Life is Too Good to be True

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There’s a group therapy session going on at the Underbelly as Stephen Glass, disgraced American journalist and compulsive liar, replays the actions that led to his sacking from US magazine The New Republic for fabricating stories. Sitting in the round, the audience is privy to this intimate confessional as though in an AA meeting. Except the difference is, the rest of us aren’t compulsive liars.

Dutch artist Gable Roelofsen, who performs this monologue, might argue otherwise. Life is Too Good to be True suggests we all lie to ourselves and others constantly as a form of social convention. He offers the subsequent Hollywood film adaptation of Glass' disgrace—glossy, embellished—as an example.

Tell it like it is, suggests Roelofsen’s second character: author, activist and breast cancer survivor Barbara Ehrenreich. Disgusted with the theory that positive thinking can help overcome cancer, she prefers to say that cancer sucks and those who profess it to be some sort of gift are deluded.

It’s hard to see what Dutch company Het Geluid is trying to achieve with this show. Roelofsen is a competent performer—both as the besuited Glass, or in pink wig and blue Lycra leggings as Ehrenreich—but the connection between the characters is tenuous, and the show takes an even more random turn with the introduction of some Lady Gaga wisdom. Perhaps there’s something lost in translation—it was originally performed in Dutch—but Life is Too Good to be True is too obscure to be satisfying.