[Review] Wendy Houstoun’s Watch It! at the Soho Theatre: punchy and full of wit
Graham Watts sees Wendy Houstoun’s one-woman show Watch It!: “There are so few entertainers of Houstoun’s calibre that one can only hope that she goes on (and on).”
| Title | Watch It! |
| Company | Wendy Houstoun |
| Venue | Soho Theatre, London |
| Date | 23 March 2024 |
| Reviewer | Graham Watts |
On the eve of being nominated for the 2024 Empty Space Peter Brook Award, Soho Theatre played host to this one-woman show by Wendy Houstoun. Soho Theatre is not a regular venue in the crowded world of the London dance scene but then work by Houstoun is also rarely performed. So, it was a double whammy of attraction to see a woman for whom quality is never sacrificed on the altar of quantity in a venue that teems with youthful vitality. Quite apart from the promised entertainment the Soho Theatre bar seems to be a place for the in-crowds to meet after work. To be frank, it was the polar opposite to an Empty Space, which is perhaps why it was not successful in the 2024 Peter Brook Award (that accolade went to the Orange Tree in Richmond).
But back to the woman of the moment rather than the space in which she appeared. Houstoun is a director, choreographer and performance artist who has experimented with the interface of movement and words in diverse theatre forms since 1980. A key member of Lloyd Newson’s DV8 physical theatre company for seven years in the 1980s and 90s, Houstoun was instrumentally featured in such important works as Strange Fish (described by Judith Mackrell as ‘marvellously potent and poetic’) and My Body, Your Body. Her other collaborations have included those with Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, Charlotte Vincent and Nigel Charnock, a close friend of Houstoun who died (aged just 52) during the London Olympics of August 2012 and whose memory was honoured in Watch It! through a couple of poignant references in Houstoun’s hour-long work.
Was it really an hour? Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun! Houstoun’s engaging and intimate performance was so thoroughly arresting that the end came as a shock! Surely, not yet, thought I! Houstoun certainly knows when to leave with her audience wanting more.
I’ve written over 300 words without yet describing the show, a deliberate prevarication on my part since this ostensibly simple premise – one woman standing on a tiny three-metre square platform marked out by strips of white tape, swaying and boogieing while speaking into a stand-up microphone – has a surprisingly complex purpose. It takes a while for Houstoun to get there but ultimately her comedy turns into a spoof game show where she gets two woke warning strikes before the third (just saying the name J K Rowling, so topical given the latter’s recent ‘arrest me’ challenge over the Scottish Government’s new hate crime law) gets her cancelled and she finished the show (with the last Nigel reference) after having been expelled off-stage.
Her text is superbly written and flawlessly delivered in the manner of an accomplished stand-up comedian. It’s punchy and full of wit, starting with references that delve back to the 80s and speedily run through 40 years of topical satire bringing us to the present day. The words – both funny and poignant – are so quickfire that I don’t have time to note them down (in any event the Soho Theatre seats are like mini two-seater sofas and I’m sharing with a man even larger than myself and so the writing movements of my right arm were likely to irritate this neighbour on my right side).
I remember her evocative reference in the 90s to “here come the M People” and just as I was thinking of Heather Small belting out Movin’ On Up as an accompaniment to New Labour’s dramatic rise to power, Houstoun hit her audience with the names of some other M People from the late twentieth century – ‘Mandela, Mugabe, Milosevic’. Her text was peppered by such witty swerve balls and unusual connections.
Houstoun is a remarkably dynamic performer and seems uninhibited (and she is certainly undiminished) by her age (now 65), moving and speaking without either hitch or pause, other than for dramatic effect. Watch It! comes with a warning that it may be her last-ever show. I sincerely hope not – although she would be retiring at the very top of her game – and this threat is obviously unrelated to the quality of her work but entirely to do with the reality that she parodies in Watch It!, which is the likelihood of her act being cancelled due to controversy.
Houstoun’s parody of cancel culture is so superbly drawn that there is sufficient ambiguity in her humour to fool even the most ardent canceller! There are so few entertainers of Houstoun’s calibre that one can only hope that she goes on (and on).
Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA). He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.
He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv. He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.
