As If

A couple of years ago I travelled from Canterbury to Nottingham to see Propeller's Pocket Dream. This is, as the company's publicity describes it, "a sixty-minute version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, especially devised for young audiences," one that aimed to "create a relaxed and engaging atmosphere… as well as encouraging the young audience to give an open and uninhibited response." As I am currently engaged in research into the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of Relaxed Performance, I was naturally interested to see how this might work. Relaxed Performance (or RP), for those unfamiliar with the term, is something that has begun to be offered by many theaters in the UK in recent years; designed primarily though not exclusively for young persons with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and their carers, an RP is one in which the usual protocols of audience behavior, and, sometimes, aspects of the show itself, will be adjusted to accommodate the needs of the condition. Thus, audience members are free to move about, to enter and leave the auditorium as necessary, and to make noise—this might well involve vociferous and blunt commentary on the show itself—and lighting and sound levels are adjusted to reflect autistic sensitivities. The idea is that RP encourages participation in an activity by a group that is habitually excluded from it, or that excludes itself from it; the understanding is that non-autistic, or, to use the terminology, neurotypical as opposed to neurodivergent, members of an RP show accept behavior that in usual circumstances would be censured or suppressed (Kempe).¹

I had already seen Pocket Dream in Canterbury three weeks earlier, and knew what to expect: a fast-paced, cartoonish, sometimes puerile, genially enjoyable production, staged in a chalk circle with costume rails, tea chests, stepladders and assorted percussion, delivered by an all-male cast of six. A glance at the cast list confirmed a dramatis personae totaling thirteen, with lovers, mechanicals and principal fairies, but no Egeus, no Philostrate, no Theseus and no Hippolyta. This will be interesting when they get to Pyramus and Thisbe, I thought; with the entire cast fully occupied as mechanicals, who will play their play audience? The solution lay in the co-option of us, the actual audience. In Canterbury, the actors came out of role and ushered two willing juveniles to step onto the stage, one male and one female, one Theseus and one Hippolyta. And because this was a Propeller show, Quince stated, handing out the costumes, they were cast across gender: a top hat for the girl Theseus, a feather boa for the boy Hippolyta. Their task was simply to sit at the top of the stepladders and watch, applaud, and, at the end of the mechanicals' play, rejoin the audience. In Canterbury, this is exactly what the two volunteers, grinning broadly throughout, did.

This, in Nottingham, is when things went, if not exactly wrong, then certainly not according to plan. Two volunteers, one boy, one girl, piped up straight away. The first sign of trouble was when Quince announced the cross-dressing business: there was no way, Propeller rules or not, that this boy was going to play a girl, nor this girl a boy. This was not ideal, but less disruptive than what happened next. Perched on his stepladder, this Theseus was under no illusions as to whom was now the real star of the show—and it wasn't Darrell Brockis as Bottom. The mechanicals' play was thus subjected to a running accompaniment of the kind of observations, insults and jokes that eight-year-old boys find hilarious: that's not a real sword, this is boring, you can't act, and so on. At first, the actors took this in good spirit and sportingly seemed to enjoy the game, but it wasn't long before they, and Brockis in particular, appeared to be struggling to conceal what I sensed was genuine irritation, as the boy's incessant and forceful interventions threatened to derail not only the play-within-the-play but the performance itself. Brockis eventually managed to silence his tormentor, and the play coasted to...