Bobby Baker - How to Live
Barbican, London

Emily Berry
posted 25 September 2006

'We need eleven skills precisely,' according to Bobby Baker and her chorus of peas, to make it through the day. Bobby Baker is a performance artist who 'explores issues through art and performance which radically affect our daily lives'. Her revived show, How to Live, first shown at the Barbican in 2004, is a curious mixture of silliness, motivational speaking, and a take-off of the latter, an irreverent but affectionate slant on self-help and therapy culture.

The production features Bobby Baker, dressed as a psychologist in white coat and 'down-to-earth' shoes, an assistant (Frank Bock), and her patient, a pea on a string. The substance of the play involves Bobby talking to her patient - whose responses are sadly inaudible - and delivering the wisdom of her eleven skills from a lectern. It's an odd sort of piece, more sedate than one expects performance art to be, with an indeterminate quality where the distinction between satire and sincerity is somewhat muddled. Bobby outlines her eleven skills - which ultimately form an acrostic of WATCH YOURSELF - with a combination of filmed examples and eccentric physical demonstrations. Her character has the warmth and practicality of certain middle-aged healthcare professionals alongside the giggly vulnerability of a teenage girl both pleased with herself and eager to please.

The pea theme continues throughout, though for much of the play the 'patient' is relegated to a miniature version of the set housed upstage. At one point a number of bags of frozen peas are brought on stage and stacked into small mounds to form a small assault course for Bobby's excitable psychologist to attempt to leap over. The audience have all been given a pea in an envelope at the start of the show, which we are encouraged to suck contemplatively with our eyes closed before eating it. The patient recalls its happiest moments (relaxing a pool of warm butter, and so on) and finally 'locates its charm', taking centre stage and singing a melancholy song.

How to Live is charming but not sharp. Rather more silly than surreal, the humour is gentle and rather childlike - the comedy lies in the child's amusement at its own joke, rather than in the joke itself. At the end of the play, the stage is filled with thousands of peas on strings, a sheet of peas, which move in a wave and seem to sing Bobby's mantra to the audience. We all have a pea inside of us, my companion points out.

Run over.