Standby For Tape Back-Up

Fest / Matt Trueman


…Sutherland, on the other hand, spouts words half at random in Standby for Tape Back-up (5 stars). He’s found a VHS tape he and his grandfather used as a sort of video scrapbook. For years, they’d record titbits of television onto it, one clip over another, and the result is a layered miscellany of moving images and nostalgic pop culture: a scene from Ghostbusters, the Fresh Princetheme tune, an old Natwest ad, nineties football, the credits for Jaws.

Our brains are hardwired to find meaning, even where none exists. They seek out connections that aren’t there. Keeping that in mind, Sutherland uses the tape as a writing aide: his poems are spun out of the onscreen images but twist off into big themes of grief, depression, memory, death – all of them vast, insurmountable ideas. Bel Air turns into a metaphor for some sort of afterlife; a Crystal Maze challenge sprouts a philosophy of time. Sutherland rewinds each clip and starts a new poem, finding new meanings, further truths in alternative details.

Individually, these poems are astonishing: jokey in their flippant nods to the video, but hugely profound on top of that. However, it’s the way they add up together that makes Standby for Tape Back-up extra-extraordinary.

This one scrappy video tape—so banal an object, so nearly lost—comes to reflect the human brain in its entirety: the mechanism of memory; its jumble of cultural references that make up an identity; the tape’s deterioration that echoes senile decay. There’s much more besides, all of it built out of coincidence and resonance: the comfort of the known and familiar; the urge to recapture the past and the dead; the knowledge that, one day, Sutherland’s tape will get wiped or chewed by accident and make this entire show unperformable. Standby for Tape Back-up has a shelf-life. It will die a death of its own.

I’ve rarely found myself so rapt by a piece of theatre, nor felt so enlightened en route. Yet Sutherland wears that wisdom so lightly that this never feels wrought or lecturing. Superb.