William Joys
Metronome

Stagaing 2 Performances:

31 January 2026 7:00pm

1 February 2026, 4:00pm

Text by Nicoletta Lambertucci

The actress is back, and her agenda is getting more muscular. Her commanding figure has been evolving since her first appearance in 2021, accumulating iterations across different acts, each a recalibration rather than a repetition. In this new work, she taps relentlessly on the mirrored stage, producing a steady rhythm that structures the space while questioning who sets the tempo of history, and who is forced to move in time with it.

William Joys’s new work Metronome is a 50-minute live act in which theatre does not mirror reality but dares to outperform it.

Positioned between performance and interrogation, a script prompter played by Lewis Prosser, who sits in the audience questions the actress (always played by Joys himself), generating a dialogue on identity, victimhood, labour, dance and costumes, authorship and more. In Joys’ words: Performance is a device in the search for liberation both political and personal. However, this isn’t the search for authenticity. Isn’t there something inherently artificial about art?

Joy’s practice is rooted in the radical humour and camp sensibilities of gay liberation theatre, drawing from the lineage of the Bloolips Theatre Company and figures such as Betty Bourne and Quentin Crisp. In this tradition, theatrical excess, wit and pleasure become acts of resistance: modes of visibility through which identity, power and social exclusion are exposed and exaggerated.

In Metronome, Joys continues to turn toward the legacy of 1960s and 1970s action and body art, practices that sought authenticity through endurance, positioning themselves against the artifice of theatre. And yet, Joys makes a point where, through the lens of postmodern performance, this opposition begins to falter. Acting and action, sincerity and drama, intention and accident fold into one another. The distinction between “actressing” and so-called “real” action collapses, revealing authenticity itself as a kind of role shaped by time, attention and the gaze of others.

The carefully crafted staging and sculptural costuming hint at the aesthetics of Bauhaus theatre, particularly the work of Oskar Schlemmer, where abstraction, geometry and the disciplined body produce figures that are at once pedestrian and uncanny. Joys channels this legacy through comedy and camp not as parody, but as strategy. Like the Bloolips’ adoption of distinct visual worlds, Joys eclectic aesthetic signals multiple histories at once and use the openings created by modernist abstraction to conjure identities that remain fluid, excessive and resistant to singular meaning.

In Metronome, theatre competes with reality precisely because realism is insufficient. Through the suspension of disbelief, it opens a space to face a complicated inquiry: What freedoms does theatrical licence allow?

Metronome is a meditation on time, power and autonomy in a moment of collective crisis. It refuses resolution, celebrating instead the usefulness of uselessness, the radical political potential of not being fixed.

****

Featuring performers Lewis Prosser, Laura Schuller, and Stella Pearce, with music by Max Schuller. Running time approximately 45 minutes, please arrive promptly.

William Joys channels characters which arouse suspicion about the endorsement of authenticity over ‘artificial’ construction. He performs through layers of subterfuge, becoming an object which embodies the prop, the stage, the costume, in order to promote the art of actressing. He has exhibited and performed at Glasgow International, Strangefield, Modern Institute, David Dale Gallery, Kunsthalle Münster and Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Germany, Kunstraum, London, The Legal Stage, MIT List Centre USA, MUMOK, Vienna, Museum Ludwig Cologne. With upcoming performances at Bolding Gallery and The Claude Cahun. He is a founding member of Villa Design Group and one half of performance and publishing platform Sartre25. He is currently part of the Conditions Studio Programme, Croydon.

Graphic design: Oliver Long
Photograph: Matthew Noel-Tod