If we get lost or confused in the story he’s about to tell us, writer/performer Sam Ward explains, we shouldn’t worry: it all comes together in the end. There’s an implicit warning there, and it proves entirely justified: what Ward goes on to deliver is a breathless, high-velocity dash through an ever more complicated and convoluted narrative that dares us to drop our attention and lose the flow. His tale, however, is a strangely gripping one: a woman finds oddly humming holes in her garden, and her attempts to discover what they mean lead her to a sub-department in her local council bureaucracy, a weird, employee-less bank, and the unremitting emptiness of the desert in the company of a private investigator.
There’s a definite Raymond Chandler-esque noirness about Ward’s convoluted tale that hints at grand conspiracies, shadowy organisations and arcane plots, coupled with a Murakami-like sense that the world isn’t quite how we perceive it. Whether, as Ward promises, it really does all come together in the end – well, that’s rather up to you to decide. But also implicit in his reassuring opening explanation is the sense that there is indeed a story to be followed, a conclusion to be arrived at, even a moral to be learnt – with all the expectations that that inevitably sets up for the whirling, churning narrative that he goes on to deliver.
Ward’s company YESYESNONO has had two Fringe hits in recent years with the topical but more straightforward Nation and we were promised honey!. Ward has admitted that As Far As We Know marks a new departure for the company, and it immediately feels like a more ambitious show – with carefully choreographed lighting (courtesy of Han Sayles), a sometimes intentionally distracting jazzy score (from Carmel Smickersgill), and a simple desk-and-chair staging implying some kind of retro office – as do the bulging beige folders that Ward extracts from his desk, containing his ever expanding narrative. Well, you’d hardly expect to rattle off this frenetic monologue from memory.
Yes, in many ways As Far As We Know is a frustrating and disorientating show, one that lays a trail of breadcrumbs only to blow them away as the work grows ever more esoteric and unlikely. But it’s a fascinating hour of theatre all the same, in which the manner of delivery is under as much scrutiny as what’s being delivered – first in Ward’s rapid-fire machine-gun delivery, and later in other methods that question whether a performer is even needed. Behind it all, however, is a question of the relationship between performer and audience, and of our perpetual yearning for knowledge and understanding, whether in the theatre or beyond, and in a world where there’s simply too much to process, much of it stuff we’d maybe rather ignore. Whether Ward makes good on his opening explanation is up to you to decide. But there’s a glint in his eye as he kicks things off, one that’s borne out by the content of this occasionally disorientating, sometimes uncompromising and often playful show.
