What happens when an audience participation-phobe makes a show all about audience participation? Or should I be asking: what happens when a comic famed for his ideas runs out of them? Both of these dynamics are self-consciously at play in Daniel Kitson’s Collaborator. Billed as a perpetual work in progress, it is now on its 16th staging, which Kitson is “pretty sure” will be its last, at least in the UK.
The show is performed in the round, with the audience given scripts; more than 160 of them (on this occasion) get speaking parts. Kitson picked up the idea, he says, at someone else’s show on the Edinburgh fringe – and sure enough this type of theatre, franchising roles out to its audience, is popular. But Kitson is a reluctant adopter: “I really hate this sort of thing.” To him, audience participation is just “comedic discomfort”, the “commercialisation of schadenfreude” that steeps onlookers “up to their nuts in the complicity of the bystander”. Ouch. His own dabble in the activity is about drawing our attention, claims the script, to the “problematic power dynamics” inherent in interactive performance.
