Stage Struck

We, the audience, are centre stage, says PETER CRAWLEY

‘YOU’RE only ever as good as your audience,” says an actor taking an ostentatious bow, in a well-worn theatre joke. “And tonight, darlings, you were magnificent!”

It’s a revealing gag. Audiences exist somewhere between a projection and a prayer. The performer plays to them, the director tries to anticipate them and the marketer stalks them, yet they remain as unknowable as they are essential.

One pronounced trend at this year’s Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival has been to put the spectator centre stage (the phrase “you, the audience” runs through the programme like a mantra).

The trilogy from Belgium's Ontroerend Goed turned its audience into performers for Internal, directors of their own experience in A Game of You and, in a certain sense, the stage itself for the mind games and sensory stimulation of The Smile Off Your Face.

The strand of Polish works made different efforts to invoke its audience, but where the disorienting opening conceit of the lustrous T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. (beginning with a staged Q&A) was dependent on plants, an early, antagonistic QA conducted by the performers of Factory 2was not.

Q: “When are you going to start performing?”

A: “What the fuck do you think we’re doing now?”

Are audiences getting what they want? The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane, Pan Pan's wild and heady riff on Hamlet, assigned its audience the role of casting director, each night electing an actor to play the prince.

Whether it made any material difference is hard to say, but when the production incorporated text, context, process, and even its own academic analysis into the staging, you might have wondered what was left for an audience to do.

Like much theatre at this year’s festival, performance emulated a user-defined experience, but the interpretive role of the audience – the strongest, least conspicuous element of participation – seemed underplayed.

By the time Tim Crouch's The Authorhad turned the audience into its set design (a conceptual gambit in which two seating banks faced each other in tense confrontation) the audience might have been forgiven for feeling sick of the sight of itself. But The Authoris all about the spectator (its performers are audience plants), asking uneasy questions of complicity in the manufacture of horror, both on and off the stage.

Comforted, exploited, canvassed, distrusted and rewarded – the audience was certainly rarely left in the dark, as though that clichéd Irish- European tussle between writer- or director-centred theatre had called a truce and devolved power to you, the third party. Whatever, and however long the trend lasts, you were the star of the show at this year’s festival.

And darlings, you were magnificent.