Truly Involving Theatre
In the past couple of years I’ve spent far too much time on Twitter, so I’ve been aware of
some of the interesting theatre-related events that have taken place there, such as the RSC’s
Such Tweet Sorrow, which saw an online cast improvise a story based
on Romeo and Juliet over the course of five weeks, and
American playwright Jeremy Gable’s The 15th Line,
a four-hander which took place entirely on Twitter (you can read its script
here).
This Sunday though, was the first time I’ve actually engaged
with and physically taken part in such an event. It’s not often that I look back on a series of
tweets to jog my memory about a piece of theatre, but that’s exactly what I’ve had to do in preparation for writing this blog post.
You
Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives in Texas / You Wouldn’t Know Her, She Lives in
London, which is performed simultaneously at theatres in
the two eponymous locations via Skype, is a collaboration between London-based Look Left Look Right and The Hidden Room, a company based in Austin.
The premise is that transatlantic couple Liz and Ryan have brought their
friends and family together so that everyone can get to know each other and
make the pair feel less like their relationship exists only in virtual
reality. The audience, both those physically in attendance and anyone
who’s following the performance on Twitter (by using the #texaslondon hashtag) and Facebook, are encouraged to take
part by asking questions and posting comments during the show.
It’s a brave and original idea: interactive theatre is
exciting enough when it’s just a matter of responding to the action going on in a
physical space – as with last year’s remarkable You Me Bum Bum Train. To then open up that interaction to the digital realm and
run the real and virtual scenarios side-by-side has the potential to create an entirely new type
of theatre experience, one that is almost limitless in scale.
Schemes like National Theatre Live – where NT productions are beamed live to cinemas around the country and the
world – and Pilot Theatre’s
live streaming of performances on the Internet – have already gone some way
towards taking theatre to larger audiences than just those able to physically
get to the venue. Enabling those virtual audiences to become directly involved in what
they’re seeing is an even more exciting step and one that has the potential to bring added value to the theatre experience.
That step, however, is not without its challenges, as I can
testify from my experience at You Wouldn’t Know Him this weekend. It’s at
the meeting of boundaries that problems arise: the interactive and the
scripted, the live and the virtual each more or less succeed on their own terms in this show – it’s when the drama forces them
together that things get tricky.
The show’s whole premise requires interaction from the
audience, but at the play’s dramatic apex (at least at the performance I attended) it suddenly felt like questions or
comments would have been unwelcome, an interruption. No longer involved in the action, we
felt like mere onlookers, a standard audience at a conventional play, but with an
awkward sense of what had been lost.
Crucial to the success of any theatre experience is the
suspension of disbelief; this is enough of a challenge when your audience are
all sat in one place together, their full attention focused on the drama being played out before them; how much more difficult does this become once you start inviting people
to include themselves in the imaginative process and think about their own role
in the action alongside that of the actors? Not to mention the issue of making
those virtual audience members/participants feel involved enough
to suspend their disbelief when sat at a computer potentially thousands of
miles away?
You
Wouldn’t Know Him, He Lives in Texas stumbles at this hurdle, but Look Left
Look Right and The Hidden Room should be applauded for their attempt to explore
this new territory and create an entertaining (albeit occasionally
uncomfortable) evening along the way. I very much look forward to further
experiments.
Theatre has only to gain from this type of innovation.
