Lucy Hutson’s show about Britney Spears, cynicism and killer chat-up lines

A few years ago, before she had quite worked out what to do with her life, Lucy Hutson tried to become someone else.

As a teenager from Essex, she had already remoulded her identity when she followed her older sister to London. There she became a squatter, mingled with unreconstructed hippies and diehard punks, and joined in with several vociferous protests for various left-wing causes. It became her social life. She was a lesbian vegan activist. She shaved her head and studded her face with piercings. She was committed to following her own path. And then she went and spoiled it all by trying to become an actor.

Hutson applied to a few schools, grew her hair long, removed her piercings and went shopping for a new, more conservative wardrobe. In a high-street clothes shop in London, she looked at her new image in the changing-room mirror, and started to cry. “I think it was in New Look,” she remembers, laughing.

The idea of trying to change the world, and yourself, has become part of Hutson's wry brand of performance art in the ensuing years, together with the realisation that neither the world nor yourself are keen to change. This is the problem she artfully addresses in her pithily titled show Britney Spears Custody Battle Vs Zeus in Swan Rape Shocker, a piece about politics and postures, which wonders – among other things – how to be a good person, where the limits of activism lie, and what makes for a killer chat-up line.

That’s how Hutson’s performance begins, with a barrage of come-ons that she sourced online, which the audience is invited to rate. What is her favourite? She thinks for a moment. “Nice legs,” she tells me. “What time do they open?”

Small interventions

Performance art proved a harder seduction for Hutson, who thought she had applied for an acting course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. For two months she was completely nonplussed. “At first there was lots of stuff I just didn’t understand. Why would anyone want to do this sort of thing?” A couple of months in, and on the verge of quitting, she discovered a modest and quirky performance by French & Mottershead, a company that stages small interventions into everyday life. “I just thought, Oh, yeah, I can get into this. I realised I could be myself. I didn’t have to pretend to be anyone else. It was brilliant.” Hutson shaved her head again, reinserted her piercings, and began finding her voice.

Britney Spears Custody Battle counts as both Hutson's earliest work (it began as her degree piece) and her most recent achievement (she developed it into an expanded and finished piece last year). In that interlude, the performance has absorbed many of her own questions about identity, a quality more slippery than stable. "It's a lot about human needs, and, I guess, my needs for external validation," she says. "Are politics about making yourself feel like you're a good person, rather than actually about changing things? I have a theory that everyone just does enough to be able to make them sleep at night."

It’s also about personal poses, in more ways than one. “I want the audience to think I’m attractive, that I’m a good person. Interlinked with that is my mental health, and maybe why I feel like I need external validation.”

Performance art in particular asks its makers to expose themselves in more ways than one. From Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden to Pyotr Pavlensky (to take extreme examples) the discipline depends on risk and often danger.

“It does, I guess,” says Hutson. “After graduating, I didn’t make a show for ages. I wasn’t so autobiographical before. In creating my own style, I decided to just say things plainly. Also, I spend a lot of time asking other people what they think of a subject. I thought, If I’m going to use people for my material, I have to be more honest about what I think.”

Hutson can be pretty candid about her views. "I've just gotten further and further away from it," she says of her radical roots. "Now I sit in McDonald's with my white Nike hi-tops." Perhaps that's why Britney Spears takes place on a stage littered with cutesy consumerist items, My Little Pony dolls (all named Lucy), and a placard, while Hutson crowd-sources a cause to care about. Once somebody volunteered that all inheritance should be banned, which might level society in the space of two generations. The next person she canvassed misunderstood that idea, enthusiastically, as a call to abolish inheritance tax, the complete opposite position. Hutson did engage with an anti-English Defence League protest, but the show is provocative in its ambiguity, presenting Hutson as a rebel without a cause.

“Basically I just took on the things that I would be doing anyway,” she says. “I think I am just cynical. Maybe I’m cynical because I was so . . .” I await the word “passionate” or “disillusioned”, but Hutson shrugs. “No, I think I’ve just always been cynical, actually. I have a capacity for hopelessness, or to decide that everything’s great,” she says. “I thought Scottish Independence would kick us up the ass and then maybe [Britain] would get a Green government and that would change everything. But it would probably turn out that the SNP and the Greens would . . . be as much wankers as Conservatives and Labour. I go from extremes.”

Ride the dung beetle

She is constant, at least, in the length of her show titles: Britney Spears may be a mouthful, but it is only her third-longest, after It Is Better to Ride the Dung Beetle Than It Is to Tread on Soft Carpet or If You Want Bigger Yorkshire Puddings You Need a Bigger Tin. Her art is a challenge to any festival poster, I suggest. "That is the problem," she agrees. "It never fits in."

Britney Spears was formulated while Hutson was working the night shift in a Canadian convenience store, and, in the absence of any customers, bingeing on gossip magazines. "They just hated Britney Spears through that custody battle," she says. "At the same time I was thinking about how we change old stories to fit the ethics of the society we live in. If you read [new versions] of mythic stories now, Zeus seduces [Leda, in the form of a swan], when originally he raped her."

These tales of celebrities and gods became, in her mind, different instructions for human behaviour.

Her new show has drawn wide praise from audiences and critics. What about her own search for external validation? Does it still motivate her? “I think artists hate to admit that we really, really like having people clapping at us,” she says, laughing.

Is there a risk that getting applause will alter her need to perform? “No,” she says, “because I don’t really know what else to do now. I guess I could have been an electrician. I think I’d look good with a tool belt.” This sounds like a prelude to a pick-up line. Is that a cable shears in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see us?

Britney Spears Custody Battle Vs Zeus in Swan Rape Shocker takes place on Saturday February 7th at Blackbox, Sample Studios, Cork, as part of Quarter Block Party (February 6th-8th)