Tuesday 11th until Friday 14th May 2010 @ Broadmead, Bristol
Showing as part of Mayfest 2010, Bristol’s festival of contemporary theatre

As befits any self respecting theatre festival, Mayfest 2010 has its fair share of “outside the box theatre” and Dream-Work, a collaboration between the Bristol-based Bodies In Flight and Singapore-based Spell #7 theatre companies, is a fine example of that. Asked to meet at a square in Broadmead, the gathered audience are handed headsets and for the ensuing sixty minutes wander through Bristol city centre following an everyday-man commuter – a performance walk if you will.

Headphones in our ears, it feels like we’ve got a direct line into the character’s brain as we eavesdropping on everything he says and thinks. It soon becomes clear that this morning he is preparing himself for an important interview and therefore constantly mutters to himself as key phrases about flow charts, bullet points and employee motivation swirl around his head. It’s a fun experience and it’s curiously exciting to see so intimately into this man’s world; however, at the same time it is strangely and somewhat uncomfortably invasive. Are we laughing at this character, pitying him for getting so worked up over an interview? Or, as this scenario is a familiar one of many of us, are we really pitying ourselves?

Dream-Work starts to get really interesting as our walk progresses and the performance becomes more and more abstract. As music picks up in our ears, our commuter is liable to burst into dance and spontaneous acts of physical theatre, most effectively in a dark underpass. The sounds in our headsets abstractly develop too, the dialogue of our character fading at several points to be replaced, for example, by chiming bells when we are outside a church or, as we pass a glass-fronted office block, the hustle and bustle of an office environment, as if the building is bugged. During these moments I can’t help but feel like we are being led around by some sort of quasi-Ghost of Christmas Present, anonymously floating along pavements being shown the state of the world and the shallowness of the capitalist system.

Overall it’s a very enjoyable experience and the novelty of being outside, amongst real people in real places gives the show much more depth and resonance. I can’t help but feel however that because the parameters of this individual’s story are set out so early, there was plenty of room to explore the thoughts of other commuters too. Even if their internal monologues were the same, a bit more variation is needed to take this show to the next level.

www.mayfestbristol.co.uk

Matthew Whittle www.matthewwhittleblog.blogspot.com