…Ontroerend Goed know full well that what they are doing here will inspire debate. They invite it and then hijack it, providing their performance with a greater social context…
The Times – Donald Hutera ****
…Ontroerend Goed know full well that what they are doing here will inspire debate. They invite it and then hijack it, providing their performance with a greater social context…
The Times – Donald Hutera ****
…There is undoubted power in the piece, (…) it’s a fascinating and slippery hour, and if nothing else, proves that an audience isn’t just integral to a show it can “be” the show, and theatre is a forum to work out who we are, what we think and understand that sometimes being a witness is not enough. Sometimes we must stand up and break the rules. Being a really bad audience can be a really good thing.
The Guardian – Lyn Gardner ****
…Far from the madding crowds of something like the fourth plinth and Sky Arts, or the populist tyranny of reality television, ‘Audience’ makes a slick and aggressive case for considering how we might conceive of ourselves as an audience: as receivers of, and responders to messages: how we might recognise ourselves – when broadcasted, when scrutinised, when singled-out or brought together. A far cry from the intimacy of their previous work ‘Internal’, here OG reduce theatre to a drop under a microscope, a cold hard diagram, strategically and obliquely approaching some of its very basic concepts. It feels born clean of some deep frustration with the orthodoxical knots of how interactive theatre has come to consider audience-versus-performer, and so with a fundamentalist clarity of purpose, and an almost totalitarian sense of spectacle, they come at us from the cool and dispassionate darkness to rain down thunder and guts, simplified and outrageous, seeking to dispense with much of what went before.
Exeunt Magazine – Daniel B. Yates *****