Jaw Droppers

Gob Squad, a UK-German theatre collective, have earned a well-deserved reputation for making truly unique theatre. A rare breed, the collective manage to be experimental and more than a little bit strange while making theatre that re-imagines clichés and transports them from sentimentality to unexpectedly moving. Speaking from Munich, unerringly endearing collective member Bastian Trost explains their World Theatre Festival show Kitchen and how Gob Squad avoid the saccharine. 

“What we found out through the years [is] that when you see the ingredients, when we really don't cheat the audience, you can enjoy the cake,” he laughs, “even if it's a bit sweet. Somehow you feel that it has been done before your eyes and you don't get cheated. We consume all these cliché moments and sometimes I feel that we need to re-enact them to get rid of them. We give the cliché back to reality; to live it at least once.”

Gob Squad's last World Theatre Festival appearance was with nigh-on indescribable but utterly unforgettable Super Night Shot. For those unfortunate enough to have missed it, Super Night Shot involves venturing onto the streets of the city of performance an hour before show time and filming a loosely plotted movie with strangers as players, before playing the just-made movie to the audience. Despite the potential for disaster – or perhaps because of it – and despite the blatant use of movie clichés it's a ridiculously moving experience.

With Kitchen Gob Squad perform a live-film version of Andy Warhol's film of the same name. Trost explains that the group had never read the script but relied on the disparate memories of group members who – wrongly, as it turned out – believed they had seen the original movie. “We didn't really take the original as a starting point,” he says. “It was more the fantasy about it. It was such a good starting point for a project where we perform a film where everything is done for the first time.

“We were drawn to Andy Warhol… We were really inspired by the element of the innocence of the '60s. We found an amazing review that someone had written at the time that if you see that film you'll see where everything comes from, it's the starting point for everything – for women's liberation, for pop-culture, for everything. So we take this really weird approach from 2013 looking back and trying to erase everything you know.”

Despite being regularly described as “moving” and “uplifting” Trost says, “I think our shows are really melancholy… It is uplifting because in a sentimental way it's human; we want to connect with strangers. But I think it comes from loneliness. I think what we want to create comes from this fight against loneliness. We feel that this excuse of being an artist is a very good excuse to connect to people… We really enjoy that element that allows us to go onto the streets with the camera and ask someone to kiss a rabbit or go into a theatre and turn the rules upside down. It's an excuse to be not so alone.” And perhaps this is the root of what makes Gob Squad shows so remarkable: a few hours of theatre during which the audience is, simply, not so alone.