Oxford Playhouse Zoom theatre review : far away and yet so close

Are actors ‘acting’ versions of themselves, not acting at all, or making everything up?

Do You Love Me Yet?: The Oxford Playhouse in front rooms everywhere
November 3-7
Review by Jon Lewis

We are about to watch ‘an experimental generation of interpersonal closeness’.

In an hour’s time, we might learn what that means. Two actors who have never met each other before are sat at home in front of screens, answering, unrehearsed, pre-set questions they have not seen before. They are viewed live on YouTube by audiences at home in two Zoom chat boxes aligned next to each other, framed in a green surround. As they talk, two images of statues move around the boxes, inching symbolically more closely together. Each participant responds to a question then clicks over to the other, and as time passes, the two begin to answer the same questions.

On the night I watched, Patrick Osborne and John Pfumojena are not introduced, to us or to each other, although the publicity lists names of actors involved over the week and provides headshots. The questions, posed by co-creators Jocelyn Cox, a director, and Samuel E Taylor, a lecturer and writer, are based on a research project by Professor Aron, an American psychoanalyst. Part of the experience of watching is wondering whether the actors are ‘acting’ versions of themselves, not acting at all, or making everything up. We notice how one reacts to the other’s stories, sometimes smiling, sometimes rapt in the confessional narrative, impassive.

Osborne is reserved, quietly thoughtful, almost reticent, responding abstractly to questions that could be about anything. He reveals his Iranian heritage, the grandmother who doesn’t know what he does, his father’s death, and his favourite Iranian dishes. Pfumojena, originally from Zimbabwe, is ebullient, and the only one of the pair to talk about acting. They are not asked about their work, although Pfumojena, in the most specific story of the evening, enchants us with his experience of standing next to his director, Stephen Daldry, outside the actors’ dressing room at St Anne’s Warehouse where they were working in New York (a Google search suggests it’s for The Jungle) ‘in 2019 … no, I’m lying, 2018 … gosh, what has 2020 done to us!’, and being starstruck on meeting actor Liam Neeson, ‘a tall white man wearing a baseball cap’. It’s the only time the pandemic is referenced, and a moment where we realise that any interpersonal closeness that occurs is as a result of enforced distancing. It would be fascinating to see all the encounters between actors this week.