Review: OHIO, Young Vic Theatre
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic
The latest show from Indie-folk duo The Bengsons was lauded as a highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and now arrives at the Young Vic’s Maria stage for a victory lap. The title, Ohio, doesn’t give much away, and it would be a fool’s errand to try to understand too much about the show before experiencing it. This cavernous and sweeping piece, impossibly fit into 75 minutes, focuses in on Shaun Bengson’s story - his relationship with god as the son of a pastor in a religious commune in the American mid-West and his subsequent loss of faith in organised religion, paralleled by the loss of his hearing.
The show is broad and meandering, but condensed as it is into a short Fringe format, it pulls off the tangents. Instead of feeling erratic and aimless, Ohio is organic and sprawling but rooted, like a tree.
The stage is simply set as a piece of gig theatre with monitors, a laptop and loop station, a projector and a rug in the shape of Ohio. With the focus of the show being on hearing loss, captions play an important role in the show, with the additional benefit of acting as cues for audience interaction. It’s a wonderful thing to see accessibility tools built into the fabric of a story and part of the craft on stage rather than an added afterthought.
The show centres around Shaun’s story and experiences but the storytelling is led by his wife Abigail Bengson - a performer of such breathlessly rare quality, to try to distil the power of her vocals in words would be an injustice. Abigail explains at the top of the show that as an autistic person she may tic, which is not at all a limiting or distracting quality in her performance but rather the freedom that she gives to her body and her impulses and her feelings lends to the intimacy and the rawness of the experience.
The Bengsons' music is a similar vein of witchy folk to some of Florence + the Machine’s early work, with earthy imagery spinning out into head-spinning existential philosophising. For two people, one guitar and a looper, The Bengsons create incredible texture in their sound - incorporating primal howling and screeching and murmuring. Weighty though their poetry and lyrics may be, tackling such ideas as death and mortality and the existence of a god, Shaun and Abigail couldn’t be accused of lecturing or moralising. They lean into doubt and mystery, beautifully summarised by Abigail’s summation of her own Judaism as an allergy to certainty. With this embrace of doubt comes a dry flavour of humour, a tongue in cheek wryness that breaks some of the moments of almost agonising poignancy in this deeply affecting piece.
The Bengsons lean a lot on their image as a married couple and that dynamic is evident on stage - the support and love they have for one another in sharing their stories is visible and audible.
It might be heavily ironic given their aversion to the dynamics of organised religious sects but if The Bengsons invited us to join a cult, we would be all in.
Ohio is a masterpiece, a show that gets under your skin in the best way. Watch us be in the top 0.01% of The Bengsons listeners in our Spotify wrapped this year.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Livvy Perrett
Ohio plays at London’s Young Vic theatre until 24 October, with further info here.
