Image: Martin Figura
Chris Thorpe and Hannah Jane Walker engage in a highly participatory brand of theatre. Thorpe is a theatre maker and Walker is a poet; together they create work involving a great deal of audience interaction, with poetry and storytelling woven throughout and, in the case of I Wish I was Lonely, a few potent rants. Their last show, The Oh Fuck Moment, had its audience sit around a table and share their greatest mistakes and regrets. I Wish I was Lonely, which has been put on as part of the Perth International Arts Festival this year, involves members of the audience to the extent that the show’s content is shaped and distorted by their input.
The show explores and condemns the intimate relationship we have developed with our phones. For Walker and Thorpe, it’s a relationship that has eclipsed – or at least regularly interrupts – our relationships with the people around us. Conversely, it also means that we are never truly apart from those people, and can therefore never properly miss them. We’re never alone anymore. Our relationships are being degraded by constant, shallow contact. To Walker and Thorpe, phones are eroding personal, human connection via electronic over-connection.
It’s a common and rather tired argument, but a no less salient one. A little ways into the show, audience members are asked to place their mobiles in a circle – switched on, ring tones up loud. Messages and phone calls pepper the rest of the show, interrupting tense moments, diverting focus in a clever demonstration of the show’s thought process. The noise of the internet is displayed in a expansive game of Chinese Whispers. We leave messages on each others phones all at once and fill the room with a mundane noise.
These exercises are highly demonstrative, effective, and often quite harrowing. Unfortunately, the show is also padded out with a high volume of much more didactic content and many of its points are heavily laboured. Thorpe in particular has a very aggressive performance style, which becomes quite jarring quite quickly and is in danger of turning his audience against him – or at least introducing resistance or dismissiveness towards the show’s points. It’s a cynical work, built on absolute assumptions. There’s also a lot of repetition, suggesting it might have been stronger within a shorter timeslot.
Despite its flaws, the show is effective in its professed intentions. It doesn’t necessarily call for an end to this technology – Thorpe and Walker use it themselves of course, and they do acknowledge its usefulness and relevance. Instead, they ask that we maintain a higher level of awareness towards the impact that mobile phones have on our lives; the effect on our relationships, their small but constant interruptions. Afterwards, the technology you take so much for granted may feel a little different in your pocket.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
I Wish I was Lonely
Written and performed by Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe
State Theatre Centre of WA
20-28 February
Perth International Arts Festival
www.perthfestival.com.au
13 February – 7 March 2015
