Offline

Camden People's Theatre

Dolan Cummings

Uninvited Guests cleverly exploit the awkward sense of expectation as the audience take their seats. They stand nervously, looking about, avoiding eye contact, saying nothing, as if genuinely out of place. But this goes on a little too long - it is soon clear that the awkwardness is a performance. The actors are in character.

Just who those characters are is a moot point. Offline is a series of sexual confessions taken from the internet, and read by three actors, with a fourth loitering and providing occasional music on tape. (I don't know what actors from Bristol wear in their own time, but along with the old-fashioned amps and tape deck on the beige carpet, their slightly retro outfits contribute to an almost Sixties sci-fi atmosphere.)

The premise is the weirdness of having words meant to be read online spoken live instead. This could be simply cringe-making: in a lesser production the actors might have asked members of the audience to read out embarrassing passages. Please, no. By actually performing the text, though, by sounding like they mean it, Uninvited Guests explore the internet's confessional culture in more depth. Paradoxically, this is a show about people struggling to assert themselves in a desperately shallow reality.

The confessions Uninvited Guests have taken from the net sound like cries for attention. On one level, this is simple exhibitionism. On another, the confessions dramatise the belief that because sex is taboo, sexual secrets must reveal something profound about a person. By talking about sex, you reveal 'the real you'. The authors of these confessions share their intimate banalities with anybody who will read them, in the hope of eliciting some kind of response: shock, pity, empathy. It probably doesn't matter.

Towards the end of the performance, the characters begin to talk over one another, and seem increasingly annoyed by the others. What is the point of confessing if nobody is listening? Finally two of the characters are reduced to physically wrestling, hurling each other about the stage in a primal struggle for recognition... Wait a minute. Is this a charmingly literal rendition of Hegel's master-slave dialectic?

The gratuitously wordy programme notes suggest that Uninvited Guests are indeed familiar with Hegel or more likely his modern followers: Axel Honneth perhaps; certainly there is a whiff of Slavoj Zizek about these notes ('hitherto impossibly self-sufficent auto-expression', anyone?). But perhaps they have simply captured the aspect of contemporary reality that gives this sort of theory such resonance. The performance itself is unpretentious, even pedestrian at times. But that is in keeping with the whole idea of the piece.

At one point, a character works systematically through the audience, telling each person that he loves them. Except that he uses apparently improvised names (I was Jack). It demonstrates an important point: face to face does not always mean person to person. And when two characters get into a frenzy of celebrity-sex fantasies, we are reminded that obsession tells us more about the obsessed that the object of obsession. There is no meaningful connection between the two, and none between the authors of such fantasies and their readers.

Consequently, there is no meaningful connection between the actors and the audience. Offline is non-penetrative theatre. It sounds like a terrible indictment, but it is the beauty as well as the horror of the piece. Because it is true. Increasingly people's interactions are mediated, frustrated and overformalised not only by technology but by a variety of institutions; political, bureaucratic and therapeutic. The struggle for recognition is never resolved, only institutionalised.

Theatre is the perfect medium through which to explore this issue, but it is both brave and ambitious of Uninvited Guests to take it on, because it takes us to the very limit of what theatre can do.

Now touring: see the Uninvited Guests website.