Theatre

I don’t think I’ll come out of any other Edinburgh show this year having been tempted to kiss a beautiful 23-year-old boy who is not in any way my husband – but ‘Internal’, from singular Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed, is one of a kind. This unexpected and potentially unsettling piece of theatre plays on experiences like speed dating or group therapy, which are short-cuts to intimacy. Six audience members meet six performers: one-to-one, then altogether in a group. You don’t know who you’re going to get – and neither do they. And, as with dating or therapy, it might be exhilarating, excruciating or even a mini-epiphany.
 
I don’t want to give too much away about the show: the element of surprise is crucial, especially with us guarded Brits. Your pleasure depends, I think, on how much you instinctively trust your partner. In a piece which asks for openness and honesty from its participants, the performers have the advantage of knowing the steps to the dance already: they are immaculate, tall, groomed and poised in eveningwear; we, on the other hand, are a sweaty, disparate and slightly bewildered bunch who’ve just rolled in from the street. I left feeling thrilled, as if I’d been given an unexpectedly lovely gift: undivided attention, a little piece of fantasy. Others left feeling enraged or deeply uncomfortable with these benevolent vampires. One man told an actress that what she was doing was essentially prostitution.
 
It wasn’t, but there’s no denying that, by getting very close to you, the performers get under the skin of some troubling questions. How authentic are your feelings if you’re paying for the fiction which induces them? To what extent is your identity a performance? Where do you draw the line? This is a piece of theatre which asks you to find things inside yourself and make them into a story which is witnessed, an aesthetic experience which you then try to make sense of. Like all good theatre, it makes something internal, external. But unlike most pieces of theatre, this is one where the most complete and unexpected story is the one seen by the performers.

'Internal' is presented by the Traverse Theatre and plays at the Mercure Point Hotel, Bread St, Edinburgh.