In The Dark

Actor, improviser and comedian Sam Longley is in the rather unusual position of knowing less about the play he’s in than those interviewing him. “The other day I was being interviewed on radio,” he recalls, “and they had me on mute listening to the intro to the piece: ‘Coming up next we have an actor from White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, a story about…’ And I had to take the phone away from my ear. Because I don’t want to know, am not supposed to know, anything about the show.”

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is different. Nassim Soleimanpour, a young Iranian playwright whose passport was cancelled after he refused to do military service, wrote the play with the hope it would be able to travel the world in a way he could not. For each performance, the theatre is asked to leave a front row seat booked for the playwright. Just in case. Audience members are also encouraged to keep their phones on, and are given Soleimanpour’s email address so they can send him photographs and notes during the performance. “I don’t get the script until I walk on stage; I believe that’s the case, anyway,” explains Longley. “I don’t know if I’m the only person in it or if there are more people in it... I’m not allowed to Google it. I can say that the playwright seems to be – from his name – not Anglo, so possibly not from Australia. But that’s all I’ve got, really. You do know more than I do.”

Longley is one of ten actors who will be performing White Rabbit, Red Rabbit for Perth Theatre Company in September, each on a different night. Forty-eight hours before their performance, each actor will be sent an email instructing them to bring a water bottle, not to drink from the glasses on stage, and to prepare an animal impression. “I think that might be some of the fun for the audience. That gap between your knowledge and my knowledge is so completely large. Watching me try to catch up to where you are might be is where the fun of the play is. But I don’t know! It could be so completely different as well.”

Longley is one of the founding members of the Big HOO-HAA!, an improvised comedy group that performs every Saturday night, but he has also performed extensively as a scripted theatre actor. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is somewhere between these two forms. “Perfect improvisation is about being almost zen and you’re purely in the moment. You don’t prepare anything, because you can’t possibly know what’s going to happen. So if I sit there worrying about what’s going to happen, then that’s unnecessary work. So I have to be totally open to whatever it is, and I have to roll with it and make choices as I go and be prepared to succeed or fail.”