The Belgian Company Ontroerend Goed have been coming to the Edinburgh Fringe for so long that I can no longer imagine how their work would seem to someone on first encounter anymore. Not that one can tell the difference between fans and newcomers by looking at the audience. And in this show there is plenty of opportunity to do just that. It is in fact a forensic study of audience behaviour. I cannot divulge much detail without giving the show away, but like a lot of their previous work, Thanks for Being Here draws attention not only to its content but also to its concept – which in this case boils down to: what if the whole show was made by the audience?
The Mobius strip is an apt description for this show, not as a clever metaphor but as operational reality. Attempting to discern where authorial intention ends and the audience agency begins is genuinely impossible here, the only option being to immerse oneself in the work’s playful metatheatricality. This is nothing new for Ontroerend Goed, who first came to Edinburgh some 17 years ago with one-to-one shows exploring personal connection. Their work is often an investigation of how theatrical form can be reinvented to communicate the content, so for £¥€$ (2017), a show about money, they involved the audience in a stock-market inspired game, and Fight Night (2013) about democracy gave the spectators voting devices. Since 2016 with World Without Us and the palindromic Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era (2018), they turned their attention to more meditative and existential topics such as our place in the universe and the perils of climate crisis. This was a phase incidentally crowned by Funeral (2023) – a healing ritual after the Covid pandemic which took great care to re-inaugurate the poignancy of a handshake.
In this vein, Thanks for Being Here, billed as a ‘celebration of your presence’ is the opposite end of the scale to the explosive and provocative Audience (2011) which focused on crowd behaviour and populism. In some ways this move from provocation to mindful connection suggests maturation, but not without a cost of critical edge. Questions emerge, for example, as to what the show could be saying about the increasingly volatile world we live in, beyond and outside the privilege of a comfortable co-presence.
The essential beauty of Ontroerend Goed’s way of working, however, remains contained in their tireless commitment to a personal tradition of invention. So while picking up their cameras again (the tool they introduced in Teenage Riot in 2010 and in Audience in 2011), they also put a new spin on the dramaturgical use of lip syncing and verbatim testimony, elements that were not a major part of their repertoire before. The innovation on this occasion is that they really do, to some extent, build the show from scratch each day, from the here and now of each daily performance, adding layers of meaning and new content to a pre-existing palimpsest of audience-generated ideas. Each performance is unique and each audience’s presence honoured in their own way – so it is a show best seen to be believed. And there’s no need to worry, someone’s request for us to be exempted from uncomfortable audience participation has already been taken on board.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Duška Radosavljević.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
