Hippo World Guest Book

Ah, the World Wide Web! What a veritable treasure-trove of weird and wonderfulness it is. Why, you might even find a website dedicated to hippopotami and then raid its guestbook for material for a show at the Edinburgh Fringe. And a damn fine idea that would be, too!

Chris Goode is a Fringe First-winning theatre-maker of some ten years’ standing, who specialises in unusual concepts. (His acclaimed play without dialogue, “Longwave”, is also on in Edinburgh this year.) In the case of “Hippo World Guest Book”, he is exploring aspects of online communication, and the various ways in which it challenges our traditional understanding of the relationship between utterance and meaning. And if that all sounds a bit high-falutin’, may I quickly add that it’s also deeply, seriously bloody funny as well.

Essentially, what Goode has done is to print off about six and half years’ worth of postings onto the Hippo World guestbook, and then whittle these down to about a tenth of the size. In the process, although he has obviously had to edit at a macro-level – that is, cutting out complete postings – he has preserved every detail of the postings he’s kept. That means typos, weird spams, and – crucially – following the convention that writing in capitals equals shouting.

Of course, as you’d expect, some of the best bits occur when contributors take a dislike to each other and the online vitriol flows. Oddly, however, the occasions when they are in support are also compelling, even moving. The highlight of the piece, however, comes with a lengthy spam-riddelled email that is cleverly melted together with a choral music background: meaning slips its moorings and we glimpse spam as incantation. The guy might just be a genius.