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Theatre Review

NAME - Sam Brooks

OCCUPATION - Theatre Reviewer & Playwright

PERFORMANCE REVIEW - Lies & What have you done to me?

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Lies and What Have You Done To Me?

Theatre doesn’t exist without an audience. Or at least it shouldn’t be able to. Too often I see plays that require nothing from an audience; no thought, no input and no processing. The actors act, the plot goes through the expected beats and the lights come up at the end and people applaud. There is nothing wrong with this kind of theatre, sometimes it can be incredibly powerful and moving, but sometimes you’re reminded that theatre can be so much more.

Two shows recently opened and bowed at The Basement Theatre that reminded me what theatre can do for, and to, an audience. The Town Centre gave us two completely different shows – Lies and What Have You Done To Me? – that nevertheless felt like breaking apart the theatre and shoving it full of life, intelligence and fun. These are shows that exist for an audience and more crucially, do not exist without an audience.

Lies is a deconstruction of theatre, and a celebration of it. Throughout the extremely quick forty-five minute, we are presented with tropes of theatre – an audition, a crying scene, a death scene – and provoked to react to them out of the usual narrative context. An incredible highlight are the four tremendous cast members, Julia Croft, Lara Fischel-Chisholm, Ash Jones and Simon Haren, engaging in a competition to see who can cry the most, with the victor tearfully reading the parking rules for The Basement staff. It is a beautiful deconstruction of a theatrical trope that is designed to provoke a similar reaction in an audience, but taken entirely out of where we would usually see it and presented for what it is – a lie.

This sounds like an incredibly heady experience and at times the show leans against being a bit too much about what we’re thinking, but for the most part it’s just a lot of fun. Whether it’s actors racing around taking the chairs away from us, or a stupendously staged death scene performed, and narrated by, Lara Fischel-Chisholm or the escalating death scenes that make up the grand finale; Lies is a whole lot of fun for an audience, and one that entirely involves them in that fun. These lies are not for the actors onstage, even though it’s clear they’re having a lot of fun, they’re to make us react and feel something. And then maybe after we’ve driven home, think about what we saw.

What Have You Done To Me? takes what Lies does and runs right into the wall with it, over and over again. It’s a show that is almost impossible to review, or start to review. If you start with how the show starts, where Nisha Madhan and Stephen Bain, the creators and performers o the piece, involve the entire audience in a series of silly games, it sounds like one of those audience interaction pieces that everybody is so scared of. If you start by talking about an incredibly beautiful monologue delivered by Nisha Madhan about growing up, delivered into a glitchy microphone while she’s wearing a gorilla mask, it sounds like a piece of performance art. Ditto if we talk about Stephen Bain stumbling around with a cloud on his head. What Have You Done To Me? defies any sort of synopsis, as well it should.

A simplistic reading of What Have You Done To Me? would be to call it a retelling of Nisha Madhan and Stephen Bain’s relationship with each other; it’s a tale of insecurity, fighting, love and obsession. It involves the audience in their struggles for power and dominance, or just piece and balance. But it’s so much more than that, at least to me. What Have You Done To Me? involves the audience and makes them part of the show, but part of the theme: It’s about how we impact each other just by being in the same space, by acting and reacting to things in the same space. Whether we’re in a romantic relationship with each other, whether we’re a French superstar sharing the stage with a gorilla in a dress or awkward audience members sitting next to each other; we are having an impact on other people just by being around them. It’s an incredibly beautiful piece, and one that, much like Lies, is incredibly fun to watch and it draws some truly visceral, immediate reactions from the audience; some like I haven’t ever experienced in theatre before.

I saw each show twice, and both shows were radically different for one reason: The audience. These are shows that simply don’t exist without an audience. The performers don’t just play off how the audience react, but they construct the show around the audience. In Lies, this is literally the case as the audience is completely surrounded by the ‘stage’, but in What Have You Done to Me?, what provides the tension, and the stunning climax of the piece, is the audience’s presence to a moment of intense awkwardness and anger between Nisha and Stephen. The first time I saw What Have You Done to Me?, the ending was an absolute stunner to me, with an audience who were maybe more familiar with their work than I was and more ready to go with what the performers wanted them to do, but the second time, the ending was a more awkward beast entirely, with the audience not knowing how to react and being stuck in a beautiful moment of having no idea of what to do. Again, this is a reaction I haven’t seen in theatre before, and there’s few shows I can say that about.

Lies and What Have You Done to Me? are special shows separately; they push the bounds of what theatre can do, and push the bounds of what an audience expects theatre to be. But together, they form an incredible two-punch of mind-expansion; they made me think more about what theatre as an art-form can provoke in an audience, and stir at a more primal level. It’s not the best theatre I’ve seen, both these pieces exist outside the realm of quality and are impossible to judge against each other, let alone anything, else, but it is some of the most important, necessary theatre I’ve seen. I wish these shows could run forever.


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