Our guest writer, Tom Drayton, is a Senior Lecturer in Acting, Performance and Directing at The University of East London, UK. His research concerns international activist theatre and the relationship between contemporary performance, metamodernism and the millennial generation. Tom is also the director of Pregnant Fish Theatre and an associate artist for Project Phakama.
“To be very meta, the online discourse about this online discourse [focussed] special,” writes Cassie de Costa in Vanity Fair, “has made it nearly impossible to question [it] because so many people have deemed the project worthy in and of itself.” Since its release on Netflix in May 2021, Bo Burnham’s Inside — a musical, stand-up comedy special written, performed, directed, filmed and edited solely by the 30-year-old comedian throughout quarantine in 2020 — has been described as the “essential document” of the current crisis, the “definitive bit of Western popular art to come out from the pandemic era” and, despite falling within the stand-up comedy genre, “one of the most sincere artistic responses to the 21st century so far.” As such, attempting to discuss this almost universally acclaimed work feels like wading into an overloaded…
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