Sorry, how much??
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." ~ Oscar Wilde
There's an interesting question underlying Daniel Bye's now show, The Price of Everything, which is, essentially: who decides how much something is worth and how does this who decide how this worth should be expressed in a monetary value on the open market. Bye doesn't necessarily attempt to answer this question, but he does answer some other interesting questions about the value of various things. For example, sold on the open market a single human kidney clocks in at £54,800, while a body-full of bone marrow racks up an incredible £13.8 million. An imaginary air guitar, however, which Bye sells on eBay as an experiment inquiring as to how things acquire value, nets an impressive £893. Bye said that he funded his entire Edinburgh show selling the air guitar and other such imaginary things on eBay because, after all, why should people publicly fund the arts through their taxes when idiots will do it on eBay instead?
The second half of the show on the other hand, or "pure self indulgence" as Bye calls it, revolves around the telling of another story. This is largely a whimsical analogy for the replacement of a cash economy with a gift-based economy in Middlesborough (of all places), where Bye and a chap he meets on the train open a free milk bar in an empty shop in the centre of town. The milk shop is born from Bye's experiments in gifting small acts of kindness to his fellow Middlesboroughites. He buys a coffee for the man behind him in the queue at Costa, which results in a 14-hour unbroken chain of people buying coffees for the person behind them in the queue, though no-one actually seems to know whether they're performing the act out of kindness or some kind of technological fault of the till. The Costa coffee queue leads to the milk bar, then to the surprisingly accommodating interference by a local health and safety officer, which ultimately results in the utter erosion of the cash economy in Middlesborough. The milk of human kindness as a metaphor for human kindness. Plus, at the sort-of-but-not-really interval between the two parts, Bye gives each audience member 1/3rd of a pint of milk. I haven't drank a glass of milk in years. Boy, it's delicious.
Perhaps somewhat hubristically, Bye prefaces his show by telling the audience that his show, indeed his "performance lecture", requires quite a bit of thinking. In fact, the girl sitting next to me at one point exclaimed: "I don't understand!" Alas, I understood all too well. While Bye delivers a charming performance (with absolutely amazing diction) and some novel ideas (selling an imaginary friend on eBay a particular favourite), I'm not entirely sure he has anything new to add to the debate about value versus kindness and the gift economy. He tells good stories, though.
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