Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005

!Runners: the Return
Smirnoff Underbelly, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Dolan Cummings
posted 27 August 2005

It is natural enough that a play about therapy should involve a degree of audience participation. In contrast to last year’s Fringe’s breezy Psychotherapy Live, however, !Runners: the Return approaches both therapy and audience participation for the most part with theatrical seriousness. Ultimately, though, each aspect of the play undermines the other.

For such an interactive show, not much is left to chance: indeed, it isn’t giving too much away to say that it could be called !Ringers: the Return. We all sit in a circle around the therapist’s chair, audience and cast, all wearing name stickers so we don’t know who belongs to which. The therapist appears and begins the dreaded warm up, urging us all to join in shouting and clapping and even dancing in our seats. Not all of us, of course. But for a few exhilarating minutes, every response, from enthusiastic submission to surly refusal, is ambiguous: anything anyone says or does could be part of the show, or not.

But nearly all the actors are identifiable very soon, simply because they are overwhelmingly the sort of people who bring a show to Edinburgh: young, middle class and bright-eyed (I won't say white - if the theatre milieu shows us anything it is that black people can be posh too). For much of the show, in fact, it is as if the actors are playing themselves. This might actually be interesting, especially with the audience encouraged to do the same, except that it soon becomes clear that each actor has a scripted story. This is a pity, because the play's 'gimmick' is more interesting than its plot, and would have been worth pursuing. Indeed, it prompts certain expectations. When the cast members stand up at the end to take their applause, we ought to look around excitedly to see who was who: in fact by now, even if it hadn't been for the hint given by accents, there would be absolutely no doubt.

Only two actors very clearly are playing scripted parts all along, however. Their conspicuousness isn't the fault of those actors themselves, though: the problem is that their characters don't belong to the milieu. One in particular is a middle class caricature of the foul-mouthed, racist 'chav', made no more believable by a clunking expulcatory backstory; in an unambiguously fictional context, the actor's put-on accent might be perfectly acceptable, but here it jars terribly, especially at the play's disastrous climax.

The plot means that even when audience members do join in, the actors are unable to take advantage, and quickly just get on with the play. If we start off uncertain about how much freedom we have to join in and shape the performance, by the latter half of the play it is clear that anything we say is a side show: these guys have lines to deliver, dramatic secrets to reveal, and we’d better not mess it up for them (even if they do continue to cause us gratuitous embarrassment).

The play has its moments. That early, awful bout of audience involvement seems much cleverer later on when the story has unfolded a bit. But if playwright Cristina Teixera is making a comment on therapy, perhaps a plea for a gentler, more humble approach on the part of therapists, it is lost amid the gimmickry, and if she really wants to experiment with audience involvement, she will have to give her actors, and her audience, more room for manoeuvre.