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Coming to the Melbourne Fringe Festival 2022, from the trio that brought you With a Whimper, comes a metatheatrical tragedy that questions all of the most important parts of theatre. When the world watches the audience, who knows what drama will bubble to the surface? And who better to watch than a trio of theatre critics?
" We are a story, waiting to be told, requiring only the eyes and ears of a willing participant. We have no stakes that we don’t bring ourselves: we won’t die, we won’t lose our homes or our livelihoods, our lives won’t be changed in any way whatsoever in the course of this performance - unless we choose to raise the stakes. It’s just like real life. You can choose to care, or you can choose to be spontaneous. There’s no right choice, but there is a choice!"
Details coming in the Someone New newsletter, performing in the last week of the Fringe festival, live and on-stream.
abstract
Three theatre critics, all with extensive knowledge of their particular fields, wander into an auditorium and find a table and chairs waiting for them, facing the watchful audience. While the audience is a static performance compared to what they are used to, this is not totally out of the question: art is, after all, about pushing the boundaries.
The three begin to argue about what approach they should take to appreciating the performance - or leaving immediately - and begin to draw conclusions about their new step: the implication that THEY are the performance gives them an unsettling amount of responsibility and forces them to choose their destiny, herded as they are by theatrical norms and expectations.
As they ask deeper and deeper questions about their plot, their characters, and their existence itself, they begin to unravel who and what they are.
references
Jo Lusty
Practical Criticism
Ryan O'Connor
Critical Criticism
Gracie Rogers
Contemporary Criticism