All About My Tits is a great title: intriguing, provocative, interesting. The promo poster shows the performance-maker herself, Anna Suschitzky, clutching said tits and staring right back at you. Her direct gaze challenges, yet she is vulnerable in her nakedness; her crestfallen expression, comical. The show’s summary encourages us to come and re-examine our own relationship to breasts. Like a bra, I was hooked!
Oh, how I wish I was not such a sucker for tricksy marketing. Forty, valuable, Friday-night minutes later I exited, DD-Disappointed and wondering why Chapter doesn’t exercise quality control.
Anna hadn’t even learned her script. About seventy of us paid £8 to watch her read from a large book. She sacrificed the intimacy of eye-contact to look down. She broke the connection with her audience time and again, by turning her back to search for the words beneath her on the table. Too often, her over-worked sentences ended with a sickly, upward inflection.
There was a slide show, halting, inefficient; and there was the sideshow of four, young lovelies in spray-on leggings and f-me heels, their breasts displayed alluringly in leopard skin. As we took our seats, they’d titillated with sexy dancing and strutting and free White Russians. I surmised that the Lovelies existed to ‘challenge the politics of the gaze’ and to highlight ‘the inconsistency of the surveillance of women’ – but, no, that bit of blurb went unrealised. Like Playboy Bunnies, they served shots of breast milk and then they joined the audience. These babes were tasked to represent mothers and real women with passionate opinions on infant feeding, but their delivery quickly became high-pitched and incoherent. Their important arguments were rendered unintelligible, as the conflict degenerated into a battle with breast-milk-filled water pistols. The Lovelies exited, soaked like contestants in an inappropriate, wet-tee competition. Centre stage, remained a puddle of wasted opportunity to create meaningful theatre.
The one, truthful and touching moment in the whole production was when Ms Suschitzky showed a slide of her toddler son and said, in effect, ‘my breasts grew him’. The rest of her script consisted mostly of personal, rather negative and tedious reminiscences. Her ideas were underdeveloped and so badly presented, that she failed to prompt the promised platform to talk about breastfeeding in any stimulating and interesting way.
Ms S ended by taking off her bra and showing us her breasts. The stage was in blackout and she illuminated them with flashlights. Why she did this, in this manner, I do not know. By then, it seemed gratuitous and unnecessary. However, her breasts became the perfect motif for my evening: everything had gone tits up.