buying the merchandise? It is just as well that the tattoos sported by the actresses are not of the artists who have offended.

At one point, the audience become the equivalent of the tricoteuses, the knitters sitting around the guillotines during the French revolutions. Mobile phones snapping on a QR code are led to screens encouraging us to vote whether to cancel specific artists they have named. There seems to be a qualitative difference between artists who have broken the law and those whose views have either changed or made public. Taylor and Rush are more concerned with artists where the outcome is more nuanced, for example, the artist guilty of a thought crime rather than, for example, a sex offence.

The ethical stance in the room depends on the belief systems of the audience. Several hecklers in the audience, seemingly family members of a company member, deliberately provoked the actresses by breaking the supposed liberal consensus in the theatre.

An enjoyably discursive OffBeat Festival production.