Jack McGee
At the beginning of Manage Your Expectations, performer/creator Eliza Sanders monologues at length about what the rest of the show will be. As she does this, she frequently contradicts herself, doubling, tripling, quadrupling back to clarify and re-clarify every new idea. All thoughts are treated as equally significant, or insignificant, to the point where we as the audience lose the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, our brains scrambling to make sense of all the words coming at us. Not to mention the litany of puns. It’s a cacophony of context.
With the show framed online and in its program as “taking the idea of trigger warnings to its absurdist extreme”, it’d be easy to read this opening as a satirisation of its subject and little else. A cheap shot at the idea we could ever protect ourselves from the impact of something by contextualising it. Midway through her ramblings, Sanders denies this. She makes clear that she’s not attacking trigger warnings (the show listing has many), before immediately discussing her frustrations with them. Another contradiction. There is no clean answer to be found here, and to be didactic in a way the show joyfully refuses to be, this lack of clarity is the point.
There’s a school of thought in playwriting that the best moments are generally wordless. There should be a handful of these killer moments in every play, and dialogue should exist purely to give us a means to interpret them. To give us context. No one should leave thinking about the playwright’s witticisms, they should instead be caught up in the heartbreak they quietly read in a character’s smile, or the triumphant joy they felt at two lost companions unexpectedly reuniting. As Sanders contextualises further and further, building tension for what is to come (and then promptly dissecting that tension, and our fear of discomfort) I find myself both dreading and getting excited about the moments I’m going to witness. I jump the gun, already imagining the sensation of getting knocked back in my chair by some exceptional piece of choreography I can only understand because of all the words that came before it. Words, which will soon stop. There will be context, and then there will be the show. Clean cut.
The mental review I’m writing trips up when Sanders starts telling me that “the context is the content”. If it’s not clear yet, it will soon become evident that the context will not be stopping. Moments and dialogue, tension and release, performer and audience, exist not just side by side here, but simultaneously.
Scenographically, these dichotomies are made clear in the constant presence of projection behind Sanders. Sometimes playing pre-recorded footage of her performing, sometimes playing memes, it’s an ever present reminder of contradiction. Perhaps the show’s greatest formal achievement is in the number of ways they find to use this screen. It is rarely as simple as “emotional physicality is expressed on stage by the performer, while objective context comes through the AV”. More often than not, it’s the opposite.
To be clear, there are beautiful and devastating wordless moments you can leave with in this show. They’re just never without a framing, or a counterpoint, or a second or third meaning. Often that counterpoint is us, and what we choose, have chosen, or are choosing to see. Other times it’s the projection, presenting a completely different emotion to what Sanders is presenting. Occasionally it’s direct voice over, listing a series of possible meanings that both deny and feed off one another. Sometimes all it takes is the same moment, shot live from an onstage camera, seen from a different angle. These moments are made more from their contradictions, from the inability of Sanders, or the audience, to clearly communicate a straightforward emotional state.
I would like to underline that this show is often devastating. It deals with heavy, personal, themes, and while it contrasts them with conflicting ideas, it doesn’t shy away from the impact of them. It’s an achievement that a work this cerebral and often self obfuscating is able to display such sincere and powerful emotionality.
Late in the show, when she’s ostensibly explaining the “moral” of the piece, Sanders tells us that “puns are serious.” It’s a full circle moment, that pulls the show’s ever present wordplay into its thematic web. A phrase that means two different things at once. Multiple moments existing in the same place and time without denying one another. The complexity inherent in all things that we’re so eager to strip away. To ignore. Riding home after the show and trying to make sense of it, I find myself thinking that there are few thoughts more reductive than the idea that I can cut through the noise and make objective, easily digestible, sense of anything. There’s too much going on at once, before, after. There’s too much context.
Sean reviewed the debut season of Manage Your Expectations here, back in 2024.