It's Scratch Night at Battersea Arts Centre, a weekly occurrence during Scratch season, which spans the summer. Scratch Nights give the opportunity for works-in-progress to be performed in front of a live audience, to see what works, what doesn't, what could be improved.
Box Junction worked.
Immersive theatre's a tricky old game. How boldly do you immerse your audience? How uncomfortable do you want to make them? For me, nervous wreck by profession, immersive theatre comes with a wealth of problems. But with a trusty beer in tow, I prepared myself for this theme park ride.
Waiting outside the room, waiting to be let in, the pre-Scratch chatter slowly faded. It was dark, an atmosphere was brewing. The man by the door, a look of panic on his face began to talk. Sparse, stunted words, words of regret and anxiety. An anxiety he shared with his audience, for he was leading us into the performance, and little did we know, it had long since begun.
This was no theatre, more like a classroom, and sat on the floor were six inanimate characters, motionless, staring right at us. After a bout of physical theatre, triggered by an audience member punching numbers in a calculator, we found ourselves on a train platform, then on the tube, sat amongst the performers, each of us playing the game of the commuter. Controlled, repressed chaos was juxtaposed with the absurd banality of a tube ride we are all so familiar with.
Upon arrival at Box Junction, our final stop, the audience took a more traditional role, while the seven characters mutated and mingled amongst one another in front of us. One wonders whether this retreat into a more traditional realm compromises the interactive quality so impressive in the first half. But the content of the show continued to engage. Sometimes animals, sometimes machines, miscommunications and aggressive behaviour, playing out in some kind of unruly circus environment, which itself finally evolved into a music box.
This story was ambiguous, that much is certain, leading one to speculate that this display of unconnected shenanigans were simply plucked from the air. But there was the occasional hint at some continuity, something deeper that conventional story-telling could not quite articulate. It all left one wondering, staring into space with a whiskey in the bar after the show.
Perhaps that's what it was about...
The modern fairy tale needs not rhymes, princes and witches, but boxes, flirting, tube rides and calculators. And this is what you can expect to get at a Wind-Up Collective show. Box Junction was the first display of a project destined to grow, refine, implode and explode. The result, whenever it surfaces, is sure to be another compelling ride.
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