A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts

Form. Convention. Plot. Casting. Script. Actor safety. None of this is what drives the purposely rule-breaking Secret Theatre Company. Instead, an actor (the evening’s sole “protagonist”) is picked from a hat by the audience and then subjected to what can only be described as a mental and physical interrogation by her sportswear clad young castmates, none of whom leave the stage all night.

There’s dancing, a lot of dancing, there’s wrestling, a volley of questions, a speech interrupted by persistent kissing, a loud love confessional and a series of repeated challenges that see our leading lady compelled to eat a lemon, balance on a football and climb inside a suitcase. She drinks a beer, loses her clothes, sheds a tear, recites Shakespeare and expends a lot of sweat.

“What is tonight’s show about?” she’s asked pointedly, on more than one occasion, before breathlessly panting out a different answer each time.

It’s incredibly captivating. How does an actor, freewheeling the majority of what she does on the spot, respond to such extreme conditions? Stripped of almost everything, literal and otherwise, that would usually inform our preconceived notion of what an actor is, it feels like we are inching towards some elusive truth. If she gets upset, or emotional, tired, or elated, it’s not because she’s “in character”, it’s because she is those things.

On occasion, it swerves dangerously close to cruelty, though the exhilaration, affection and display of collective human endeavour at the end reminds you just what an extraordinary theatrical experiment this is. Utterly fascinating.