A conversation with a friend after seeing Dick Johns – What Midlife Crisis? brought up questions of one’s expectations when attending the theatre. My friend is a cultured and very intelligent guy, who probably doesn’t get to the theatre as often as he would like. However, he knows the mechanics, and he knows theatre’s versatility so he was not baffled by the evenings events rather he was uplifted by them. The post-show lift back to his place brought up the fact that theatre, and its conventions, can create certain expectations for the infrequent but, in my friend’s case, learned theatregoer. Expectations both in its form and its content.
We were having this conversation because what we had just witnessed was not necessarily theatre as you might expect. Neither was it a stand up comedy gig or a night of cabaret or a table quiz or a lecture on pop culture in the 1980’s. It did, however, have all these elements and more. What Dick Johns show is, is storytelling and it is so at its most honest and free. It is honest in the context it gives: Johns tells his audience which bits are true to his life and which bits are fictions; he evens alludes to points where he, or his wife, are not sure what bits may be one or the other. It is free because he allows the audience and feeling in the room help tell the story.
The audience are arranged in a ‘cabaret’ style and they are encouraged to interact with each other and with the performer. Johns opens the show like an emcee at the local glee club introducing the acts to follow but instead of acts they are his stories. The format then shifts to the quirky lecturer regaling the chart toppers of the 1980’s and tracking his ever receding hairline with his headshots – the research was there; the PowerPoint was there; the middleagedness was there. Then the stories begin.
There are five stories in all interwoven into the evening serving as the back bone of the show. Each story has a different function going from the hilarity of the domestic situation to the darker side of life with topics of domestic violence and feuding parents through the eyes of a child. In each story there is nothing new as such but it is the combining of these subjects, and the form that they are presented, that is intriguing. The juxtaposition of the jovial emcee with the darker undertones and overtones arguably serves as a catalyst for questioning of propriety around how we discuss and think about the more difficult stories of life.
Johns’ interactions with the audience throughout the evening places them very much in the performance world while at the same time placing the subject matters in the world of the audience. Whatever you feel about interactive theatre, or whatever you feel about the 1980’s, if you like storytelling, particularly the old oral traditions, this one is for you.
There are parts that I question if they would translate should the show be taken beyond Cardiff but these are in isolation so could well be omitted or adapted in the right context.
An excellent show that is more complex than surface suggests.
Chapter, Until April 16