[Insert Slogan Here] - HOME, Manchester

Forming part of HOME’s Incoming Festival, theatre company YesYesNoNo returned with the latest version of their piece [Insert Slogan Here]. It isn’t a play in the conventional sense, more like a multi-media spoken word piece. The stage featured a yellow lino positioned centrally, with white boxes at the upstage with various corporate logos painted on. Some boxes had advertising friendly words such as ‘safe’ and ‘luxury’ written on in place of the logos. To stage right, sat at a table and surrounded by sound mixing equipment was a lady, who was later introduced as Ola, a musician. Opposite her, seated stage left and by a similar set up but with video equipment instead was a man called Conan, a video artist. Between them, lying down on the lino, was Sam Ward, the host/narrator of [Insert Slogan Here].

At a very basic level, the show is about advertising and how certain advertisements leave their mark on your consciousness, not only to get you to think and desire the product on offer (the main aim of adverts, naturally) but to induce a feeling of nostalgia in you when you get older and think back to the adverts which impacted on you the most when you were younger. As the show begins, the sounds of waves crashing and a child laughing fills the space, and then on a screen at the back of the stage, home video footage of a young boy at the beach began on a loop. Over this, Sam narrated the memories of his eight-year-old self of this holiday and how the memory of a car advert featuring a couple dancing on the beach by candle-light near their car bled into the memory of his holiday. This advert, Sam claimed, left such a deep impression upon him that he wrote to Volvo to compliment them on their advert with the hope of appearing in one of their next adverts. Having had no reply, after all these years, he has decided to invite the audience to help him recreate the advert during the performance.

[Insert Slogan Here] follows a pre-planned structure, whereby Sam relates a memory of his (which may or may not be true) – being eight-years-old on the beach, an awkward fourteen-year-old who nearly gets into a fight he is bound to lose, experiencing the thrill of being out in a nightclub and having your heart stolen at nineteen – with each story merging into an advert and the looping back to the story of a boy watching an advert on television, each time wanting to get closer and closer to what he is seeing until he breaks the television. Each narrative is accompanied by a video edited by Conan, and subjected to some live visual trickery, and music composed by Ola (her techno dance music was fantastic). Each ‘narrative’ is presented in response to the context of a particularly successful Volvo advertisement from recent years. These narrative segments juggle the line between truth and fiction, fantasy and reality, the desire of the now being drenched in nostalgia.

Where [Insert Slogan Here] gets more interesting, however, is in its use of audience participation. In between each narrative section, Sam asked the audience a question (“Who is wearing shoes?”, “Who is wearing a watch?” “Who has a mobile phone?”) and he chose someone who raised their hand in response to the question and invited them to come onstage to help him recreate an element of the advert which left such an indelible mark on his eight-year-old psyche. Sam and the audience member would then draw sandcastles on the yellow lino, or make a car out of the white boxes, or light electronic candles (for health and safety reasons), all the while being asked about their memories of their first home, whether they have been in love, or if they are “cool”. The audience members were engaging and willing to answer the questions and this added an element of unpredictability to the show – each time the show is performed these moments would be unique as each person would give different answers. Sam’s reluctance to choose audience members from beyond the front row, however, could give one the impression that perhaps these people weren’t as random as they appeared (although that could just be a coincidence).  

For all the show’s discussion of the emotional impact of advertisements, it only really came close to provoking a genuine emotion response itself at the section near the end, where the last member of the audience to be chosen by Sam danced with him on the recreated set of the car advert while Ola beautifully sang a cover version of the Rolling Stones song Wild Horses. Interestingly, the incorporation of the song heightened the emotional impact of what was, arguably, a rather self-indulgent moment and echoed the level of manipulation that the best adverts engage with.

[Insert Slogan Here] does make for an interesting hour or so of performance but it does feel like it could be more radical in its engagement with the impact of advertising on people and how it colours our memories. Perhaps with some sharper analysis of the mechanics of the emotional manipulation of adverts and more narrative contributions from Ola and Conan as well as Sam, the show could go from being an interested experience to an essential one.

Reviewer - Andrew Marsden
on - 02/07/18