I watched this via Shedinburgh, the online Edinburgh Festival event, in August 2020. This is a very tardy blog.
Having seen this brilliant play live, performed by Tim himself, at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto a few years ago, and knowing first hand the role that interaction with the audience plays, I was intrigued to see how Tim would adapt to the live Zoom performance. The play requires audience members to share objects — this sharing is integral to the story of art and ownership and permission that unfolds — so key to the success of the play. Audience members were invited to share a photo of an object, rather than the object itself, ahead of the performance — from which Tim selected and showed the images on screen in moments where the objects themselves may have been handled.
Thinking about images and the lack of control we have of images that are shared over the internet, this change was profound — an innocently shared photo became something else, something you may or may not have liked it to represent. Striking in these times.
Beyond this, of course Tim is an engaging storyteller - captivating in his manner and pacing. The staged version already leveraged video and this was not lost in the Zoom performance. Frankly, this adaptation presented new and unique thoughts about the script and story, and is a brilliant example to other theatre makers of how to use the limitations of the medium to our advantage. Live and real yet also recorded and distanced.
Magical stuff.