Review: Mayfest: The Killers

Eating chips and mushy peas in a seaside cafe, a warm mug of tea waiting to be sipped. Three empty sachets of ketchup lay discarded on the melamine tabletop and I’m struggling to find the little nick that’ll let me get into a fourth. I hear a jingle playing, I think it’s Radio 1 – and yeah I know this song – although come to think of it I don’t think I’ve heard it on the radio for at least 20 years. There’s a guy in the corner, I can hear him pouring his fizzy Vimto, it’s really loud actually.

The Killers is Richard Allen’s live binaural soundwork, performed for Mayfest 2018 in The Regent Cafe, Weston super Mare.  Referencing the cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Allen gives us something that was either a love letter to nostalgia, or a warning of its dangers. Actually, the work showed that it could never be anything other than both at once.

Part of the plot was a retelling of Ernest Hemingway’s eponymous 1927 short story about the minutes before an assassination in a seaside diner. There was a section where we accompanied the killers on their car ride from a drizzly service station to the diner that was particularly evocative, perhaps because hearing the sound effects and Allen’s beautiful narrative delivery felt familiarly like listening to a radio play in the car.

However, for the most part there was a slightly photocopied feel to the murder story, where the sense of impending threat didn’t quite match up to the events we were supposed to be witness to. In that sense, the gunshot ending seemed anti-climactic, and I left the diner feeling, if anything, confusion.

However, as I walked back to the station I began to wonder whether I had missed the point. The key to Lost Futures is that it is an analysis of the time-loop in the late ’70s/early ’80s British TV show Sapphire and Steel. In terms of Richard Allen’s experience, the primary (murder) story was only ever the figment of a child’s imagination after watching too many TV murder serials: whereas the diner, the chip sticks, the Vimto, even the impossible number of woopee cushions inflated (but never squashed) – those things were real. We were effectively inhabiting a memory palace of Allen’s childhood. No wonder the familiar had more dramatic weight.

Allen took us on a tantalising trip.  But for all that, disappointment was a recurring motif – from underwhelming arcade prizes to a dog that never comes when it’s called. Perhaps more fundamentally, Allen showed us the sadness of nostalgia for a future that never was; all joy residing there locked in the past. Lucky, then, that we were all treated to some really excellent chips and peas alongside our helpings of existential angst.

The Killers played at The Regent Cafe, Weston super Mare from Mon, May 14 to Wed, May 16. For the rest of the Mayfest 2018 programme, visit mayfestbristol.co.uk/programme

Read more: Preview: Mayfest 2018