Speed dating, absinthe and theatre

An evening of speed dating turned out to be an excellent rehearsal for Etiquette. Part of The Arches’ off site programme, Etiquette sits two strangers opposite one another, and instructs them in their conversation, through a pre-recorded script. Like speed dating, it forces an immediate and false intimacy, the structure of the experience guiding the man and woman through a series of awkward dialogues. 

Both are uncomfortable experiences. I noticed how rapidly my dating gambits are bad faith, a feigned interest in the other person fuelled by social anxiety. Etiquette offers a series of scenes, fragments of Ibsen and café conversations with a bloody suicide at the heart of the story. Speed dating ended up as sixteen disparate job interviews. Neither event left me with much hope for my romantic prospects. 

Etiquette is one of the too many contemporary works that questions the nature of performance. The two members of the audience double as the actors, moving various props around the table, speaking the words coming through their ear-phones, like a theatrical karaoke. An overwrought version of The Doll’s House emerges, then a casual meeting between a philosopher and a prostitute: nothing is resolved, bringing the experience to an abrupt finale.  

I hate to think what one of my three minute dates might have made of this: she loved theatre, she said, but found the Lyceum too subversive. Even my adoration for Live Art mischief didn’t protect me from finding Etiquette provocative, exposing the isolation of the individual as they attempt to reach out and communicate, the irreconcilable differences between our intentions and hopes. Already grappling with the impossibility of making genuine contact with another person in a world caught in its own surface, I left feeling bereft and thoughtful.  

I made my wat to the roof of a car park for Motor Vehicle Sunset. Framed as a museum’s interactive exhibition on the last of the automobiles, it uncovers the romantic dreams of twentieth century America, never explaining why the car died out but conjuring visions of vast, open roads and erotic teenage adventures at the drive in movie. 

The prospect of another Valentine’s day on the absinthe looming over me, this lost myth of freedom and potential became a lonely paean: once again, the threat of violence hovered, in the vivid description of car chase. MVS avoids clichés about the environmental devastation the car has wrought, turning the car into a metaphor for the slow decay of capitalist optimism. 

Am I turning these works into bleak elegies, or has my engagement with theatre left me alienated and almost cynical? Both Etiquette and MVS are dark, lonely and melancholic, promising the hope of adventure and communication before finally turning me away sad and sardonic. Just like speed dating.