Some Dumb Play, currently playing at Metro Arts, Brisbane as part of their Allies Program, experiments with the device of allowing the audience to vote on how subsequent scenes should be played. While it may be an experiment for this particular company, it is certainly not the first time it has been tried. Man Catches Fish, from US company Across The Pond (Seattle) does something similar, asking the audience to vote on whether each character lives or dies, and then enacting the winning scenarios. It is also not too far from the Keith Johnstone process that became Theatre Sports.
The difference here is that the audience votes by means of their mobile phones, connected up to the company’s intranet via wi-fi.
It starts off well enough, with enthusiasm from the participants carrying the day. The scene changes involve lots of rushing around choosing props and costumes, and pretending to be annoyed when the vote goes somewhere else. From an audience perspective, watching the meters bob up and down on the screen is more entertaining than sitting through a blackout.
Two narratives run parallel throughout, one a sloppily written story of a cop searching for the man whose blood type matches his seriously injured partner. The other concerns the actors clumsily enacting the cliché of disagreeing about whether they want to play according to the vote, or not.
The journey across deserts or through storms, fast or slow action, Italian mobster or musical comedy (for example) involves some amusing uses of props, while the unhappy-actors-refusing-to-work-with-each-other scenario rapidly disintegrates any sense of inner logic this piece may have had, and descends into a mishmash of amateurish acting and crudely disconnected ideas.
The nudity and bad language are shocking only inasmuch as the writer/director Nathan Sibthorpe seems to think being gratuitously shocking is an end in itself. The bad acting is shocking, because these are some of the finer crop of young actors Brisbane has produced lately.
Some Dumb Play does not herald an innovative approach to theatre making. It reveals instead a deep lack of respect for the intelligence of the audience, and a lack of insight into the kind of skill necessary to do something deliberately badly, effectively enough to communicate what it is you intended to satirize in the first place – if satire was, indeed, intended.
Rating: ½ a star out of 5
Metro Arts Independents Program
Some Dumb Play
Director: Nathan Sibthorpe
Producer: Kristen Trollope
Cast: Kieran Law, Toby Martin, Claire Pearson, Bianca Zouppas
Lighting Designer: Hamish Clift
Technical Coordinator: Candice Diana
Software Developer: Ben Murray Phillips
Sound & Visual Design: Nathan Sibthorpe
JUMP Mentor & Dramaturg: Sam Haren
Sue Benner Theatre, Metro Arts, Brisbane
6 – 17 November
