The Confidence Man

It takes tremendous ambition to give your audience only one sixth of a story. It’s even more ambitious when your six live performers are all unrehearsed audience volunteers. But the particulars of plot are the least important part of The Confidence Man – what matters is the inventive way the audience experiences that plot.

Our six actors are already seated when we enter the theatre. They’re wearing obfuscating, oversized masks that resemble commedia dell’arte props on steroids. The set is in the centre; we sit on the perimeter, surrounding like voyeurs. On each seat sits a pair of headphones and a smartphone with six icons corresponding to each character. After a brief technical explanation, we begin with the story of Sam, an accidental witness to a car wreck.

Or rather, I begin with Sam; a patron beside me begins with the whining monologue of emasculated father Peter, whose story I jump to after five minutes. Later, I observe his wife, then his daughter and later, the two bumbling crooks who’ll meet them all in the climax.

The amateur performers gesticulate in response to pre-recorded audio prompts. They’re hearing the story unfold in real-time, reacting to the dialogue and choreographic direction, like some form of semi-improvised extreme pantomime, as we watch on. It’s rough around the edges and there are occasional lags between speech and action, but there’s a vital energy in knowing that the performers are untrained, that everything could go haywire at any time.

But it doesn’t, and therein lies the brilliance of The Confidence Man. Director Zoe Pepper and her collaborators at Side Pony Productions have created an ambitious technical triumph; an interactive, real-time, choose-your-own adventure pulp thriller topped with delicate sound design and painstaking attention to detail. If ever a piece of theatre is worth seeing more than once, this is it.