Guilt reaches Fever pitch

Joe Hill-Gibbins recreates Shawn's original setting in The Fever.
Claire Allfree|Metro10 April 2012

When Wallace Shawn first presented this monologue in 1990, in the homes of rich Americans no less, he was treated with some contempt. The piece, in which a bourgeois man finds himself in a foreign hotel room, grapples directly with that enduring malaise of the middle classes: liberal guilt.

How I can I eat at restaurants when people are starving? How can I go to parties when people are being murdered? Why do I earn more than the maid who cleans my house?

Joe Hill-Gibbins recreates Shawn's original setting by placing the audience around a table strewn with the detritus of a party. The effect collapses the distance between performer and audience: we are not watching a play, we are listening to someone who is just like us.

The problem is that moral complacency is rather more complex than the play gives it credit for. By questioning the intelligentsia's love for talking about art, it questions the legitimacy of art itself.

But not talking about art, or by implication not making art (which would include, presumably, The Fever itself), isn't going to make people less hungry.

And yes, some people are born rich and others poor, but having someone exorcise their guilt about this over coffee doesn't change it, just as voting for a politician who wants to feed the poor, as the play points out, won't make the poor less poor.

Hill-Gibbins's intimate performance makes for an uncomfortable evening. But it is also an evening stymied by the intractable way it presents its argument.

Until Aug 7, Theatre 503, 503 Latchmere Road SW11, Tue to Sat 8pm, Sun 5pm, £9, £6 concs. Tel: 020 7978 7040. www.theatre503.com. Rail: Clapham Junction

Wallace Shawn Season: The Fever

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