TRANS-

Jury Statement

Four actors huddle in a clump the middle of an empty space. The audience enters. They take their seats, the chairs set up in one unbroken circle. Every audience member can see every other audience member. The actors can see every audience member. The actors start to speak. They describe what they see in the theatre. The lamps, the tape on the floor, the speakers. This is theatre. The present moment. The actors continue to describe what they can see right now. Their gaze shifts to the audience. They single us out. They describe what they see. They tell us what we look like. Our clothes. Our haircut. Our faces. It’s the kind of confronting fact-based description of ourselves we’re not used to. Then they shift a gear, into metaphor. They describe our story, our imagined story, the story that is being written right now between the actor and us. And in the process of that the actors stop addressing us personally and transform us into characters in a play: their telling of our story shifts from ‘you’ to ‘he’ or ‘she’. Then eventually from ‘he’ or ‘she’ to ‘it’, We have gone from audiences to interlocutors to characters in a story to the very story event itself, all within an hour of theatre distilled to its very essence. This is the re-birth of theatre. An audience gathers in a space with a group of actors to make a testament to meaning, human existence and the way we tell stories. That’s how it’s always been in the theatre. two-woman-machine-show and Jonathan Bonnici are showing us, as if for the first time, the oldest truth.

Simon Stone