Blood Show by Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Blood Show comes with a spatter warning and plastic ponchos for the audience. The set, in Battersea Arts Centre’s small Member’s Bar room, consistsnof a pristine white carpet with a chair, a plant and a drinks flask filled with stage blood. The show, performed by the writer Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth, with Tim Bromage and Craig Hambling, is a surreal exercise in mimed violence. Hambling and Chillingworth stage a fight, the former painted all over in white, the latter slathered from head to toe in stage blood. It is a nasty and very believable fight with kicking, biting and gouging, and it ends with Chillingworth strangled to death in an alarmingly realistic manner. The white carpet, by this time, is smeared in blood. Then they do it again, and the shock of the violence wears off a little. Then again, and again, and each time the impact is reduced while the set becomes bloodier. There is also a ghost, adding unnerving comedy in a head-to-toe sheet costume, who glides around and sometimes sings – played by Tim Bromage I assume, although we never see his face.

The idea of repetition desensitising us to violence is a good premise, but the show takes a different course. The fight scenes end and Chillingworth becomes the sole performer, enacting a series of increasingly bloody and comic effects – including slamming plastic cups full of blood into their body foley-style. The volumes of blood grow, and it emerges from props and comes on stage in buckets to be sloshed around.

Blood Show is promising, but frustrating. It perhaps references violence against the trans body, violence in film, complacency about violence in society, or all of those things – but we never really know. The show seems to lack a driving rationale, and feels more like a scratch exercise than a coherent, finished production. The performers are physically committed to an impressive extent. However, the blood is a distraction and becomes the whole point. The need to produce more and more blood derails and defocuses the evening. And it turns out that when you examine it too closely, stage blood looks like stage blood, not the real thing,