Audience

Ontroerend Goed have a reputation for playing around with its audience. Throughout the Personal Trilogy (The Smile Off Your Face, Internal & A Game of You), all theatrical action was centred around the spectator. Audiences were singled out, touched, directed, mirrored, confronted with other audience members and challenged to explore their boundaries. In Teenage Riot, the company projected audiences onto a white box and virtually pelted them with tomatoes.

Developed at the NT Studio and performed in the main space at the Soho Theatre, it begs the question, how can public money be spent on developing and presenting such offensive, low-brow, pointless rubbish? At £20 a pop, real audiences should donate their money to a worthy charity. It is made worse as the would-be performers (I use that as an ironic gesture) of Audience plant pathetic actors in the audience in order to carry out this 'social experiment'. The offence is not what they say, not the foul barracking and pigeon-holing, not the crass and unadulterated cheap-minded unnecessary brinkmanship of it all – the offence is that they were allowed to do it under the banner of theatre. Shame on them and all who sail in it!

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