From Gareth Vile’s Skinny review for “How Keanu Reeves Saved the World,” which premiered the 24th and 25th of September at Arches Live in Glasgow:
How Keanu Reeves Saved The World @ The Arches
Posted by Gareth K Vile, Mon 27 Sep 2010Get slack and see the truthI have a serious art-crush on Amanda Monfrooe. Not only does she share my fascination with the beautiful slacker who is often accused of underacting, she even parlays this obsession into a heavy lecture on the flux of meaning in the post-modern universe. She might not avoid the easy jokes – yes, a block of wood does stand in for Keanu – but she refuses to dumb down her essential message. Ironically, this makes it tough going as part as Arches Live – a festival that has settled into a programme of new, tentative theatre – and a rare example of a show that I felt could have been spread more easily over a longer span.
Monfrooe’s thesis is that the films of Keanu represent a consistent philosophy, that insist on a rejection of consumerist hegemony. The Matrix‘s blatant dualism between appearance and reality is the core text: Monfrooe goes onto identify the theme in his earlier works, and in his friendship with the more respected, probably because he is dead, River Phoenix.
The cod-academic rigour, not without its own humour, does drop back, with Monfrooe revealing her working process in a series of sketches, ably supported by masks and Lottie Maslin-Prothero. The lectures are recited to the subtle drumming of Glynn Forrest, dragging the show out of the classroom and enthusing the speeches with a jazz beat poetry.
If the structure is uneven – the truth behind Keanu is revealed in something close to a rant, and a few scenes wander around unrelated ideas – How Keanu Reeves Saved The World is quite unlike anything else on the stage. Passionate, intelligent, it draws equally from puppetry and academia, takes a much maligned celebrity and battles to forge meaning in a society that is increasingly losing its faith and purpose.
