PROMPTER – Hydra Poesis

Overview

Well it sounded promising. I’ll go one further, PROMPTER sounded exciting. You’ve got this out-there, experimental, multidisciplinary dance/theatre/activist company (that’s Perth’s Hydra Poesis) producing a show about online news media that’s been scripted by an actual journalist (that’s Monocle’s Australasian correspondent Patrick Pittman) and performed not just by actors on stage but by performers all around the world streaming in by internet.

That’s got to be amazing, right? Even if it fails, it will at least be an interesting experiment, right?  Right?

Perhaps the idea of combining these elements was too full of promise for any actual show to live up to the expectation but, even allowing for this, PROMPTER is a remarkably drab theatrical experience.

The story centres around an obscure fictional island which is struck by a never specified cataclysm. For some reason people around the world are invested enough in this turn of events that they go psychotic as a result. At least we’re told they go psychotic, what we see is a few people jiggle briefly. Then a couple have a tiff over the internet and some soldiers delivering aid supplies shoot some civilians, because, well, that’s just what soldiers do, at least in the histrionic world of PROMPTER.

Ah well, comprehensibility of plot is not essential to enjoy experimental theatre but the performance is also a flat-out fizzle. For all the promise of multidisciplinary approach, the show has very little physical performance, dance or anything other than big slabs of monologue. It’s dreary monologue, too, thick with uninteresting details about the imaginary setting or raging with outrage about the unconvincing series of events that happens there. While the script is clearly aiming to make a statement about the media, it is too heavily laden with contrivance and conceit to deliver a meaningful message.

That the monologues are mostly delivered to on-stage cameras and the video displayed, as if televised, on large overhead screens, adds little to the audience experience. If anything, the fact that the actors are almost always working in effective isolation drains much needed vitality from the performances. Likewise, the contribution from the online performers, while intriguing as a concept, brings little to the show. They seldom have anything to do other than watch blankly and their rare actions have almost no bearing on anything on stage. The show comes with many technological trappings, from actors interacting via portable monitors to projections on a billowing inflatable screen, but it all feels like effort that's been put in the wrong places.

PROMPTER takes itself tremendously seriously but at no point do the audience have reason to care about any of it.  We have no point of connection to the characters, they have little connection to each other and the events have little connection to reality.

The cast all seem like decent performers but they look bored and exhausted, as well they might. Logistically PROMPTER must have been complex to set up, but to watch it is like typing 'paint drying' into YouTube and then being expected to be shocked by what you see.  A lot's gone into making this show, but little has come out for an audience to enjoy.