Super Duper Close Up

One moment screaming passionately, the next sitting in the audience eating popcorn, Jessica Latowicki’s creative performance will feel like all of your anxieties embodied in front of you. Throw in a camera, some French skincare and a backdrop of a dark forest and you have Super Duper Close Up.

Covered in glittery props and drowned in the tunes of bubblegum pop a la Robyn, it is a one-woman play written and performed by Latowicki. Despite the glitzy set up, her 80 minute monologue is everything but sparkly and upbeat. She manages to perform the anxiety of a millennial career woman all in the span of one story, which she sidetracks from and returns to throughout the play. You could say it is a ramble, or a rant of sorts, but a fun one indeed. Latowicki’s nihilistic comments will have the audience laughing from minute to minute, things like “I read the news at night just so that I can justify my nightmares and insomnia”. Through this pessimistic ramble, we get a glimpse into a very real person, and much of it is very relatable for a young adult in today’s capitalistic reality. Latowicki is dressed in a shiny, green dress and is standing in the middle of the stage very determinedly. She has this angry Piper Chapman (Orange Is The New Black) energy about her. The whole setting is eerie (think Stanley Kubrick’s two girls in The Shining).

Apart from a maybe unnecessarily dragged out dance scene towards the end, the whole play fits together seamlessly with all its agendas and media. The experimental integration of technology is brilliant. Latowicki criticises our use of technology today, our ‘scrolling and scrolling’ through social medias, at the same time as the play builds on the use of it. Large parts of the play are livestreamed on a screen as they are simultaneously taking place right in front of you. Sometimes you are unsure which one you should be looking at (I mean this in the best way possible), if you might miss something by just looking at the screen. The camera becomes a narrative in itself, choosing to zoom in very close, showing only selected parts of a particular scene. A lot of the play is centered around this topic, about spending your life looking at screens, jiggling too many open tabs, ordering too many things online and posting too many things on your instagram for everyone to see.

Latowicki is easy to listen to, but can still make you feel uncomfortable with scenes of her panting and screaming, or even dancing in a very sexual manner, with the camera very close up to her. She is relatable but intimidating, satirical and scary. At the end of the show you feel like you almost know her as well as you know yourself.

Super Duper Close Up keeps you captivated from the beginning all the way through till the end. The mix of media in this play works together nicely. Latowicki is a storyteller who can really milk a concept for all it’s worth. When the lights dim down at the end and everyone starts clapping, you’ll think it’s much too early for it to already be over, but also realise you just spent 80 minutes listening to one single dragged out story and a lot of millennial anxiety. If you want to spend a very intimate evening being entertained by various anecdotes depicted in experimental ways, definitely go over to Hackney Wick for Made In China’s Super Duper Close Up, you won’t regret it!

-4 stars