Do audiences need to touch to be touched?

    Credit: Retz

Recently I went to a Q&A session between the amiable Gareth White and Josephine Machon, academics and authors respectively of Audience Participation in Theatre and Immersive Theatres. Of the many topics covered in relation to immersive theatre practice, the most interesting and lively or the one which sparked the greatest degree of debate came from a discussion about the idea of 'contracts'.

Lost Dog - It needs Horses and Home for Broken Turns, Brighton Dome.

This review was first published on The Public Reviews.

A skeleton sits on an equally emaciated stage, in the corner stands a chicken on a stick, although this one is without meat too. Three poor sisters scuffle below it, desperate to escape their poverty stricken rural backwater. Home For Broken Turns, in this respect continues to explore the Lost Dog themes of dependence, desperation and escape.

Simon Munnary - 'Flym'. The Old Market, Brighton.

This review was first published on The Public Reviews.

If like your comedy to make observations about life that have you rolling around chortling with red faced recognition then you may feel disappointed at a Simon Munnery show. If you like your comedy to include multimedia, to question the boundary between the role of performer and audience or to challenge the concept of comedy itself, then you might have felt quite alone until Simon Munnery came along.

October 2013 Theatre Picks

6th-25th October

Vibrant 2013 A Festival of Theatre Playwrights at the Finborough Theatre, London. In it's fifth year, with a great range of plays from an alternate reality musical to a new verbatim translation. See them here before they get hit the big time.

Joy!

It was Brecht, the incorrectly labelled poster boy of all things serious and educational who said that 'theatre needs no other passport than fun, but this it has got to have'. I very rarely find myself seeking out unadulterated fun or joy at the theatre. In this cynical, recession dipped world, joy feels a bit naive and irrelevant or, in the hands of the middle classes, a bit smug, much like a Richard Curtis film.