GUERRILLA THEATRE
a post-covid guide to theatre
'Guerrilla Theatre' is part-guide book, part-script. It seeks to consider what absurd limits the Covid-19 pandemic may have offered to theatre or whether it is entirely paradoxical.
Does theatre require an audience?
What if that audience is implicated in the health of the show?
Can theatre exist for one person?
Can the actor be the audience, theatre set and stage simultaneously?
The answer to most of these questions is no. Guerrilla Theatre is interested in what makes theatre, theatre. As a medium, as a ritual and as a commune.
The play is written from the perspective of the partner of the writer of the book. The writer has gone missing. During the pandemic, it felt like someone had gone missing. It felt like it was a detective mystery story.
Theatre has always revelled in the possibilities of one character in one room. Covid offered that to the world. Yet Guerrilla Theatre also used the pandemic to grow a new form of theatre. In many ways, the pandemic is the single-greatest threat to the industry that theatre has had to face due to the audience not being allowed to be in theatre spaces. What can theatre become in such difficult circumstances and is this an opportunity to grow the industry, to be experimental, or to reduce the medium of performance and turn it into TV or film.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Covid theatre become monologues online that tended to rant about the disease or the government. There were some on-the-nose references and horror-driven implications but on the whole, the world has yet to reconcile with that unexpected beginning to the 20s, which undoubtedly will connect future events.
Guerrilla Theatre is an attempt to reconcile with and learn from the pandemic. To combat theatre with absurd ideas of meaning, of design, of thematics and of characters.
Theatre runs along - laying the track before the train comes - Guerrilla Theatre was the intermission.