Next @ Assembly

Next follows Kiki Kendrick, occasional actress and serial auditioner, as she suffers from RDS, or Repetitive Death Syndrome. RDS will be familiar to anyone who has ever had a stab at a career in performance. You attend audition after audition, the ‘people in charge’ behind the table repeatedly killing your hopes and dreams with their seemingly arbitrary shouts of ‘Next!’.

The lights go up on Kiki standing stock still, moving only her vocal cords and mouth as she warms them up with the sounds of “a e i o u, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”, etc etc. This small but significant act instantly transports you to the world of theatre and auditions, with all its conventions and oddities. Through her stories (all of which are true), Kiki takes on various issues peculiar to this world, such as the arrogance and eccentricity of directors and the inhumanity of the audition process. Using her considerable talent for voices and impressions, she embodies a busy director who doesn’t have time for politeness: “Next!” “You don’t want me to finish?” “No, and don’t forget all your…stuff.” Scenes like this strike a chord in anyone who has undergone such experiences, as does the section where she laments how her career (or lack of one) is wreaking havoc on her relationship and taking her away from what’s important in life. Such sections lend the show unique charm: it has a niche topic, which appeals strongly to what is probably a niche audience.

Unfortunately, no doubt in an attempt to make the show appeal to a wider audience, most of the hour consists of Kiki re-enacting funny(ish) anecdotes that could happen to anyone. She relates how she walked in on one director on the loo, how she unintentionally insulted another about his birth mark (or was it a black eye?) and how she showed up for an audition, just in time, in the wrong place: Shoreditch Centre for Homeless Women. But when you strip away the quirks unique to the world of auditions and foreground such mundane occurrences, the stories and their presentation (complete with some pretty terrible one-liners) are just not funny enough to deserve an hour of the audience’s attention.
However, Kiki is fun, spunky and good looking (and she knows it), which makes listening to an hour of her stories much less boring than it has the potential to be. And there are moments when her real talent shines through, such as when she plays a seriously terrifying director, and when, in an audition for an ad for descalar, she transforms into a mixture of the Incredible Hulk and a Stepford wife.

The performance finishes to the sound of Jacques Brel’s Au Suivant (‘Next’), bursting with drama and passion. Unfortunately, apart from a few moments, this performance didn’t convey that drama, that feeling of life or death, that the audition process inherently contains. Next!