Theatre on a Long Thin Wire

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If an audience walks into a room and there’s no performer, does the performance really happen? A Berkeleyan question that is filled with promise, if not kitschy self-importance, on the interactions between spectator, actor and space. Arguably, it was best perceived by Eric Davis in last year’s Red Bastard (returning this year)—although his terrifying investigation sought to query theatre itself as a sacred arena in which audiences could absorb and become the show.

Jack McNamara’s new thought experiment, however, places a group of people in an attic with a mobile phone. When it rings and a voice asks the listener to repeat everything, we begin to wonder where the drama actually takes place. Are the encounters of our mystery host the real action, is the show about how we respond to the strangeness of our environment, or can theatre be conveyed across cellular satellites, then transmitted, as it were, along thin wires?

The immediate concern is how surrounded by stooges we may be, and this examination of fellow spectators is perhaps the most interesting and unnerving experience. The problem is, there’s no greater exchange of ideas. The whole show slowly deflates, leaving us utterly disappointed and puzzled – but not in a purposeful way. The gimmick of being trapped in a room with a group of strangers for 50 minutes is the entirety of the show: no real mystery, tension, expectation or reward lies at the heart of it. It is dull, limp and, quite simply, struggles to even call itself theatre.