Review: Sharp, witty show with serious questions about identity

How To Occupy An Oil Rig by Daniel Bye, Warwick Arts Centre, March 4.
How To Occupy An Oil Rig by Daniel Bye.How To Occupy An Oil Rig by Daniel Bye.
How To Occupy An Oil Rig by Daniel Bye.

How To Occupy An Oil Rig presents a step-by-step guide to political protest.

Start with a spare weekend. Find a cause: nothing too heavy, something to do with wildlife, maybe. Get involved, enjoy the experience, the camaraderie, the sense of taking action. Go on a march. Take part in a sit-in. Invade the board room of a multinational energy company. If that’s not enough, go for something big: take over an oil rig. It’s tough, dangerous, and it will grab the headlines.

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Along the way, make friends, get arrested, fall in love; discover you’ve been betrayed by the very person, the closest comrade, you thought you ever had.

This sharp, witty show, devised by performers Daniel Bye, Kathryn Beaumont and Jack Bennett, is not so much about protest (what we’re against) as the need for involvement (what we’re for). What we are against is alienation, the feeling of being swallowed up by Big Things. What we are for is collaboration, shared identity, belonging. It’s a fundamental tension, and affects everyone to some extent. Protest is as much about a search for identity as it is a desire to challenge or destroy things.

And so it is with this show, in which the audience becomes part of the movement - at least for a while. There’s a serious point behind the Lego-brick scenery, the Jackanory costumes, the comic characters and the plasticine models which we, the audience, make of ourselves.

If everything comes with a how-to-do-it manual, why not take it all the way? How-To-Change-The-World? First, start with some hope.

Nick Le Mesurier

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