Theatre review: Won't Somebody Dance With Me? | Hand Me Down | How Soon is Nigh? | Marlene Dandy One-to-One
IT'S SATURDAY afternoon and I bump into a friend in the bar of Glasgow's Arches. She's talking animatedly to another woman whom I assume to be a friend of hers. I should have known better. The two have only just met, but it has been in an extraordinary circumstance. They have been part of the audience of Internal, a phenomenal production by the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed.
Ever since this show played on the Edinburgh Fringe last year, I have been observing the odd effect it has on people. Even those who haven't enjoyed this cross between a speed-dating encounter and group-therapy session seem compelled to discuss it with strangers. On Saturday afternoon, a passing Arches usher comes over and tells us how much she has enjoyed it.
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Hide AdMeanwhile my friend is talking with as much irritation and bewilderment as she is enthusiasm. It is clear, however, that the show has got right under her skin. That doesn't surprise me. Nine months after seeing it, I'm still processing this half-hour show, trying to figure out whether it offers genuine interaction between spectator and actor or whether it is just a clever script in which the performers, as usual, have all the power.
This is the kind of question the Arches is asking this month during its Behaviour festival. In a 21st-century world mediated by computers, TV monitors and smartphones, we have started to put a premium on theatre's capacity to explore the personal, the intimate and the spontaneous. Whether it makes you feel alarmed or alive, the experience of an actor looking you in the eye and asking your opinion is something you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere else.
Certainly, it would make no sense for Adrian Howells to make a movie version of Won't Somebody Dance With Me