What happens when an audience participation-phobe makes a show all about audience participation? Or should I be asking: what happens when a comic famed for his ideas runs out of them? Both of these dynamics are self-consciously at play in Daniel Kitson’s Collaborator. Billed as a perpetual work in progress, it is now on its 16th staging, which Kitson is “pretty sure” will be its last, at least in the UK.
The show is performed in the round, with the audience given scripts; more than 160 of them (on this occasion) get speaking parts. Kitson picked up the idea, he says, at someone else’s show on the Edinburgh fringe – and sure enough this type of theatre, franchising roles out to its audience, is popular. But Kitson is a reluctant adopter: “I really hate this sort of thing.” To him, audience participation is just “comedic discomfort”, the “commercialisation of schadenfreude” that steeps onlookers “up to their nuts in the complicity of the bystander”. Ouch. His own dabble in the activity is about drawing our attention, claims the script, to the “problematic power dynamics” inherent in interactive performance.
That’s the conceit – but it’s far more playful, ridiculous indeed, on stage than it reads on the page. That’s partly because Kitson hams it up and skips around daftly in the main role of “Daniel Kitson”, explicating, instructing and arguing with his crowd. It’s also because half of the performance is undertaken by audience members, whose every possible question, anxiety or mis-step Kitson has anticipated in the script itself. This is meta-theatre squared, a silly/tricksy text manipulating its speakers like marionettes, forever commenting on its cleverness and undermining the pretence to spontaneity. “Some of you will only say one word in the whole show,” says Kitson. “Really?” responds someone from the crowd.
It’s great fun, which is just as well, because the promised dramatic developments, the play we’re forever about to start once the housekeeping’s out of the way – well, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, it doesn’t materialise. The audience interaction, the deconstruction of it, and the dialogues that ensue about where this exercise fits into Kitson’s canon – that’s the show, all carried off with antic delight and pretend vainglory by our host. Is it more than a gimmick, asks his chief antagonist, “Keith”, spiritedly played by a fellow in the front row. Yes it is, I’d say – if not perhaps by a very big margin.
It’s an exercise not so much in whether audience participation can ever be equitable but in what such equity might look like if autocratically engineered. Is it a new departure for Kitson, as – with mounting frustration – he feigns to claim? Well, he himself points out the similarities to his 2015 show Polyphony, of which Lyn Gardner wrote “in some ways it’s like hearing all the voices – both doubting and consoling – an artist has in their head when they are making a show”. Which is very much the case again here.
But few such internal monologues, I imagine, are as funny as Kitson’s. And once again it’s a pleasure to share in it here, fragmented between 160 audience members, in a play-that-isn’t-a-play bent on fostering in all of us a scepticism of audience participation as deep-seated as Kitson’s own.
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Collaborator – A Work in Progress by Daniel Kitson is at the Albany, London, until 3 August