Alec Jones-Trujillo plays Old God, a grease painted Pagliacci professing to be, well, an old god – and a very actorly one at that. He invites us into the theatre, the offensive position from which he batters us with an imagistic sequence of mimes, skits and imaginative volleys. We cover names, rhymes, Jeff Bezos’s rapacious appetite for stuff and people, time travel, an early human invention of the social media cesspool. All the while the threat of a recital of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland hangs over us. It’s, well, a lot.
You know what else there is a lot of? Words. An unending stream of them, largely carried off bar a few stumbles as a bravura feat of extempore. There’s a battle going on here between a rag bag of fragments which, at points feels like winging it, and a real performance. It’s this linguistic dexterity which keeps the performance element alive.
And then, there’s a break in the weather. The mask slips and Old God becomes plain old Alec, telling us of his plans for the show, most of which he doesn’t actually do, before returning as Old God, a reprise which feels dramatically satisfying. Of course, we finally get The Wasteland, to underline the point that a heap of broken images, in the hands of an artist, become something which just about leavens or purifies. But there’s maybe too many fragments here for it to feel fully shored against ruin.
Old God, Assembly Roxy, until 24 Aug (not 11, 18), 9.55pm