Review: txtshow (on the internet)

 

This UK Premiere of txtshow is easily the most unusual theatrical experience I've enjoyed all year. Dressed in a black jacket and sporting a Gandalf beard, the mysterious txt (created and performed by Brian Feldman) recites a script written anonymously in real-time by a live audience (on the internet). It's actually quite an unnerving experience joining the zoom call, changing your zoom name to anonymous and diving into this immersive experiment in online performance, but it's well worth facing the fear!

Every show must be entirely different, and indeed there is an 18+ warning which suggests some nights it must get quite explicit. Txt reads all the comments shared without bias and uncensored (so far as I could tell), so in that sense anything can happen. Consequently, I can only speak in detail about my own night, which had a family audience and a quirky, disconnected but fundamentally playful atmosphere. We quickly wrapped ourselves up in familiar words, typing musical theatre song lyrics, popular catchphrases, snatches of poetry and old nursery rhymes. In essence, we simply watched and giggled as txt repeated them back to us. 

So what was the charm? What kept this going for an hour? The comfort of words that are tried and tested? The joy of hearing the words we typed brought alive before us? The power and control that action implied? I found these questions engaging and sufficient to sustain the show, but also frustrating. Once the idea that human beings like to make other human beings do things for their own enjoyment (an observation I've repeated almost verbatim from an anonymous typer on our night's performance) you need something more to nourish your interest. Plot, character, context... The show's structure, in which txt is restricted to reading out our desperate chat comments, limits the development of those essential elements of drama. The format's intrinsic excitement is also its immediate limitation.

However, I think the future for this type of theatre is filled with thrilling potential. Once we get past the excitement of getting txt to sing songs, recite poems and call out our own names, which turned the show into a type of computer game with txt as our shared avatar, I think there is genuine potential to help audiences realise their own creativity through collaboration. A new type of theatre in which the audience is also the writer, listening to one another and responding through the same focal character. And what an amazing experience that could be. Let's hope this is the first step.