Comeback Special
Comeback Special grew out of an interest in the weirdness of reenactment and the strange in-between of repeating something that’s already happened—a queer sense of an act that’s neither this nor that, but also both.
In this solo performance, I return to Elvis Presley’s 1968 Comeback TV Special—not through impersonation, but through a kind of haunted cover version. I describe it in detail, mimic movements, sing in fragments and slip into moments of fantasy and friction. It’s a re-enactment—but not how you might expect.
-
Jam sessions, patter with a Southern drawl, big dance numbers, and a bit of sweat: revisited, reenacted, refracted. Comeback Special plays like a half-remembered dream, or a word repeated until it detaches from meaning.
What happens when the Comeback comes back? This is a double negative: it’s not the original, but it’s not not. A haunted feedback loop between then and now, between masculinity, visibility, and desire.
A peculiar kind of séance.
“Wohead arranges the audience on four sides of a raised square stage in Shoreditch Town Hall, mirroring the layout of the Burbank studio. Chairs and a microphone stand are placed just so. It’s a perfect reconstruction in some ways, deliberately imperfect in others. Drained of the bright, synthetic colour of 1960s fashion, Wohead’s version is a shadow or skeleton of the original event. Recreated in monochrome, this is a black-and-white negative of the 1968 Comeback Special. An echo. A ghost.
The whole event is, supposedly, about authenticity. “I want you to see who I really am,” says Wohead/Elvis in a seductive drawl. That was the whole point of the television broadcast: to offer fans a glimpse of Elvis the man as well as Elvis the star. The King and his musicians jam together, while Elvis talks to the audience between songs. Yet at the same time, as Wohead tells us, this was all carefully constructed: the television show was pre-recorded and released in multiple different versions. How is it even possible to recreate something that exists under myriad guises?
Wohead builds his re-enactment slowly, in careful layers. At first, the dynamism of the gig is rendered oddly static. Everything is told, not shown: Elvis’s appearance, the layout of the television studio, the position of the cameras, the clothes worn by the fans. Wohead talks us through every last detail of the recording, the meticulous description juxtaposed with a complete refusal to imitate. “You can see that my hair is black, obviously,” says Wohead, looking at us through his mousy mop. Even the lyrics are spoken, deadpan, rather than sung.
And then gradually, bit by bit, Wohead takes on aspects of Elvis’s physicality. A curling lip. A thrusting hip. Then, later, that distinctive voice. That unmistakeable “uh-huh”. Wohead’s is a fragmented impersonation, isolating individual elements of Elvis’s performance. He works like a forensic scientist, as if in search of some elusive essence. Is it in the voice? The recognisable quiff of hair? Those hips?”
Full programme note from the original run of Comeback Special:
When you watch something as many times as I have watched Elvis Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special – I’ve probably watched it more than a hundred times over the past two years – you start to develop an intimate, familiar relationship with it. I haven’t had this kind of relationship with a video since Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1989.
The ’68 Comeback Special was considered groundbreaking for its authenticity. Most of it was meant to feel like a relaxed jam session. In a way, my repeated viewings started to trip this authenticity into something completely inauthentic. It wasn’t that it was any less powerful or impressive, but more and more I started to become aware of how constructed it seemed. The looped watching pattern made everything predictable and fake.
This interest in fakeness brought about by repetition led me to an interest in re-enactment and the book Performing Remains by Rebecca Schneider. She writes:
“To trouble linear temporality – to suggest that time may be touched, crossed, visited or revisited, that time is transitive and flexible, that time may recur in time, that time is not one – never only one – is to court the ancient (and tired) Western anxiety over ideality and originality. The threat of theatricality is still the threat of the imposter status of the copy, the double, the mimetic, the second, the surrogate, the feminine, or the queer.”
Pretty much any film holds syncopated timelines. There’s the time when each individual shot was filmed, so that each scene or sequence is edited to look like a continuous timeline even though it’s made up of several singular timelines. Then there’s the overall time period it took to make the film, which normally spans days or months. And there’s the timespan it takes to watch the finished film, which can recur as many times as one cares to watch it and can happen over and over again throughout the course of a life.
The ’68 Comeback Special straddled the filmed and the live; it was pre-filmed, but there was a major TV broadcast, which in many ways was a live event. When we’re working in a live theatrical event rather than film, maybe re-enactment allows us the possibility to work in syncopated timelines rather than just the singular running time that dominates the idea of liveness. It’s less possible to make that syncopation invisible with slick editing, but maybe it means we can more consciously hold a plurality of contradictory ideas all at once. Maybe through the peculiar theatricality of a sort of re-enactment, we can touch something. It’s not the original Comeback Special, but it’s not not.
Concept and performance Greg Wohead
Sound design and music arrangement Timothy X Atack
Scene and lighting design Ben Pacey
Producer: Laura Sweeney
Collaborating artist Joe Wild
Artistic mentor Sharon Smith
Technical manager Salvatore Scollo
Main photo Manuel Vason
Production photos Richard Eaton
With thanks to artists and technical managers who have contributed to the making process: Dan Watson, Rachel Mars, Nicki Hobday, Gareth Cutter, Rachael Young, Helen Mugridge, Anna Barrett, Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, Alice Hoult
Co-commissioned by Shoreditch Town Hall, Theatre in the Mill and South Street Arts Centre. A Jerwood Charitable Foundation/Bristol Old Vic Ferment Commission. Developed at MAKE, Bios, Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre and the New Wolsey Theatre. Initially supported through a Dance and the Homemade Commission by Chisenhale Dance Space. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.