Audience - Ontroerend Goed

Intimacy and confrontation are the watchwords of Edinburgh fringe favourites, Ontroerend Goed, whose Internal, Teenage Riot and The Smile Off Your Face have been hits in recent years.

The Belgian company's ethos doesn't merely fit the current trend of participatory theatre – this year the gloves are off. You, the audience, are the performance. The actors – Maria Dafrenos, Joeri Smet, Matthieu Sys and Tiemen Van Haver – are the manipulators, guiding the audience through their prearranged series of events.
The result is not so much a narrative, but a sequence of responses that are more – or less – Pavlovian, according to the audience's susceptibility. In the opening sequence, an on-stage video camera sends images of the audience to a screen behind it. As the camera pans across the faces of the people, the actors speak the thoughts that might be going through the audience members' heads.
The result, as anyone versed in the arts of mind-reading would predict, is that the faces on screen grow to reflect the thoughts which are being ascribed to them. Whether it is the person who changes or the viewer who sees what they want to see, the manipulation works.
So far, so intimate. Confrontation quickly follows, demanding that the audience take a moral stand – and pushing the envelope of that confrontation until they do. That over, everyone is standing up, dancing and mouthing lyrics, until images of the real manipulators, the leaders, dictators and arch-creators of the spectacle, are run in a sobering finale.
In comparison to the other participatory offerings this year, Audience feels uncomfortably crude. Where productions like Dance Marathon insinuates its audience into the performance so that they help create their own appreciation of it, Audience throws a bundle of emotional triggers at its audience, making them the performance by telling them that they are.
It also seems, at least on the surface, to be derivative old hat. Comedians have been abusing their audiences for years, picking on individuals to make a point to the collective whole. Mind-readers don't just force responses any more, they deconstruct their tricks as they do so for the pleasure of their own audiences.
Around Edinburgh's bars, debate on Audience centres on the abuse by its cast of their audience. It would destroy the effectiveness of that element of the production to detail it, but such criticisms miss the point of the production completely. It might be at the climax of the show, but it isn't what it is about. If it were, then Ontroerend Goed – who has happily taken its audiences into far more psychologically confrontational spaces – would have made the passage a lot more dangerous.
The aim of the whole production is, rather, to take the audience outside the confines of society and show them the spectacle that it is. Far from being derivative, the techniques of comedy and suggestion are tools to show the audience as complicit in the activities of those who seek to dominate the show on their behalf. As for the audience, so for society.
Except that with such a focus on the confrontational element of the show, the effectiveness of the later manipulation of the images of the audience – so they appear to be the willing supporters of the actors – becomes diluted and fails to have its potential impact. While the final montage of dictators does not have enough context to raise it above the banal.