Pepper takes audience into her confidence
Audience members take the lead in The Confidence Man, an immersive theatre show that continues a growing trend in live performance.
The latest show from writer-director Zoe Pepper’s Side Pony Productions, The Confidence Man uses six audience volunteers as its cast in a kitchen-sink crime thriller.
They have masks and headsets to guide them through the action with sounds, music, prompts and pre-recorded dialogue. The rest of the audience become voyeurs to proceedings through headphones and by channel-surfing between the audio of the different characters on smart phones.
The Confidence Man merges elements of gaming, audio-drama and masked theatre to dramatise a disturbing chain of events set off when a father comes home with a big bag of cash.
It has a heightened flourish when performed by amateurs in WA artist Rebecca Baumann’s oversized, caricature masks loosely inspired by the Guess Who? family board-game.
“I guess it is about giving people a way in and using comedy, heightened realism and exaggerated costumes as a way of disarming and relaxing people and emotionally connecting with an audience,” says Pepper, who put actors in lion outfits for her suburban law-of-the-jungle black comedy The Pride.
“It gives performers anonymity and gives them the freedom to play,” she says. “It is functional in terms of the story in that the features are so bold that you easily recognise the other characters and how you fit in the story world.”
Pepper says the players get to experience first-hand a morally complex tale where good people do bad things.
“I think it is more about engaging people’s imagination and sense of play, and it kind of democratises the performance space in a way that it is anybody’s shot to have a go and perform,” she says. “Every character is the hero of their own performance.
“There are six audio streams and in each character’s world, they are the centre of the story. That is quite unique in terms of the story-crafting and the craft of writing that and making it all fit together,” she says.
An associate director on the immersive promenade theatre show Don’t Look back at the 2008 Perth International Arts Festival, Pepper’s interest in technology to enhance audience participation was sparked by the stranger-to-stranger piece Etiquette at PIAF in 2010.
Perth collective PVI has been creating multi-player performance pieces for a decade and the actor-audience lines have been blurred in digitally enabled shows like Rimini-Prokoll’s Situation Rooms, Aphid’s Thrashing Without Looking, Hackman’s Apollo 13: Mission Control and Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot.
“I haven’t actually seen a lot of that work,” Pepper says. “For me it is more about using that platform and that technology as a way of stripping it back and making it more about people enjoying themselves and using their imaginations. I wanted to make the technology invisible so it is not like going to a theatre performance and staring at a screen.
“It is still about human interaction and about people, just using the technology as a tool to find a way to be more inclusive and include people within the performance.”
The show, written by Pepper and Adriane Daff, had its premiere in Melbourne in 2013 and is presented by the Perth Theatre Company ahead of a national tour. The dialogue has been pre-recorded by leading Perth actors, distilling the production down to the set and equipment to avoid cast salaries and other touring costs of conventional plays .
“I wanted to make something where all the work was at the back-end of it so there was greater potential for it to have a life beyond the initial season,” Pepper says
The Confidence Man is at the Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre, from May 1-10 (preview April 30).
