QFWFQ

QFWFQ begins with Gregory Nussen apparently trying to get a show going. In darkness, the Institute for the Posterity of All Things welcomes us, before Nussen appears as a slightly unhinged professor, sending an audience member out to use the toilet and fussing over the mechanics of the performance. It is funny, but the ‘real show’ has not yet started.

Until it does. Nussen, finding his script, transports the audience to Finland, as the lights fade and a snowy scene appears behind him. In the second person, we are in our twenties, listening to an organist in a church. The sudden beauty of the image and music is genuinely transporting. And then the script glitches. Nussen loses the words, calls the Institute’s helpline and is given another story. And on it goes. Each time a story begins to gather force, it is abruptly interrupted.

The cramped Former Gent’s Locker Room suits this well with one version of a story pressing against another. Nussen handles these shifts impressively, slipping between performances with charm and ease.

The motif becomes more revealing when the show moves into the first person. Jewishness, the Holocaust and queer identity emerge through “The Long Dirt Road Which Leads to a Pile of Ash”, which feels less like another beginning and more like the point at which we might finally be reaching a destination, as the play’s politics begin to materialise.

Nussen credits Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’ as the influence for the conceit, but the show pushes much further into questions of identity, sexuality and Zionism.

Yet it is Nussen’s control that makes the instability work. The performance can appear loose and improvised while the structure underneath remains tightly managed. That is also what makes the frustration productive: just when you think you have worked out what the show is doing, it changes the terms again.

QFWFQ is winding, and at times deliberately difficult. But the repeated near-arrivals leave something behind. I kept thinking about the feeling of having almost reached something, only to have it disappear again.

QFWFQ by Gregory Nussen, Daniel Segura and Suzanna Rosenthal Productions. Credit Gregory Nussen.