Adelaide Festival. Queens Theatre. 14 Mar 2014
There are five candidates. The audience must vote. Many times.
But first, some personal details.
Angelo, the MC in a terrible chequered three-piece suite, encourages the 187 people in the old Queen's Theatre to give up their personal details by pressing numbers on little keypads with which they have all been provided. Age, gender, marital status, income...
Thus armed with demographics, he presents five candidates who need their votes. The losers will have to leave the stage, he warns.
Initial voting is pretty random since the candidates have not uttered a word. They are chosen by personal appeal. Then the winner and the loser may speak to the audience. It learns a little about them. But, various tests will turn up commonalities.
Which pejorative word is most offensive? Are we a little bit racist? Are we religious, spiritual or nothing? Do we prefer certain characteristics in a leader?
The candidates' ranks slim down. They speak some more. Winners versus losers. Another round of voting and the status quo changes. A back runner hits the lead. Does the audience still favour the candidate it liked before? What will swing the vote? The candidates vie for preference but they still have no real policy.
It is politically hollow but a very interesting exercise because the audience members have only a minute to answer serious questions. Are they a little bit racist? Dare they admit it? Yes, they reason. It is anonymous and all in the spirit of entertainment, after all. So, a majority of Adelaideans own up. They reject religion and spirituality, too. And they show that they are easily swayed by not very much at all when they suddenly change their voting preferences from one candidate to another.
Well, at least it was so on the opening night of this co-production from Belgium's Ontroerend Goed and Australia's The Border Project.
It did not prove that people will vote for people without parties or clear policies for it was clearly a game being played through actors in a theatre.
The votes were tallied by a couple of "officials" at a control desk to the rear of the square dais of stage. The results were transmitted as dots of various percentage sizes on an overhead monitor.
Sometimes the voting results surprised. Certainly the end of the game surprised.
It mightn't have been theatre, as such, but it was an extraordinary adventure in collective behaviour and it left its participants filled with questions, not about politics and elections, but about their own integrity.
Samela Harris
When: 13 to 16 March
Where: Queen's Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
