Created by Tom Bailey

Review by Gabriel Rogers

Zoo Southside

Tom Bailey’s Vigil is a delicate love letter to the lesser-known and more interestingly named fauna which lives or, rather upsettingly, has ceased to live on planet Earth. The show begins comically as Bailey attempts, with great success, to mimic and clown 26,000 different animals projected onto the back curtain of the Zoo Southside stage. Bailey enters the stage timidly, looking to the audience for strength and shrugging at the unexplained projection, which reads “Columbian Lightbulb Lizard”. From this moment on he begins playing at these various animals projected in light, and so starts an equally hilarious and moving piece of theatre.  

Bailey jumps, crawls, shuffles, and laughs his way through the various and varied names which flash onto the curtain and draw consistent laughs from his eager audience. The projection itself takes on a character of its own – impelling Bailey’s character to contort himself into the image of these wonderfully named animals. The projection directs Bailey and goes so far as to make him drop his trousers to portray an animal named the “Problematic Flasher”. Bailey shrugs at the audience, almost in apology, and then obliges. For a brief moment the audience is stunned into shocked silence, and then the projection breaks the awkwardness which it itself has directed. The projection replaced this lewdly named animal with a laugh “HaHa”, prompting the audience to join in with their own laughs. This was a brilliant moment in the performance as the actor’s autonomy is undermined. This added an unsettling and slightly sinister undertone to the performance, which, as of yet, had not been felt. 

From this moment on, the clowning and joking-mimicry began to be replaced with a certain tension. The projections became so rapid that Bailey had no choice but to stand and watch as they flicked on and off the screen. Eventually, Bailey took a seat on a box which, up until this point, I had assumed was empty. There was a feeling of hopefulness as the recorded voices of Sir David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg expressed the importance of protecting the environment. However, this moment of awareness was shattered by an excerpt of Bernard Manning’s standup in which he asked, “who gives a fuck about Panda’s?” It was at this point, and to the sound of gunfire, that Bailey poured the box’s contents onto the stage – revealing them to be the bones of various dead animals. Vigil stages the anxiety of the climate crisis and forces the audience to endure a funeral for the natural world.  

Vigil is aptly named, as it ends with the audience and the performer engaging in a shared experience of grief for the natural world. With his back to the audience, Bailey watches with the audience as the projection lists tens, hundreds, and then thousands of animals that have been made extinct. After a wonderful moment of silence that allowed one to contemplate the impact of the performance, the lights came up. Vigil is a wonderful piece of theatre that builds to an amazing crescendo of climate crisis anxiety.   

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