Empire
Theatre of Decay @ some dingy backstreet in Kent Town
8:00pm, Fri 3 Mar 2006
Score: 9
We meet the Theatre of Decay crew outside the main FringeTix office, replete in their red bandanas. Once the sell-out crowd of 12 (!) was assembled, they led us all on a dark, quiet, expectant stroll across the parklands to some dark, barely lit side-street in Kent Town. The performance, they explained, takes place in a car; two actors in the front, three audience in the back. Four different cars, four different directors, eight different actors.
We get split into groups of three and taken to our cars. We, apparently, had one of the “better” cars, but it was still tight squeeze in the back seat for a fatty like me and my two companions. In the driver’s seat, a man nervously waiting for something. The other actor, we surmised. And so we were waiting too. The tension in the car grew.
Cars occasionally pass us down this quiet back-street. Suddenly, the other man – his step-brother- is in the car with us, and the more overt aspect of the performance begins. It’s tense, it’s moody, it’s rife with racism, tolerance, hatred, compassion, understanding… the two brothers cover a wide range of themes and issues. When the end comes, it’s sudden – and we’re bewildered. It’s difficult to know what to do – the men remain in character, we’re imposing on their world. I wanted to thank them for the performance, but it didn’t feel appropriate. Or even safe to do so, such was the atmosphere in the car.
It’s painful, it’s provoking, it’s powerful – and the fact that there’s a different interpretation of the piece in each of the four cars is compelling. Oh, to have had the opportunity to have seen this again.
(In chatting with my guide for the evening, I learnt that one of the producers spent ages scouting the location of this dim street. And Theatre of Decay’s other work, Empire, has a similar directorial twist – it’s performed entirely in a dark room. If only I’d managed to sneak that in, too…)
Further note: I bumped into Rod Lewis (of ATG) and he mentioned that the four different interpretations were, due to different directorial inclinations, of substantially different lengths. Mine (car 2?) ran for a plump 45 minutes; his (the car with two female actors) was a more svelte 25 minutes.