Saturday 9th June, 7pm
Artsadmin Bar
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season 2007

Artsadmin’s bar has been given a makeover. The lights are dimmed, the walls are covered in tacky decorations, and someone has turned the music up. This is the intimate setting for Wendy Houstoun’s ‘Happy Hour’, an hour-long performance that is part dance, part poetry, and part dramatic monologue.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Houstoun, here adopting the character of a barmaid, but she’s clearly distressed. Her body makes involuntary, repetitious movements – slamming her hands down on the counter, shuffling her feet, shaking her head – and she delivers a calm, casual monologue as if she’s not aware what her body is doing. Even the monologue seems meaningless – it’s filled with verbal ephemera, the kind of padding that people use to circle their point. She never really says anything, but skirts around an unnamed dissatisfaction with familiar phrases: ‘You need to let your hair down’, ‘What’s the point of it all?’

In fact, there is nothing and everything wrong with Houstoun. She repeats empty gestures from the edges of mundane experience – the things we say and do without thinking – and places them centre stage. Amplified like this, these gestures appear both meaningless and indicative of emotional distress. But by refusing to articulate what is at the centre of her character’s unhappiness, Houstoun involves the personal worries of each audience member - we all fill the gap with our own crisis. Houstoun’s disintegration, in other words, is happening to me.

The piece follows the chronology of a night out, from the urge to drink through the happy, morose and aggressive stages of drunkenness. At one point, Houstoun ejects herself from the bar in what seems like a metaphor for drinking culture - we drink to escape, but we don’t like who we become. And yet ‘Happy Hour’ is more than an indictment of binge drinking. In a series of drunken toasts, Houstoun lists Gucci fashion and Saddam Hussein in one sentence, the tributes tumbling after one other as monuments to modern existence. Just like the familiar-made-unfamiliar gestures and phrases she adopts, Houstoun’s casual references render these facts empty and significant at the same time. Their value seems to lie in the fact of their cultural prominence, not the reasons that put them there.

‘Happy Hour’ is humorous, poignant and affecting in turn, and Houstoun develops an emotional credibility that supplants any initial disbelief at her disjointed movements. Her prose is largely elegant and immediate – rolling between concepts and scenarios so effortlessly that it’s easy to forget she has nothing definite to say. The story ends as ordinarily as it began, with one person’s quiet, persistent discontent disappearing into the night. It’s time for the audience to finish their drinks and follow her.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more information on Wendy Houstoun see http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/...