This show started off badly. Advertised as starting at 7pm, actual proceedings of the event didn’t begin till 8.20pm, which was technically an hour and twenty minutes late; fine if you’ve come with a friend and are sharing drinks, but a very long time if you’ve come by yourself with the simple intention of reviewing the show. Luckily, I had a book.
Literary Death Match is, ostensibly, a talent contest of writers. Four writers read from their recently published work to an audience, pitted against each other in pairs, and a panel of three alleged experts chooses a winner from each round. The two winners face one another in a grand finale.
Which is all good as a concept if it were not for the fact that host and creator of LDM, Adrian Todd Zuniga, seemed to be far more obsessed with love of himself than love of literature. He leaped and vied with his co-host for the audience’s attention but the prevailing impression was that he wouldn’t have been able to tell you much of the writers’ readings had you quizzed him.
The four writers – Ian Kelly, Melissa Harrison, Rebecca Wait, Will Storr – genuinely had a lot of good material that deftly kept the audience enthralled in the seven minutes allotted to each of them. Zuniga however was more obsessed about getting a malfunctioning ‘Hollywood trailer’ video to work about turning LDM into a TV show (one wonders why…) then talking to them of their work, and the three ‘judges’ might as well have been a row of blow-up dolls for all the intellectually incisive criticism they afforded.
At a halfway point I was genuinely thinking ‘is this the inevitable, sinking and painful death of literature I am witnessing?’ Yet if that TV show does get made, for whatever motives, and they get genuinely talented writers such as these four involved then there is the possibility it may lure a new generation, generally deemed apathetic, into reading.
But to sum up this show, straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, finalist Ian Kelly commented before beginning his summation: ‘the shit your publishers get you into.’ Quite.
• Concrete, 56 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JJ, Wednesday 13th March, www.literarydeathmatch.com
