Petrol

115270 original

"Fitter, happier, more productive, comfortable, not drinking too much..." There's not much I can say with certainty about Giacomo Gamba's baffling mime performance Petrol. But as the voice of a Mac computer bleeps and crackles through the space, it's pretty clear he's a Radiohead fan.

The show's two performers start out ecstatic, writhing in bliss to the sounds of gutteral moaning. But these free spirits are soon put in their place. They return to the stage as robots, with lightly-modified welding helmets for heads. And as Thom Yorke's computer anthem repeats, again and again, they're forced to conform to its commands: "Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week." They mime their way through bizarre imaginary paperwork tasks, becoming corporate drones who serve an invisible voice. When they get too close, a buzzer reprimands them. And as their existence becomes more and more repressed, they struggle to nurture a single black flower.

Yorke culled the list of slogans in 'Fitter Happier' from nineties aspirational headlines, but they feel just as true in today's more digital age – if we don't become robots, we might well be replaced by them. Gamba's performance feels timely, after exposés of the dehumanising treatment of employees in Amazon warehouses or Sports Direct stores. But its intense sincerity makes it as clunky as its plastic-headed subjects, shambling through a petrol-black vision of the world of work. You'd need the precision of a robot arm to really probe corporate 'wellness' culture – this pair just reflect it, blinking, in their sightless eyes.