The ever-inventive Stan’s Café mix online radio and live theatre in a new interactive piece that’s coming to Bristol’s Tobacco Factory. Steve Wright tunes in.

Obviously it’s very scary for the performers. But audiences have found it very addictive and seductive, and although it’s not got the classic arc of a well-made play, it’s got this other shape to it that people find compelling. And if you can’t hold out till the very end, you can nip home and listen to it on the radio…” James Yarker, artistic director of Birmingham’s always-explorative Stan’s Café performance company, is explaining the unique conditions in which the company’s latest show is born each night.

‘Tuning Out With Radio Z’ is a play-cum-radio show, in which two performers recreate a small-hours radio programme in front of a theatre audience as the presenters attempt to navigate the perils of the night, intent on bringing their listeners safely to dawn. The play/show is created afresh each time, and a fair hunk of its content is contributed by audiences, both in the theatre and listening to the radio show online. Audiences are invited to keep mobile phones on and bring laptops into the theatre, and submit material – song requests, images, anecdotes and observations, news items – to the show via text, email or the website. The performers from Stan’s Café then weave the pick of this material into the emerging drama, alongside some pre-rehearsed material.

Stan’s Café have performed the show eight times – another three performances are coming up in Bristol next week – and on each occasion they’ve given the show a theme, typically a major (invented) news event from the day which has got the presenters and listeners talking. Thus far, those have included a flood, a shooting and a great escape. Beyond that, though, much of it’s down to audience suggestions. “An audience member in Birmingham texted in a message ‘we can see you’, and that provoked a whole riff in the show about hauntings,” James recalls. “Occasionally, as the producer, I’ll send out a message on the website – ‘we need more news items’, or ‘can someone send me in a travel report?’”

Formed in 1992, Stan's Café are a multidisciplinary Birmingham troupe, who’ve already made some intriguing incursions into (and beyond) theatre. They’ve turned Croydon Clocktower into a film set and built a new tram stop on the Birmingham Metro (for spacemen only). 2000’s ‘The Black Maze’, meanwhile, was an adventure down dark corridors for one person at a time, and arguably anticipated the recent vogue for intimate, immersive, walkabout theatre.

Improvisation, as James explains, has always been at the heart of the Café ethos, and this show, more than ever before, uses the potential of the spontaneous and unprepared. “We generate our material through improv. Every now and again something brilliant happens, which we’ll try and capture in a show. But, of course, part of the magic is how things emerge from the ‘soup’ in such a spontaneous way. So many times I’ve wished an audience was with us during an improv session, to see what emerged. And that got us thinking: why not have the actors up on stage improvising directly from audience feedback and ideas?”

You can, rather than heading to the theatre, just listen to ‘Radio Z’ online. But, says James, you’ll find the theatre show far more involving. “Listening to it online is a sort of satisfying experience, you hear some good music and some curious radio – but really it’s about being there live and seeing what happens with the performers. I collate the info that comes in, which I send onto the presenters to read out, but I’m also looking for opportunities to translate them into physical scenarios or trains of thought by the presenters while they’re off-mic, during songs.”

As well as the two presenters, theatre audiences will find four sleeping figures on stage. “They represent a wider world beyond the radio studio,” James explains. “Online listeners might get a 10-minute track or they might hear some poetic text – they will get a sense that there’s something else happening in the studio, which the theatre audiences will see fully.

“I’m partly interested in what it does to the atmosphere to have four people asleep on the stage – because that’s obviously quite a strange setting. But it also opens up the possibility of other worlds, that the performers might have some relationship to these sleeping figures, or that different identities might be projected onto them. Some of the stuff that comes out will be the dreams, memories, perhaps the imagined futures of these sleeping people. But who are they, where are they? That’s often up to the imaginations of the audiences, as much as it is spelt out by the performers.”

TUNING OUT WITH RADIO Z WAS AT THE TOBACCO FACTORY, BRISTOL FROM THUR 4-SAT 6 NOV.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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