Laughing Out Lonely is a one singer show produced by the Danish group OPE-N.  It was presented by Tapestry Opera at Ada Slaight Hall this Friday and Saturday.  It’s an interesting and unusual show which has toured extensively in Denmark and Iceland and will be seen this year in Sweden, Edinburgh, Quebec and, Trump cretinism permitting, the USA.

It’s an exploration of loneliness as experienced and described by young people on the Internet during the pandemic.  The libretto is taken entirely from online messages and posts which have been organised into ten “songs” by originator and director Louise Beck.  They include a boy who dreams of being a slaughtered lamb and a girl who describes herself as The Fucking Ugly Face plus several more fairly despairing and angry vignettes. The music, by Matilde Böcher and Asger Kudahl, consists of countertenor Morten Grove Frandsen singing both live and on prerecorded backing tracks.  There’s a lot of electronic processing applied to both.  Much of it, given the visceral nature of the texts, is quite melodic and gentle but there are some pretty harsh passages too.  The sound is relayed to the audience via speakers placed in the corners of the performance space.

Which brings us to the staging.  It’s a rectangle with a double row of chairs around three sides with a collection of yellow hazardous material containers, with fragments of the libretto stencilled on them, strategically placed within the performance area.  Some of these contain props while others are available for audience members to sit on.  So, audience members have the choice of a fairly conventional experience or being in the heart of the action which is engaging to an almost scary degree.  Sitting fairly centrally I was scattered with glitter, narrowly avoided flying fragments of dismembered stuffed toy and had “I hate old people” sung repeatedly into my face from about two feet away.  Were I to see it again I would definitely choose a box again.

Frandsen is intense.  He moves through the stage area in quite a sinister way.  He cuts himself with glass and smears blood around.  He dismembers soft toys.  He “dances”.  He sings in TXT speak.  He wears a dismembered bunny (toy not real… it’s not that visceral) on his head and collapses into a box and so on.  Apparently the action is fairly heavily improvised and varies from show to show based on set up and audience reaction.  He’s also a pretty good singer.  The music, of course, is precisely cued.  The lighting (Jeppe Lawaetz) is pretty dramatic and the sound stage is terrific even on the reduced speaker set used in Toronto.  It’s cool that the whole set including lighting can be packed onto three pallets and rearranged in almost any space.  There are some good ideas there for anyone planning a touring show.

In the talk back we were told that the show had been toned down somewhat from the original version.  Whether this is because the team think it’s actually more impactful that way or to pander to some putative US audience is not clear to me.  It’s hard hitting and very effective but I wouldn’t say it’s shocking or offensive by Toronto standards.  In the last couple of years I’ve seen very edgy treatments of race (Slave Play), uncomfortably realistic simulated rape (Bad Roads) and graphic description of a hanging (The Welkin), to pick three examples almost at random, so a bit of cutting and the word “fuck” seem relatively tame.

But, bottom line, it was a very interesting and worthwhile show and it’s rather a pity that more people won’t get to see it in Toronto .  Kudos to Tapestry for bringing it here.

Photo credits: 1,2,5 and 6 OPE-N, 3 and 4 Katja Juliannova