Best Before

I love the idea of Rimini Protokoll, the German theatre company who have dispensed almost entirely with trained actors and use, instead, experts: people who talk about their own expertise, whether that’s as a journalist, lorry driver, call centre operator. Their shows strive to remove the fiction from theatricality, perhaps, in part, to see what irreducible fictionality inhabits the basic relations of theatrical production. They are intrigued by exploring how interesting it is just having knowledgeable people telling you what they know, the interplay between objective knowledge and subjective experience, the sense that the acquiring of knowledge and understanding is part of a life lived, variously and not without affect, desire and defeat.

The subject and form of Best Before is the virtual world: computer gaming, online avatars, Second Life, the Sims. The five main people on stage are a computer programmer, a game tester, a guy who works judging what age rating to give computer games, a flagger (that is, a woman who redirects traffic around construction works - in her case, near the Vancouver offices in which the other two work) and a mysterious cowboy figure who plays country-folk guitar through most of the show. After about fifteen minutes we are introduced to the game. Each of us has a games controller and a small onscreen avatar, like a squidgy, two-colour pebble. We make some decisions about our avatars - whether they study or play games, whether they are militaristic or pacifist, their attitudes to drugs and immigration - and slowly we build up a personality with which we face obstacles, seize opportunities, and slowly grow through life from birth to age 100. This game is interspersed with personal recollections and sarcastic commentary from the experts on stage, who compare our responses with those in other cities where this show has toured.

It’s not just trained actors that Rimini Protokoll seek to do without; obviously, they have no need for the playwright. This interests me, in part because playwrights have been shedding parts of the playwriting role; using found text, leaving gaps for collaborators to finish the play, and so on. It’s a process that brings somewhat experimental writers like Crimp, Ravenhill, Kane and Stephens together with Verbatim theatre and Rimini Protokoll’s brand of ‘Theater der Zeit’. Despite rumour, playwrights aren’t the only people who handle dramaturgy (though I think playwrights are, or should be, very good at that), so I watched this, somewhat perversely, looking at the dramaturgy of the event.

What do I mean by dramaturgy? Heck, not sure. I think I mean a satisfying design and organisation of a theatrical experience through time. So it’s not about the acting as such, or stage design; it’s about narrative in its broadest sense. But of course acting and stage design will sometimes contribute to the temporal experience. I’m not laying down the law here.

The shape is given by the journey of a life - or rather of all our virtual lives as played out on screen. And the work of the show is to allow us to invest emotionally in the blobs on screen. This is does sneakily but effectively through mapping the questions into the conventional sequence of a life (drugs and sex early on, political commitments, career, then family and home, old age and death). I watched the show with Lilla, my lovely wife, who comically took the whole thing very seriously (was very shocked when I decided my avatar wanted to take heroin; was very anxious that we should ‘bond’ as soon as possible and made it very clear that a divorce would not go down well). As a result, I got that feedback where I wasn’t just thinking about myself but found myself moved to watch me and Lilla growing old together, knowing that Lilla beside me was thinking about that too, feeding imaginatively, sympathetically and associatively off one another’s feelings.

One of the things that happens in other shows by Rimini Protokoll that they have talked about is that the experts become actors. That is, they start being interesting because they are awkward and unvarnished, but through dint of repetition and, to some measure, the lure of performance, they start to sharpen up their act - stories get polished, jokes get refined, they start to develop a rapport with the audience. In this show, it was Duff, the games tester, who was most ‘guilty’ of that. (I say guilty, but RP’s attitude is that watching that happen is as interesting as stage 1.) He had developed a series of sardonic put-downs, which were actually a little harsh for the occasion and just every so often a little uncomfortable (he outed the computer programmer as an advocate of the death penalty, oddly, and the moment froze awkwardly on stage. The flagger was nicely ungainly and straightforward in her performance; the programmer had a teutonic lack of affect, which worked. The age-rater (must be a better term) was more confident but was unflashily so.

What we were confronted with in the very rudimentary nature of the screen world was something about our ability to invest very primitive imagery with significance and emotion. As such it stimulated a good deal of thinking about the nature of our mutual engagements on the virtual world. This was paralleled with the stories of the experts, discussing, for example, their experiences of politics, or life-changing decisions which sat alongside their more inaccessible computer expertise.

Quite honestly, as a piece of performance, I felt the device had diminishing returns. The old age period was quite moving, but that was almost two hours later, and we’d sat through quite a lot of more prosaic decisions. The use of the game-controller handset was a novelty and I couldn’t really feel it was anything more than that. As such, in narrative terms, it lagged quite a bit in the middle, and by the time the moving bit happened at the end, I was ready to go. This perhaps may be a bit like life.

I’m yet to experience this directly interactive theatre in a way that makes me feel I’ve seen the future or would want to go back. (There’s a one-to-one theatre season at BAC at the moment which I want to try. Basically, though, this kind of thing makes me feel uncomfortable and I’m not sure I should feel bad about that.) I suppose I still feel that all theatre is interactive - or can be - and this kind of novelty has picked on the most superficial aspects of that potential. That’s not to condemn this show which I enjoyed and never wanted to walk out of, but I think I’ve seen more interesting work by Rimini and the project of rediscovering theatre’s power to engage its audience is not really to be found here.