A Snapchat Performance
Transience: A one-on-one drama over the phone, from Friday, January 18, to Saturday, January 21. Review by JON LEWIS
The Canadian sociologist Irving Goffman suggests that whenever any two people meet, it’s a performance. Promoted by the Oxford Playhouse, Hitcher Encounter’s production of Transience is a joint performance when a professional actor meets an audience member on the phone.
At a pre-arranged time the mobile rings and Roberto Morreale – I’ve no idea if this is his real name, stage name or character name – gives you some safeguarding ground rules, including how to end the encounter, which should last about 40 minutes, by saying ‘abandon’.
This is an interactive play, like playing dungeons and dragons, with the storyteller providing a plot and sound effects. Roberto is agile and personable, adapting a pre-written scenario to the contours of the imaginative input that I was able to dream up. As in fantasy role-playing campaigns, the player’s avatar is devised early on and the actor invites you to create a name and describe the kind of clothes the character wears.
The plot is a thriller that begins in a greasy arcade where the character gets swept up into a computer game called Transience. Roberto describes what your character sees and hears and offers prompts as to what happens next. The character is warned that at any moment it could be game over and that other players were lost forever in the game. I don’t know if every player has the same mission or whether the actor has many scenarios that are rehearsed. You are warned to trust no one, and that the mission is to retrieve an artefact from an auction. Time is not on your side. Already the clock is ticking and there is half-an-hour left of the co-created performance. My story, a fusion between The Matrix and James Bond, with a dash of Sherlock Holmes thrown in, rattled along on a track of enthusiasm.
There is pressure on you not to waste time in thinking up responses to the actor’s prompts – they need to be immediate, whatever the consequences. Roberto hung up after 40 minutes, my character lost into the digital realm.
Fun, if brief.