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Simon Carroll-Jones. Image: Vish Vishvanath |
The Situation Room at Bike Shed Theatre: Until 20th September 2014
Collectivism or individualism?
Corn chowder or chicken Kiev?
Long Island ice tea or Moscow mule?
Arbitrary choices made in the bar determine with whom you sit
and where for The Situation Room, a
thoughtful, clever piece of interactive theatre that puts the audience in opposing
Cold War camps to thrash out the fate of the small oil-rich nation of
Al-Khadra. But while your tastebuds could be largely responsible for which
ideology you represent during this war-game, your subsequent decisions – and
their consequences – might well be based on motives much more unpalatable.
Game-play, tactics and strategy drive the narrative as we,
members of the Politburo, led by solemn former Stalingrad hero Andrey
Sergeyevich Budka (Bennett), and the National Security Council, under the
command of suave CIA man Benjamin Stokely (Simon Carroll-Jones), must decide which
action to take – send in a sniper, torture a rebel leader – to secure our aim:
control of the region. The insistent surge of Oliver Soames’ all-encompassing sound
design underlines the need for increasingly fraught decisions as our ‘advisors’
urge us on to win, win, win. As the timer hammers away – only 60 seconds to
make your choice! – at the capacity for rational thought, will the competitive
streak over-ride consideration for civilians on the ground? Could you sanction
an assassination? Should you order a nuclear strike just to see what happens?
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Image: Vish Vishvanath |
And, of course, it is
a game; there is no real danger, no real threat to actual civilians. You can
compete in earnest against your opponents, change tactics to disrupt the
narrative, wait until the last tense second to throw your vote into the arena; since
there’s no room for discussion between members of the same ‘team’, you are
also, in a sense, playing against each other. It’s here that the boundaries of
the piece’s interactivity are revealed – there’s no conferring, our decisions
manifested by raising a hand or pressing a button, sometimes while blindfolded
– with the binary nature of the choices similarly constraining the outcome. But
rather than limiting the experience, this structure serves to reinforce again and
again – supported by the dislocation of the subterranean performance space, the
sepia time-shift of Hannah Sibai’s design – that decisions are made all the
time with little real understanding of what they mean on the ground, in that
place, for the people who live it every day. Decisions demanded in unnerving,
frantic circumstances. Decisions based on strategic alliances and investment
potential.
All of which makes the outcome on the night I saw The Situation Room either incredibly hopeful
or a cause for despair. Because if the people in the Bike Shed with me that
night were the ones making the decisions, we might just be all right. But I suspect
that the wrong people are always going to be in the room, because the ones with
the real power – the ones whose choices actually have weight – are going to
make sure of it.
Produced by Oscar Mike in collaboration with Upstart and Bike Shed
Theatre
Directed by James Blakey and Tom Mansfield
Cast: Jack Bennett and Simon Carroll-Jones
Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Reviewed for Exeunt