UK theatre collective SUBJECT OBJECT makes its Melbourne debut with a bold double-bill of celebrated work at Melbourne Fringe Festival in October.
Fascinatingly, work.txt reimagines theatre by eliminating the cast entirely – the audience performs the play for themselves.
In instructions – winner of a Scotsman Fringe First Award at Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 – a line-up of Melbournian performers and public personalities will take to the stage each night. Alone and entirely unrehearsed, they are fed a series of instructions they must carry out via in-ear-monitors and television screens.
Nathan Ellis, Artistic Director of SUBJECT OBJECT, explains that work.txt began its life in 2019.
“I’d read a book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs and had the idea to make a show that was about work that was performed entirely by the audience and the bulk of the making was done over the course of about two weeks, so very quickly,” he says. “Then Covid intervened and delayed the actual premiere of the show until 2022, which left us lots of time to think about it and fine-tune the techniques. work.txt then toured internationally, going to 6 continents over the course of 12 months.”
When this came to an end, Ellis became interested in making another show with the company and instructions was born out of an increasing sense of anxiety about the questions generative AI poses to what we mean by ‘creativity’? “In a world where any image we want can be created algorithmically in seconds, what value is left in human creativity and moreover what do we mean by creativity in the first place? That was where we started with INSTRUCTIONS alongside the idea of using a guest performer, where Acting becomes a synecdoche for creativity in general. Perhaps unsurprisingly, creating a show that can be performed sight-unseen and that isn’t boring to watch took a lot of technical fine-tuning.”
Ellis says that both shows interrogate liveness in the theatre. “No two performances are the same and audiences are invited into a particular kind of communal meaning-making: at its best, the shows feel a bit like going to church. They are also a lot of fun: they are more playful than a lot of this kind of theatre, and they are experimental theatre for people who don’t like experimental theatre.”
Ellis believes the shows are asking questions about how we live and more particularly how we live with technology but if people leave just saying they had a good time that’s also fine by him.
As a production, work.txt has travelled quite extensively with Ellis acknowledging that the readiness of different cultures to get up on stage and get involved in performance is widely variable. “The Germans, perhaps unsurprisingly, are very reticent to get up on stage,” he says. “In Brazil on the other hand, it was almost impossible to get them off stage. In Egypt, getting the audience to stay silent during the scenes proved almost impossible, and in China we had some of the craziest ad-libbed heckling of anywhere we went. I’ve watched the show 200 times now, and I can honestly say it’s never not an incredibly stressful experience to see an audience given so much freedom.”
INSTRUCTIONS has been performed in China in December 2024 and goes on after Melbourne to the Belfast International Festival and will continue touring through next year.
SUBJECT OBJECT is a company based in the UK, founded in 2022 and is described by the Royal Court’s David Byrne as “the future of theatre”. It is interested in providing theatrical metaphors that help us understand the technology we use every day.
Ellis explains that the company is made up of a group of regular collaborators who make work starting with a formal proposition and some kind of philosophical question, and then they get in the room and talk about it for absolutely ages. “I suppose what’s unusual is that we very rarely start with the idea of performers being central to the performance, which generates a whole bunch of freedoms and also a bunch of problems! I think company work like this can often sound kind of esoteric, when actually our guiding principle is to make work that’s engaging and interesting to as wide a possible audience: we make work about ideas that isn’t going to bore anyone.”
Ellis has spent a lot of time thinking about the impact of AI on culture and the world of work, and he concedes that theatre is probably one of the few immune industries. ” Theatre by its very nature requires people in space to be looking at the same thing at the same time, it’s already a very inefficient medium and that seems to be part of its pleasure and there’s clearly something we instinctively crave about that experience,” he says. “I’m yet to be convinced that the robots are going to be taking over. INSTRUCTIONS and work.txt are both strangely a validation of the human element of theatre: the joy in both shows is the moments where human spontaneity and creativity emerge out of the automation.”
Running for two weeks during Melbourne Fringe at the Common Rooms at Trades Hall, work.txt and instructions can be seen separately or as part of a double-bill on the one night.
Says Ellis, “INSTRUCTIONS is a chance to see some of your favourite Melbourne performers put on the spot with a script they’ve never seen before. And work.txt features communal karaoke to My Heart Will Go On. If that doesn’t sell it to you, I don’t know what will. ”
October 1 – 12
melbournefringe.com.au
