At the Edinburgh festival, a woman is talking to her iPhone’s personal assistant, Siri. But this isn’t a private encounter between one woman and technology. Much like Krapp’s Last Tape could be described as a piece for two performers – an actor and a tape recorder – so Siri is a show featuring a human and a digital performer. Canadian actor Laurence Dauphinais poses the program a series of questions that, as they probe into her own background, elicit ever more existentialist-sounding replies.
When Beckett wrote Krapp in the late 1950s, he saw the potential for harnessing everyday technology in the theatre; on the Edinburgh fringe this summer, artists are doing the same thing. In the creepy Séance, which takes place in a dark container outside Summerhall, binaural sound is used in a way that undercuts all certainties and so overwhelms the senses that you find yourself doubting what you have just experienced. In Javaad Alipoor’s The Believers Are But Brothers, the whispering, insidious voices of extremism are delivered to the screen of your smartphone in a disconcerting piece of theatre that uses multimedia to evoke a shadowy world of online Isis recruiters and “alt-right” websites.
Some of the technology that is changing the audience experience has been around for years. For Stand By, written by former police officer Adam McNamara, the audience wears single-earpiece headphones just as real officers do. We’re watching a group of police officers bicker and banter in a police van ready to intervene if negotiations with an armed man holding a child hostage fail. The officers complain about cliched TV police dramas, but there are plenty of cliches here, too. While the earpiece that allows us to hear the communications between the officers and their station immerses us in the drama, the technology doesn’t feel fully integrated until the final tense moments.
The danger is that an art form that, as Shakespeare once wrote, always requires the audience “to piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” and bring imagination to bear, is flattened by the overuse of technology – whether it is limelight, trapdoors, flying devices, computer-generated effects or virtual reality. As anyone who saw a lot of experimental theatre in the 1980s and 90s knows, there were often so many video screens on stage, it was like trying to watch a piece of theatre in a room where TVs were constantly blaring. It’s not new technologies themselves that are interesting, but whether artists use them innovatively to enhance performance and storytelling.
That’s just what Curious Directive attempt in Frogman, a show in which the audience don virtual reality headsets for significant parts of the action. Meera, beautifully played by Tessa Parr, is an Australian coral scientist who was raised in a small town near the Great Barrier Reef by her father, a police diver, after the death of her mother in a car accident. Now her father is being put on trial for the murder of Ashleigh, who disappeared after stealing a boat years earlier.
The audience is cast as the jury in a murder trial: we put on VR headsets (a bit clunky) for crucial parts of the evidence that take us back 20 years to the underwater search for Ashleigh, and to Meera’s childhood bedroom during the summer when she disappeared. Why did 11-year-old Meera not disclose the extent of her relationship with Ashleigh? What other secrets are lurking amid the coral?
The transitions from live action to VR aren’t smooth, and the screens can be hard on the eyes even as they let you explore Meera’s bedroom in detail and delight in the underwater coral sequences. The technology makes for a stop-start quality, which is odd for a company and director – Jack Lowe – celebrated for delivering shows of exquisite fluidity. But it’s good to see them embracing the possibilities of VR; at its wistful best, Frogman is an affecting and ambiguous study of childhood friendships, guilt, knowledge and different kinds of mothering.
Jane Doe, the story of a young woman who is sexually assaulted at a party, is nowhere near as innovative as either Frogman or The Believers Are But Brothers. It features filmed segments and extracts from defendants’ text messages are projected on screen, but its main idea is to create a temporary online community for the audience that allows us to anonymously message our responses and express feelings at crucial moments. It understands the value of using technology as a safe space so that those watching difficult material can respond immediately, anonymously and safely.
The show uses material from trial transcripts and filmed interviews with young women about their experiences of rape and sexual harassment in a measured, responsible way. If the use of technology adds nothing to the storytelling, it offers such a useful space for debate that it would be good to see this New Zealand production rolled out in classrooms across the globe.
- Siri is at Canada Hub @ King’s Hall until 27 August; Seance is at Summerhall until 26 August 26; The Believers Are But Brothers is at Summerhall until 26 August; Stand By is at Army @ the Fringe until 26 August; Frogman is at Traverse @ Codebase until 27 August; Jane Doe is at Assembly George Square until 28 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.