In the frenzy and intensity of the
Edinburgh Fringe you can encounter a whole range of theatrical moods
and genres, and even a variety of ideas about what constitutes theatre
and how it works. The basic notion – that it is a live performance
event in which performers and audience occupy the same space and time –
is already under question in headphone pieces such as
en route, which I reviewed earlier
this month. In other instances, that co-presence is reduced to its
purest, a one-on-one encounter such as that in
Internal, last year’s
speed-dating-cum-group-therapy piece from Belgian company Ontroerend
Goed.
That company’s preoccupation with audience/performer relationships
continues this year with
Teenage Riot,
a sequel to 2008’s exuberant
Once
And For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Really Are So Shut Up And Listen.
That was a piece performed by a group of teenagers from Ghent (though
shaped by the company’s adult prime movers), several of whom return for
this sulkier follow-up. These are truculent teens who don’t wanna do
anything except what they wanna do, which seems on the strength of this
largely to be to protest that they don’t wanna etc. So opposed are they
to the world of adulthood that they shut themselves in a cabin on the
main Traverse stage. Sometimes one or more emerge, but most of what we
see is video projected on to the front wall of the cabin. That’s right,
the “fourth wall” here is real and opaque. Which means we have to take
it on trust that what we see on video is actually happening in there...
and since the supposedly live footage is intercut with clearly
pre-recorded external sequences, we know we’re not getting anything
unmediated. This is not playing games with the audience’s notions of
immediacy and (a current theatrical buzzword) liveness, at least not
games that we can win. It is mocking us. I have become increasingly
persuaded that Ontroerend Goed either do not realise the gross
disparity between the stake their performers have in a given production
and that which the audience is compelled to invest, or that they do not
care about what amounts to exploitation of the basic theatrical
transaction. And I find this approach smelling more and more rank.
The contrast could not be more telling than with French mime/clown
Julien Cottereau’s piece
Imagine-Toi
(Assembly @ Princes Street Gardens). Cottereau’s work is more or less
classical mime: playing wordlessly with imaginary dogs, balls etc.
However, he opens it up to us both collectively and as individuals,
inviting audience members on to the stage to skip on his invisible
rope, play keepie-uppie and engage in a swashbuckling romantic drama
with him. His greatest gift is for keeping such routines entirely free
of the embarrassment that is usually mandatory with such audience
participation. His helpers, and the rest of us, are sharing in play
with him: the deal he implicitly makes with the audience is that we are
equals. It is quite beautiful.
A certain amount of audience complicity is also required in Richard
Cameron’s latest play,
An Evening
With Elsie Parsons (Dome @ George Street), in which we
effectively play the visitors to a séance which develops along
unexpected lines. Its conclusion is characteristically Cameronian,
downbeat yet hopeful and involving muddling through together, but the
route to it is a novel one. It is a pity that its audiences are not
bigger: at the performance I saw, there were scarcely more of us than
would fit around a ouija board.
Similarly, in
Magicians! Behind The
Magic, we spectators play the part of an awestruck conjuring
audience, even though Fabuloso and Dupont (alias the duo Swift and
Crawley) are exponents of that performance aesthetic dubbed by the late
Ken Campbell “doing it crappily”. And yet they strike the most
impressive audience deal I have seen all month by enticing us to watch
in rapt silence, as if witnessing a Copperfield illusion, while a
toaster browns a couple of slices of bread. These productions, so to
speak, hold conversations with the audience so that they and we agree
what we all bring to the theatrical event; unlike the Belgian
theatremakers, who are too similar to their teenage performers in that
they are concerned only with saying what they want to say about theatre
and not with listening to any responses.
Written for the Financial
Times.