Wrecking Ball (Oberon Modern Plays)

By: Action Hero

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Synopsis: A male photographer is taking a photograph of a female celebrity. She wants to be reinvented. She wants to be For Real. Wrecking Ball is about consent, power, authorship and putting words in other people’s mouths. It’s about the seductive power of make-believe. That’s not a real pineapple she’s holding, that’s not his real cooler full of beers, those aren’t her real thighs, those aren’t his real feelings. But does the real really matter? In an age where the consumption of artifice is its own industry, we are being asked to dream, and we are being asked to buy the sunglasses the woman is wearing in the dream. The woman that looks like every woman in every picture you’ve ever seen: like the woman lying on the beach, like the woman swinging on the wrecking ball, like the woman painted on the side of a bomb. In this funny, surreal and unsettling new play for two performers and an audience, “maverick company” (The Guardian) Action Hero ask who’s really in control and how subtle abuses of power shape our relationships – with art, with language and with each other. Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse live in Bristol, UK, and create performances together under the name Action Hero. For the past decade, they have worked almost exclusively with each other and have toured together to more than twenty countries across five continents to critical and popular acclaim.