Six Characters in Search of a Meaning
VICTORIA KINGHAM
On 13 April, there was a rehearsed reading of Lindsay Jayne’s play A spectacular Interview in Studio 27, the White Rock Theatre’s fringe venue.
This was quite a feat of writing – like watching a cross between Private Eye’s ‘Pseuds Corner’ and a twenty-first century version of something unspecified by Ionesco. A script like this – a string of corporate speak with emphasis on the spoken acronym (which proliferates throughout) – necessarily calls attention to itself as, sentence by sentence, lacking in meaning.
It’s about the death of sense and reality in the face of endless online techspeak, virtual text and images, and the burial of the truth, among the dross generated by Artificial Intelligence (the written equivalent of music sampling, now so ubiquitous that the originals are rarely acknowledged) and the 1984-type nonsense spouted by world leaders resulting in – yes, possibly – the rewriting of history.
The author herself was prompted to write it because she feels that modern tech-speak is impossible to understand. Who could disagree? She also stressed that this was a rehearsed reading, not a perfect rendition, and that it is extremely difficult for actors (among them the notable, funny and acrobatic Cazimi) to memorise lines with no appreciable context.
It’s a challenging technique, to write that which mixes the essentially meaningless with the essentially absurd (an opera singer randomly enters dressed in Valkyrie costume at one stage, and there’s quite a bit of general falling about, belching, sneezing, and nose-picking) and keeps the audience engaged. The actors did a creditable job despite this not being in any way a finished product.
There was a short discussion afterwards in which one topic was the staging of this. Personally I wondered if slightly less time, without an interval but with more use of the projection screen, might have made the point just as well: it would have enabled each actor to revel in a continuous development of their particular cult of ‘personality’, as do countless on-line ‘influencers’ whose opinions proliferate, without any background knowledge, on any topic they fancy.
An experienced stage director with vision and lateral thinking might be able to bring out this play’s essential protests against the burial of reality, the instability of language, and the massive glorification of the ephemeral, which appears to make up most of the digital universe.
A Spectacular Interview was written by Lindsay Jayne and read by the Daytime Theatre Players: Leonie Avril, Cazimi, Nathan Detroit, Yasmien Huband, Heather Leech, Keith Leech, Delia Reynolds, and Stephen Rose. It was written, produced, and directed by Lindsay Jayne and stage managed by Simon Hobson with consultancy from Elizabeth Ryder.
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