Binge review: A gleeful performance installation on Zoom where treasured television shows hold life’s answers

This interactive performance, presented by Cork Midsummer Festival, makes reassuring parallels between the audience's stories and the lives of fictional television characters. Photo: Christa Holka

★ ★ ★ ★

It is shocking that the New York-born Brian Lobel, wild of hair, dressed leisurely in a robe, comes across less than a stage persona and more like a fellow citizen. In his one-on-one, performance installation Binge for the La Jolla Playhouse, presented by Cork Midsummer Festival, he floats through his London apartment, eliciting my solitary thoughts with effortless charm while simultaneously parsing storylines from Sex and the City. 

This combination of gentle assurance and specialist knowledge made Lobel known as the creator of the moving You Have to Forgive Me, a durational performance where he got into bed with audiences and watched chosen episodes of that comedy-drama about emotionally complex Manhattanites. Binge has been adapted for Zoom, so it doesn’t carry the same intimacy, but it does intriguingly extend the formula to a wider cast and other franchises. You might get a different performer making reassuring parallels between your life and characters from Queer as Folk or, if you're lucky, The Real Housewives.

Television shows hold life’s answers in this gleeful interactive performance. Can a return to chosen treasures bring out new, fresh meanings? If, like Lobel, you once shouted at anti-heroine Carrie Bradshaw for pleading to a betrayed ex-boyfriend, only years later to shed tears during the same scene, you might have gained new scars.

Most of what happens is woven from your own stories and opinions. There is a comprehensive survey to be filled out beforehand, where questions appealing to cult followers of Star Trek, Gilmore Girls and other shows are designed to extract your personal thoughts. The resulting performance may make you feel like an agent rather than a witness, more a participant than an audience. Who’s Zoomin’ whom here exactly?  

This collusion can make the performance feel all about us, the audience, but there is a longer con here. References from Sex and the City drift into Lobel’s apartment. There is a reach for a martini glass, a lip-sync to a song from an iconic scene. He is unafraid of comic, risqué touches as he guides the performance. (I’m not entirely sure how to respond when a man in a robe says: “I want us to do some role play”). 

With his encyclopaedic knowledge, he instantly summons references from key episodes, weaving Bradshavian parallels to my revealed anxieties about the Dublin property market and being single. As the performance’s coda - a monologue from the show - near-miraculously sums up a lot that is said, while also offering new advice, it’s clear that Binge isn’t about me after all. It is about art and its radical comforts. 


Runs until July 12th. See corkmidsummer.com