Alex Ferguson
posted 21 July 2006

Jonathan Kay is a fool, but more in the sense that he wears a funny hat than in the pejorative sense favoured by Mr T. Here is a list of some of the things that happened during his show: 

• A Dutch notcouple kissed on stage. Apparently they were just friends, but the sexual tension was palpable. And mostly one way. Which made it all the funnier.
• Kay asked if he could answer a phone that went off in the front row. Then he led a conversation between the audience and Chris, who was phoning to find out if the show had started. Chris was encouraged to strip while the audience blasted out a demented version of a burlesque striptease number. Apparently he did. He was rewarded with a standing ovation, which is probably not something he's had down the phone before.
• Two members of the audience got topless, not wishing to be outdone by an absent telephonist.
• The audience and Kay swapped places, with Kay conducting them as a makeshift mime-orchestra of drums, violins and triangles. Somehow, the sound ended up being rather beautiful.
• I laughed so hard I farted. This is actually true. This prompted Kay to elicit a bizarre chorus of people making fart noises with their armpits, followed by an audience member demonstrating the impressive skill of making a fart sound with his bare back against a wooden floor.
• A woman who volunteered the information that clenching your buttocks a hundred times a day stops your bottom from getting saggy demonstrated the clench for the audience. Her bottom, like the earlier telephone stripper, was rewarded with a standing ovation.
• Kay narrowly failed to arrange a time when the audience could all meet up in a park, bringing as many of their friends as possible, and fall over, the aim being, eventually, to bring a thousand people together, just to do something, because, well, because. When logistics proved the downfall of this ambitious project, the audience all agreed to fall over at 12 the next day, wherever they were, in order to enjoy the knowledge that others would be doing likewise.
• In the interval, the audience serenaded two men in the bar with a rendition of 'Hard Day's Night', performed 'Summertime' (including a remarkable trumpet solo, made all the more remarkable by the lack of an actual trumpet) for passersby, and then danced into the nearby green to belt out 'All You Need Is Love' for the amusement/bemusement of a couple of men having a sneaky drink and smoke.

Now, audience participation isn't normally very good. Normally the cringeworthiness of a show increases exponentially as the level of audience participation increases (C=2^AP) whether the variety of cringe is middle aged anti-music by someone like Phil Collins in which the onlooker is encouraged to turn backing singer, or Cutting-Edge Radical Theatre in which the onlooker is encouraged to engage actively with the performance by talking to it, much to their own embarrassment, rather than, for example, enjoying it. In general, it's best to avoid performances in which the publicity states anything along the lines of 'NitroMatrix Theatre Company push at the boundaries of performance, smashing the fourth wall with fierce art, in their new show about the Iraq War/a paedophile/a futuristic dystopia/custard'.

But what's so remarkable about Kay's relationship with the audience, beyond the fact that his deranged, effortless charisma means they would do almost anything for him, is that it is utterly unthreatening and utterly generous. What should and elsewhere would provoke mortification (a phone going off in the front row, an embarrassingly audible fart, the playing out of an ongoing flirtation on stage) here is an opportunity for Kay to lead us into communal flights of joy. Whilst individuals may provide the starting point for humour, they are never ridiculed, always inflated rather than belittled. Whilst they may be asked to come onstage and do things which are, frankly, ridiculous, or even deeply personal, they are never pushed to anywhere they might feel uncomfortable. Rather, they become the focus of the audience's collective elation and delirium, consistently rewarded with applause and laughter. Everyone's a subject, no one is ever an object, to crowbar the feeling into a trite grammatical construct.

'I don't want to make an enemy', he tells us in a voice that suggests it's been contrived in such a way that you shouldn't be quite sure whether or not you're supposed to take anything it says seriously, 'There are friends, and people who are not yet friends. But you have to make an enemy.' When he says enemy, it sounds a bit like enema, which is funny, but it shouldn't detract from the serious point. In a world where we're alienated from our work, our neighbours, ourselves while our media and politicians mint a currency of fear, Jonathan Kay works magic because he turns strangers into friends. An example: my companion and I were a pound short for a round at the interval, and a fellow audience member, a stranger, happily and voluntarily contributed it. A small act, perhaps, but a good one, and can you imagine that happening at the interval of Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National?

It's not too often you see something so determined to be a force for unadulterated good. The performance elicits, and then rides an unstoppable collective goodwill which is, sadly, all too rare (Mark Watson's epic durational stand-up shows, lasting in excess of 24 hours, are perhaps the closest equivalent). Kay's project could be seen by the pretentious (ie. me) as an attempt to transform the world from the bottom up - he explains his desire to find the words that you could whisper to someone else who would whisper them to someone else who would whisper them to someone else spreading a kind of viral joy. But until the fool's revolution that this would create, then this two hours that happily bleeds into the next day and, hopefully the next and the next, will just have to do. Create or be Created could be seen as a threat, but it's also a choice, and one which this show empowers the audience to make. Spread the word: Jonathan Kay is a Very Good Thing.

Single performance. See Jonathan Kay's website for future plans.