How often have you visited a town and thought how nice it would be to be shown around by a local who could do more than catalogue the historical sites of interest, but also give you a real sense of what it is like to live there? Now you can.
Created for National Theatre Wales, Rimini Protokoll's theatre experience takes place every Tuesday evening in Aberystwyth over the next year. Tuesday is the evening that the Heartsong Choir meet, and they are your guides for the evening. While they rehearse, you are issued with a snazzy video iPod and headphones, and set off around the town on a solo journey with members of the choir as your recorded video and sound guides. You end up at the choir rehearsal room for their final songs of the evening. It's a low-key experience, and one that can be severely compromised – as mine was – by the weather on a dismal Aberystwyth night. My iPod screen needed wipers such was the deluge.
But while there's something fascinating about peeping into other people's lives and glimpsing their personal intersecting maps of the town, even without the rain there are flaws in this set-up that make it a frustrating experience – one that is limited, rather than liberated, by the technology. The stories aren't revealing enough, and all the multitasking means you don't notice your surroundings as much as you might if you just wandered without the iPod. You sometimes feel as if you are on a wild goose chase (the stop-off in the pizza parlour goes nowhere, and I become overfamiliar with the scaffolding on one particular street), and the final gathering at the choir rehearsal isn't structured in a way to offer sufficient social or emotional pay-off.
I've seen plenty of theatre that reminds us that everyone's lives, however quiet and mundane, are interesting. But this sells participants and audience short.
