The creators of a new play began to think about how much of it we should see. Arminta Wallace found the result intriguing
Theatre. You go and sit in a darkened room in rows of seats with people on either side of you and things happen, in front of you and often above you, on a stage. Right? Wrong. "I like going and sitting in the dark and watching a play. It's very nice. It's great. But it's only one way of doing it." For the past seven years the writer Michelle Read, the director Tara Derrington and the actor Natalie Stringer have been exploring other ways of doing it.
Theatre. You walk into a house on Gardiner Street in central Dublin. You chat with the people there. Belatedly you realise that some of them are actors, that the play has started and that you are in the middle of it. That was a piece called Living Space, which they created in 2001 - "a comedy, very promenade-like," says Read. Another piece, Play About My Dad, seated the audience in a square, with the actor working around the edges. "It was about memory and nostalgia, about being in the middle of something. And then we got interested in the idea of, well, where do you see something from in the theatre, and how much do you really see?"
The trio, known as ReadCo, are about to open their latest creation, The Other Side, at Project arts centre. You enter the theatre to find that both stage and auditorium have been split in two by a wall that runs down the centre.
You are invited to choose. Would you like to sit on this side of the wall or that side? If you have come to the theatre with a friend, would you like to sit together or on different sides? There is no interval and no switching of sides, so what you see of The Other Side is what you get. Or maybe not. You will, after all, be able to hear what's going on on the other side of the wall and the other audience's reaction to it. And you can, if you want to, find somebody from that other audience at the end and ask them about what they saw.
"It's not a gimmick," says Read. "And it's not designed to get people to come back and see the play again. The whole point is that it will be a totally subjective experience. Even though some people will probably say: 'I've paid to see two actresses and want to see two actresses . . .' "
It is dizzying in theory. Eavesdropping on a rehearsal, however, it makes perfect sense. Two prison cells, somewhere in Africa. Two women, detained for their protection while riots rage outside. The actor on our side of the wall, Síle Nic Chonaonaigh, is pacing about in her socks. Her character is telling her invisible neighbour something that it is obviously difficult for her to talk about. "Fuck," comes the impressed reply from the other side. Every so often Derrington stops the action and the actors replay the scene. It is detailed, demanding work, because everything that happens on one side of the wall has to make sense on the other side as well.
One factor is the noise of the actors' footsteps; hence the socks. "Listen to this," suggests the invisible neighbour. We listen. Shuffling noises. "And this?" Shuffling noises mark two. We nod sagely. Much more authentic. "But there's more. I have four altogether. Listen . . ." Chuckles all round.
Then a hand appears round the edge of the rehearsal room "wall", which is actually a couple of sheets of heavy canvas held together by clipboard grips. "I've just realised I have a telephone in here - look." The hand waggles a battered handset at us. "I could call my boyfriend to come and get us out if you like." And Stringer steps over to our side with a grin. Lunch-time.
In performance, needless to say, the wall won't be so easily breached. It will still, as Read explains, be made of canvas, but it will be weighted to look solid. "At one of the early sessions I said: 'Can't we build a wall with breeze blocks or something?' And the designer looked at me a bit oddly and said: 'Michelle, if you're going to build a breeze-block wall you have to have a foundation. Otherwise it'll fall over and squash somebody.' I could just see the headlines: Wall kills actor."
ReadCo's interest in "audience placement" derives from work with improvised theatre and, in Read's case, stand-up comedy. "What really excited us," says Derrington, "was the idea of interactivity without that hideous idea of making the audience 'do' something. Everyone loathes audience participation, runs a mile from it." The process of creating their plays has therefore been one of drafts, rehearsed readings and repeated audience consultation. There's a fine line between keeping an audience on its toes and switching it off - between challenging people and embarrassing them.
"What was interesting when we did the rehearsed reading," says Stringer, "was how people chose to share the information they had at the end. Some people desperately wanted to tell, and other people felt it was their info. It was like a secret they didn't want to share. Another thing was that there were different things the audiences laughed at. So if one audience laughed, that audience had a kind of bonding experience, knowing that the other audience doesn't know why they're laughing. But the other audience is bonding, too, because they're going, what are they laughing at?"
For a play that began almost as a mathematical exercise, a sort of theatrical theory of relativity, The Other Side comes across as a compelling piece of storytelling. Yet its author insists it could have been about anything. "It could have been about two star-crossed lovers," says Read. "It started as a kind of fairy story, set in a sort of Beckettian nowhere, but then we realised that would be incredibly frustrating for the audience, so we changed to this realistic setting. It's never clearly named. The setting indicates that it's in Africa somewhere, in one of those African countries that you're warned not to go to. But it's not about western women in Africa. It's more about them being a long way from home, in a place that's foreign to them.
"They don't know how long they're going to be there, they don't know if they've been forgotten about, they don't know if somebody has set fire to the building they're in. They're there for their own protection, but they could end up being killed in the crossfire. So these two people, who would probably never have met, end up relying on each other, confiding in each other, challenging each other. It's about a unique moment in time."
"It's about," adds Derrington, "the unknowability of things. Sometimes we choose not to know things. Sometimes it's wise not to know things. And sometimes we can't help wanting to know things - and then it changes the situation irrevocably, like Pandora's box."
What I want to know, of course, having left when the rehearsal had got three-quarters of the way through the play, is how it ends. Some chance: three articulate people turn instantly shtum. Time to go. Ultimately, though, how far can ReadCo push its experiments in audience placement? "That," says Derrington with a Cheshire cat grin, "is the exciting thing." And that's all she's saying.
The Other Side opens at Project arts centre, Dublin, on Wednesday. Linked events include a talk by Ciarán Benson, professor of psychology at UCD, on memory and identity, followed by an open discussion, on Saturday, August 16th at 3 p.m.; a pre-show talk aimed at students and theatre practitioners on August 20th at 7.15 p.m.; and a post-show discussion, chaired by Doireann Ní Bhriain, on August 27th
