This was for me, one of the most engaging and rewarding pieces of theatre I have seen for a very long time.
I found it startlingly and brilliantly unsafe. A pretend lecture on Shakespeare became an edge of your seat experience. What was being asked of me as audience member? Am I suppose to chime in? Am I supposed to respond? The apparent plant, yes. But other audience members fell under the spell and responded as well. Were they ruining it? Were they making it better?
“We need to stop asking rhetorical questions in the theatre”, the character of June tells us. And with a single line brings the whole show into perfect clarity. This is not a performance. This is not a lecture. This is now. This is a moment. And for the first time in a very long time, I felt that I (the audience) was part of that moment. Trying to capture a theatre that we have lost. Memories that are no longer our own. Rules and guidelines have replaced what once was skill and human instinct. We have become creators of oh-so-clever recitals. What Flloyd has captured is the importance of that all pervading, all-powerful question that (at least for me) all great theatre is based on – “What Happens Next”?
Bravo.
Matthew Ryan
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