The Paper Birds with Theatre Centre.
Co-Produced with New Wolsey Theatre.
HOME, Manchester
October 9-10; 80 minutes, no interval
(also Leeds Playhouse November 20-23)
The Paper Birds has a reputation for devising verbatim theatre with a political agenda, women’s stories, and creating workshops and outreach that match its productions in importance and value.
This production is for the young: teens and 20s, the online programme suggests. I didn’t know that in advance; being outside the target demographic, I didn’t think to check for an online programme in advance. That was my first stumbling block.
Getting into the theatre, phones were a must: scanning a QR code, answering a series of questions online. My phone wouldn’t scan it. The technology was playing up and only at the very end of the production was I able to answer a question that didn’t seem to be the one they wanted everyone to answer at that moment. It was frustrating. Was it the tech? Was it them? Was it me? Did I need to get involved to fully experience the performance? Was I missing out already?
Nevertheless the show progressed, and we were asked to what extent we care about forcibly displaced people around the world. There are some shocking statistics, some well-told stories with physical theatre, audience address and integrated technology, and some serious questioning of media agendas, tricks and techniques.
If you hadn’t, up to this point, seen asylum-seekers and refugees as actual, real, human, people, it certainly brought that message home on a personal, intimate scale. That’s a media trick they taught us, by the way. Make a story personal (pick someone young, attractive, probably white, probably straight), garner empathy, then scale it out to tell us how many million people experience this kind of forced displacement. Soft-moving piano music and gentle but serious voiceover helps.
But here’s the rub. Because the technology is so multi-faceted and pervasive (three screens doing different things, titles doubling the performed script, live action while watching the action filmed, instructions to be on your phone and interact), I struggled to focus, and therefore to immerse myself in the journey of the performers. I didn’t fully connect to the people they were trying to represent. Only in the final moments, when a photograph of drowned Kurdish toddler Alan Kurdi was projected, did I feel the pang of empathy and anger: an image I had already seen and a feeling I had already felt long before this show was made.
The stories this show tells are important. Our reaction to those stories, which are these days mediated by our phones, is also important. Understanding both media agendas, and how we are manipulated into outrage or empathy by the media (via our phones) is important.
I hope this show is working, as it is designed to, for young people. There were a lot of young people in the audience, and I’d love to hear what they thought. But considering the different ways life is mediated by phone use then maybe, in mid-life, my emotions just work differently. And that’s an interesting point in itself.
