Brilliant Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed caused controversy at Edinburgh with this show which deconstructs the audience by filming us, playing with us, and making us their subject. It’s a strong concept with some lovely moments: at the start, a roving live film of our closely packed bodies has a soft-focus tenderness – especially when it happens upon hands that are holding each other.
But the gentle trusting mood is soon broken when the lead actor on stage zooms the camera on a young, attractive girl in the audience, whom he calls ‘Fuckface’. He insults her, telling us that he’ll only stop if she spreads her legs – or if someone takes her place. Some of us protest: others watch in silence, afraid of being picked on.
What you do and how you feel in this and other challenging moments will define what ‘Audience’ is for you. For me, ‘Audience’ wasn’t big, open or quite clever enough to justify its uncomfortable focus. Tellingly, in a show whose gender balance is already skewed by the fact that four of the performers are male, when a man in the Soho audience offered to spread his legs instead, the lead performer failed to engage with him. The audience has a choice, but only within set paramaters.
The company, who come with their faces and strategies prepared, have too much power compared to the people. That is in part the point. In a year that saw riots in London and the Arab Spring, and the growth of Twitter, crowds have been valorised as a source of power or meaning.
A witty final montage – in which uplifting music plays over footage of protesting crowds – also exposes their triviality; the unevenness of consensus; the manipulability and schematic behaviour of the group. By filming our faces and superimposing their voiced-over thoughts, the makers are also exposing how, in a media-saturated life, thoughts that aren’t our own stream through our minds.
It’s discomfiting and stimulating. But it would have been better and less arrogant if the performers had asked us more and showed us less.