Belgian provocateurs Ontroerend Goed may want to talk about us in their latest production, Audience, which has just reached London's Soho theatre, but we're more interested in talking about them. The company have a knack of prising open the cracks in the performer-audience relationship. In the past, they've bound and gagged us, seduced and betrayed us and turned us on one other. Following her G2 feature earlier this year, Maddy Costa has produced an extended profile of them on her blog. Paradoxically, Costa's very inability to pin this "slippery bunch" down is what makes the portrait so acute.
More than any other company in the world, Ontroerend Goed know just how to get under our skin. It may come as a surprise, then, that online responses to Audience lack the moral outrage and mortal offence with which some mainstream media outlets greeted the production in Edinburgh. Instead, there's real level-headed, nuanced debate, mostly about the infamous "bullying" sequence, in which a member of the audience is subject to what seems genuinely like harassment. As Diana Damian tweeted following this weekend's panel discussion at the Soho theatre: "It seems the critics are getting moral, whilst the audience are actually discussing the show." A recording of that panel discussion can be found at Theatre Voice.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times have held one of their own, which includes a representative of the company, performer Matthieu Sys, who stresses that "theatre is a safe place to do unsafe things." That paradox is neatly summed up by Laura Tosney, who writes: "I felt genuinely paralysed. On the one hand, you're burning up with indignation; what he's saying isn't 'okay'. But then you are the audience, you're trapped in these self-styled codes of conduct." In fact, as "Webcowgirl" points out, having apparently led a Spartacus-style rebellion, the company themselves are equally vulnerable to paralysis. The "rules of theatre" leave them confined to the script and "given rams when expecting lambs, Ontroerend Goed [have] to carry on trying to show how we were members of a unified, single-minded, easily controlled organism."
Actually, I wonder if OGs' point isn't proven as much through collective rebellion as compliance. Either way, we're still prone to manipulation (both as prompt and afterwards) and still performing a response. It's a point Damian makes in her review: "We're being filmed. And as we build a relationship with the camera – the protagonist, storyteller of this show – we enter in a conceit." For her, Audience "simulates response, imbricates thoughts and forces responsibility." (Interestingly, both she and Spoonfed's Naima Khan feel the piece could have gone further.)
Personally, I don't think responsibility comes into it. Yes, Audience forces choice – whatever we do, we consciously choose – but it's a false choice. Because Ontroerend Goed can point to the situation's "reality" and its "fiction", they can ridicule our every act. We have no: "right" option; we're damned if we do and damned if we don't; heads they win, tails we lose. We only make a meaningful impact by walking out or stopping the show entirely, which strikes me as rather like holding suicide to be the only meaningful act in life.
Nick730 also believes OG are "trying to have their cake and eat it," and the piece is, to use Costa's term, slippery in the extreme. It plays fast and loose with the rules of theatre; simultaneously dismissing them and relying on them, but never setting out any of its own. That's probably problematic, but it's precisely what makes Audience such a talking point.
