Arena Dramaturgy: John Robertson @ Edfringe 2016

John Robertson: Arena Spectacular!

The Stand Comedy Club 2

Aug 4-14, 16-28 3.40pm

Dirty jokes! Nice suit! Sit near the front! It’s an arena show… in a 45-seater. In his sixth year at the Fringe, the Australian wild man and insult comic unleashes 60 minutes of whatever comes into his head. Get ready for a party, and everyone’s the pinata.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

I was getting heckled in a large theatre (at Wai-Con, the best anime convention in Australia), and I suddenly had the desire to torture my audience with memories of how hard and unforgiving videogames from the 80s were! It’s a strange desire, but it blossomed into an interactive improvisation that lasted 40 minutes! Why not workshop your ideas with 3,000 people? It turns out fine!

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

Well, after we were decommissioned from the army, we became soldiers of fortune. Hannibal was the one who brought the group together - our muscle B.A Baracus, our seducer, Face and me, “Howlin’ Mad” Murdoch. If you have a problem, and you know where to find us, we are the A-Team.  

Nah, I married my wife. And my old next-door neighbor Jon Hayward is a tech wizard.

How did you become interested in making performance?

Well, my father was an Anglican priest. He had the robes, and THE VOICE and the pulpit and was maybe the last non-zealot priest I’ve known to command a huge audience. A popular preacher is incredibly good fun to watch. Apparently I used to dress in a bedsheet and “do communion” when I was a kid.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

The seat-of-the-pants improv definitely was. The technical side is profoundly atypical of me, though it’s now something I’ve become associated with.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

Fear and elation, nostalgia and recognition, joy and community, then more fucking fear.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Well, we worked the show until its rhythms flow through me naturally – The Dark Room was originally an angry taskmaster, now he skews playful, like a sadistic clown uncle. Covered with spikes and body armour.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition? 
Heh! My drama teacher told me I’d invent my own method of theatre, so I did. This’ll be The Dark Room’s fifth Fringe (its world premiere was at EdFringe 2012) and it’s still the world’s only live-action videogame. Maybe there’s shades of Theatre of Cruelty in there, and critics have said it’s reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett, but this is an immersive, low-fi, interactive show that controls its audience and fuses stand-up and clowning with retro gaming and cult behaviour – I turned bad old games into a good, new gameshow. Plus, we only find the show’s plot if the audience manages to find it, by selecting the correct options off the screen. So it’s a play that plays you.

Thom Scullion: 86 per cent

It’s not entirely unfair to ask what the hell Thom Scullion thinks he is doing. Last time out, at Arches Live!, he filled up a room with retro computer games and let the audience go wild. I ended up in a particularly vicious combat with a press agent, missed two serious performances and finished the evening being dragged away from the machine by my colleagues. This time, he only had one game – some bloody impossible Jurassic Park tie-in – and I still ended up swearing at innocent audience members, only this time in frustration.

Scullion is one of the Live Art Young Team: impeccable credentials, only he has chosen not to go for monologues or choreography based on post-modern dance but computer games. Chatting to him after I had died six times on screen, he comes across as affable: his lecture, which tried to explain that computers are not as bad as the tabloids paint them, was remarkably intelligent. Yet instead of writing a script about the positives of gaming, he just lets people have a shot on his prized collection of games.

This might make it difficult to review – I mean, how am I supposed to give a star rating to a dinosaur that I am operating? – but it makes more sense. He has stripped away those fripperies of performance – the stage, the actors, the design – and aimed instead for the direct transmission of emotions. Now, I might be able to empathise with Oedipus’ frustration when the messenger won’t give him a reasonable answer to his questions, but I sure as shit feel it when my little dinosaur gets eaten by the big one in exactly the same place for the fifth time.

He also saves himself a bundle on the post-show discussion. His corner of the Old Hairdressers is packed with people, shouting encouragement or laughing at my failure. In short, he doesn’t need to write an essay on how gaming makes a community, he just makes the community.

It’s a sharp idea, and it does all the hard work – once he has got it all plugged in, the installation takes care of itself. It doesn’t hurt that Scullion hovers around, charming and chatting, but the event is an object lesson in how to get the impact of a theatre piece without splashing out on an author, an audience, a stage and a script. Besides that, it is a little more fun than half an hour of incest, monologue and chorus.