Adler & Gibb

From the moment we walk into Adler & Gibb, we have destroyed and desecrated it. To gaze upon it is to vaporise it; so too is to look away. This ambitious, abstract play from deconstruction doyen Tim Crouch excavates the earth it stands on with such painstaking precision that audiences may well find much of it infuriating. Yet this same razing bares a living, breathing entity.

Janet Adler and her partner Margaret Gibb are two conceptual artists invented by Crouch. After formalising their art with projects such as eating a book of criticism, the couple announced their retirement and retreated to a secluded life in the USA. "There are now enough objects," they opined. Their life’s work is recounted here in the form of an academic thesis, presented by Jillian Pullara’s Student, only to be invaded by actors Louise and Sam (Cath Whitefield and Mark Edel-Hunt) who go in search of Adler’s grave after her death.

This unplugged and pared down version of Crouch’s play—first performed at the Royal Court in 2014—works equally as effectively. It doesn’t so much meditate on the collision of fiction with reality, and art with consumption, as cannibalise it. As Louise and Sam proceed to trespass on holy ground, Hamlettian levels of insanity befall the characters. What sick part do we play in this? Are we complicit in the obliteration of privacy? Or have we simply exhumed and grossly exhibited a corpse? Either way, we bear violent witness and are judged for it.