I take what must seem like an eternity to work out exactly how Zoe Pepper's upcoming show at the Arts House, The Confidence Man, actually works. With monkish patience she walks me through the concept, which she developed with Adriane Daff and their award-winning Perth-based company, Side Pony Productions. In a wonky nutshell, it's “an interactive audio show that is essentially a crime thriller, using pretty overt masks”. Find another play with that description and I'll eat my trilby.
The Confidence Man's plot mixes crime thriller and family drama. The characters are “poised on the precipice of a deeply sinister and disturbing chain of events when a large sports bag full of cash is brought into his very ordinary home.” From there a labyrinthine tale, criss-crossing action and morality, unfolds. However, and here's the catch, six audience members, “if they turn up early and are willing,” Pepper says, are the play's only performers. They're each given an oversized, caricatured mask representing the character they'll play for the duration of the show, and a headset through which they hear pre-recorded audio specific to that character – a mixture of inner thoughts, dialogue and instruction guiding them through the world of the play. “Each character has their own discrete channel, so they hear their own audio, and then [physically] interact with the other characters based on the timing of the audio. But, for us, it's all about weaving all the characters together, making sure the right characters are answering the door at the right time, and that all the scenes match up. I worked with six actors and we rehearsed over a week, just like a normal play. Then we recorded the tracks, made sure it was all timed perfectly. We basically hit play at the start, and the audience does the rest.” The audience, of course, all don headsets too. As multiple conversations, monologues and pieces of action happen on stage, they can toggle through which characters they want to hear. “The story is dense, so you will essentially be creating your own story by the way you change the channel. That's at your own discretion. No one will have experienced the same story by the end.”
The crime/thriller genre usually asks its audience to strap in and shut up as they're whisked away on a rollercoaster ride. Not so with this choose-your-own-adventure. Intertwined character relations and the family drama that plays out provide extra layers of complexity that bust generic borders and allow this traversal of the text. Pepper is happy to relinquish control. “We've been working on it for quite a while now, and we've tried it in a different kind of story, which was more politically driven. And the plot was much more complicated, in a theoretical way, which just didn't work for the world of the play. We needed something far more action driven.” As a result, The Confidence Man shapes up as a beautiful balance of thrills, choice and technical wizardry.
