A resplendently bearded American man serves me a burger (well, a veggie burger) before returning his attention back to his grill and the queue of hungry people behind me. The sun is out and it’s just about warm enough to venture out without a coat.
People are drinking lemonade from plastic cups and while the scene resembles an ordinary British summer barbecue – paper plate, an abundance of mustard, a slight chill in the air – it’s taking place during the interval of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s twelve hour Life and Times marathon performance, part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival.
Our food is being served by the cast members, who having just performed for three and a half hours. They have many hours on stage still ahead of them but in stepping out of the theatre and feeding their audience, the interval, the space between, has been incorporated into their performance.
We are all in this together – a theme which echoes through the work itself, a verbatim account of one woman’s suburban American upbringing which is both very culturally and geographically specific and yet incredibly universal and unifying. We clutch our burgers and our foil-wrapped baked potatoes and find ourselves discussing both the piece itself and our own memories, of childhood, of school, of growing up.
There’s something immensely pleasurable about the fact this is taking place in Norwich as well, not in New York, not in London. The congregational quality of the experience, the sharing of food and stories, the spilling of the piece beyond the theatre walls, encapsulates all the best elements of the theatre festival.
It’s not that such long-form work doesn’t happen in London – as the Bush Theatre’s opening 66 Books marathon or Elevator Repair Service’s eight hour Gatz demonstrated – but the format lends itself to the festival environment, where the external elements, the chosen location, the connections made before and after the production, the act of eating and drinking together are all part of the overall experience. (The cast of Gatz did not hand out cups of cocoa at the end of their show).
The most exciting theatre festivals capture something of this. The West Yorkshire Playhouse turned their foyer into a park-like space, complete with bandstand, for their recent Transform Festival and Ipswich’s Pulse Fringe, which concludes this week, is programmed so that visitors can experience a number of shows in one day before wrapping things up, if they so wish, with some live music.
At Exeter’s Ignite, a six day festival of performance which also begins this week, people are being encouraged to meet over breakfast and discuss the work they’ve seen as well as the work they plan to see.
While theatre can be intense and intimate, it is also – in the main – a communal, connecting art form and, in focusing on one person, on one single life, Nature Theater of Oklahoma succeed in bringing their audience together, both within the theatre and outside, in the world beyond.