Offending the Audience
Yesterday, I saw Peter Handke's 'Offending the Audience' at the theatre on campus:
"The Austrian playwright Peter Handke's 1966 play Offending the Audience isn't a play. The actors do not play characters. The stage does not represent some other place. The time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time. Time passes as it passes in real life for the audience. There is no illusion. There is no play.
How do we know this? The actors tell us. When the curtain parts, four actors come out, the house lights come up, the actors stare at us and they tell us that this is not a play, that the stage does not represent some other place, that the time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time, that time passes as it passes in real life for the audience, that there is no illusion, that there is no play.
Handke's play (or whatever it is) is an hour-long polemical lecture about the theater, taking place in a theater, that tries to be as unlike theater as it possibly can be. We are asked to abandon every expectation, to be the subject of the actors' gaze the way that they are usually the subject of ours. There is nothing offensive in what is represented on the stage; the offense of the title is that nothing at all is represented."
It was great. Offending the Audience was double-billed with an original piece of writing by a girl on my course. Her play was called Nowhere Warm, and I knew most of the cast. It was enjoyable, and well produced, but Offending the Audience will be the piece of the billing that endures in my mind. At one point the entire audience ended up on the stage, which still contained the props from the previous performance. Some of us lay on the hospital bed, some of us sat on chairs. Some stood around. The actors moved around the stage and around the seating, throwing in asides and confiscating mobile phones that went off. One unsuspecting man rang an audience member who didn't put his phone on silent; one of the actors seized it, put it on speaker and asked how the caller felt about being an actor on stage now.
"The Austrian playwright Peter Handke's 1966 play Offending the Audience isn't a play. The actors do not play characters. The stage does not represent some other place. The time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time. Time passes as it passes in real life for the audience. There is no illusion. There is no play.
How do we know this? The actors tell us. When the curtain parts, four actors come out, the house lights come up, the actors stare at us and they tell us that this is not a play, that the stage does not represent some other place, that the time of the action does not unfold as though it were some fictional time, that time passes as it passes in real life for the audience, that there is no illusion, that there is no play.
Handke's play (or whatever it is) is an hour-long polemical lecture about the theater, taking place in a theater, that tries to be as unlike theater as it possibly can be. We are asked to abandon every expectation, to be the subject of the actors' gaze the way that they are usually the subject of ours. There is nothing offensive in what is represented on the stage; the offense of the title is that nothing at all is represented."
It was great. Offending the Audience was double-billed with an original piece of writing by a girl on my course. Her play was called Nowhere Warm, and I knew most of the cast. It was enjoyable, and well produced, but Offending the Audience will be the piece of the billing that endures in my mind. At one point the entire audience ended up on the stage, which still contained the props from the previous performance. Some of us lay on the hospital bed, some of us sat on chairs. Some stood around. The actors moved around the stage and around the seating, throwing in asides and confiscating mobile phones that went off. One unsuspecting man rang an audience member who didn't put his phone on silent; one of the actors seized it, put it on speaker and asked how the caller felt about being an actor on stage now.