Not Everything is Significant | Reviews

Four star review

Ben Moor - Not Everything Is Significant, Pleasance Star rating ****

Similar to Kitson only with less baggage and even more understated, is Ben Moor. Coelacanth, Moor's Herald Angel winning 2005 piece of story theatre, was a charmingly wistful shaggy dog story that was both beautiful and surreal. This latest work is even better in that it's even more beautiful and even more surreal. Moor takes as his starting point a professional footnoter who moves into a flat formerly occupied by a professional biographer. A filled-in diary for the following year and an unfinished biography of the biographer himself becomes a chronicle of a life foretold in a world where poodling is one craze along from dogging, Nike sponsors the OED and Mobius strip clubs are filled with elongated cartoon girls.

As the footnoter corrects and clarifies fact from fiction in a manner spearheaded by both Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto and Alasdair Gray in Lanark, a parallel universe emerges that wouldn't look out of place in Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories if they'd been set in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and the presence of the J G Ballard chain of pubs is a telling detail. And it's these small, seemingly insignificant epiphanies that matter here in a calm, unflashy but utterly evocative manner. Moor tells us of a girl who "moves like a fading continent worried about its future", and you know exactly what he means.

But, as vividly drawn as all this is, as Moor makes clear from the title, not much of this gently mind-bending hour-long delight may actually matter in any way, shape or form. Then again, add up the everyday tos and fros of it all, and all those little footnotes add up to something a whole lot bigger, and really rather wonderful.

Bewilderingly brilliant

by SHARON LOUGHER - Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Not Everything Is Significant
Ben Moor in Not Everything Is Significant

If you're feeling the effects of a few midday pints, don't pick Ben Moor's one-man show for your afternoon entertainment. But if you can bring a clear head to his surreal, non-linear performance, you're in for a mind-bogglingly brilliant piece of theatre.

Moor introduces himself as a biographer with writer's block. He simultaneously acts as a provider of footnotes for the piece, pointing out his alter ego's inaccuracies and omissions in po-faced detail. Both talk us through the biographer's strange little world.

The plot swings into action when the biographer is sent a diary for the following year - it's already filled with his handwriting, recording future meetings, nights out and an appointment to partake in the mysterious art of poodling.

His struggle to understand the book's existence is explored with humour and surprising emotional depth, toying with ideas of fate, memory, mental illness and even time travel.

It could easily descend into gibberish, but Moor embellishes the convoluted tale with hilarious, one-liner-style details; a visit to a theme park with a rollercoaster called Life ends with a punchline of almost perfect weight and heft.

The conclusion ultimately raises more questions than it answers, but as head-scratchers go, it's one of the warmest and wittiest around.