Director/performer Bill Aitchison addresses the audience at the beginning and asks for their co-operation. We are told we will be asked to hold on to and pass back props to him. More importantly he also hands out ten tape recorders, which are set off in sequence. Each plays a different soundscape, with gaps of silence in between. Aitchison explains that the show will finish after an hour, or when all the tapes finish, which ever comes sooner.
You will gather from the above that this is a rather unconventional piece of theatre. It is Aitchison’s task to perform a certain activity each time a particular soundscape kicks in on its respective tape recorder (God, this is so hard to explain!). Those tasks seem very random; reading out word definitions from a dictionary, flirting with a member of the audience, explaining the book of Genesis whilst dressed as a vicar, making a salad, washing his hair... you get the picture. As the bites of sound cut in randomly he never knows what he is going to have to do and when, and sometimes has to multi-task if soundscapes coincide.
There is a bit of blurb in the program which will help you to understand the point of all of this. My problem with it is really that Aitchison is not a good enough performer to carry it off. It was the first performance I saw, and he seemed nervous, but he isn’t sharp enough at ad-libbing or physically compelling and agile enough to make the physical elements work. Some of it is intriguing, but really, reading out definitions of words at random is going to be dull even if you don’t read them badly, which he does, with longeurs in between whilst he finds the next word. This just perversely flies in the face of any concept of performance or theatricality.
There is also one excruciatingly loud sound effect which I came to dread as I was sitting next to a speaker. Really, it hurt my ears. In what universe is it considered okay to do that to your audience in the name of entertainment and charge them for the privilege?
If you like this sort of stuff, it’s an interesting concept. If not, there are 2049 other shows out there for you to choose from this year, none of which will cause you physical discomfort.
[Robin T. Barton]
Printer Friendly
