5/15/2020 Vanishing Point Plays By Justine Bayod Espoz

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Theatre: Vanishing Point Plays

By Justine Bayod Espoz
January 15, 2017

During its 2016 edition,

the Edinburgh
International Festival
bestowed Scotland's
own Vanishing Point
theater company with
the honor of presenting
two of its productions:
the company’s most
recent project The
Destroyed Room and a
restaging of 2009’s
Interiors. Upon Interiors
watching both works, it
becomes abundantly clear that the pairing is meant to explore the relationship
between participant and spectator, cleverly playing with the concept of the
fourth wall in order to manipulate the viewer’s experience.

The aptly titled Interiors places the audience in front of two large windows
that reveal the interior of a house. It is through these windows that we watch a
small party unfold, the glass obstructing our ability to hear the conversations
taking place inside. At first, the audience is reduced to a simple visual voyeur
left to its own creative devices when piecing together a complete story. That is,
of course, until a ghost appears to narrate some, but not all, of the party-goers’
private thoughts.

The production’s narrative thread is limited simply to the course of a more or

less average evening amongst friends. The focus is on the individuals rather
than the group as a whole, a tactic designed to draw you from the already
private space inside a home into the even more private space of the
character’s minds. The success of this theatrical gambit is entirely predicated
on how emotionally or intellectually invested the audience becomes in the
characters, and unfortunately for Vanishing Point, these characters don’t
generate much investment.

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5/15/2020 Vanishing Point Plays By Justine Bayod Espoz

Interiors bore a striking similarity to spending a night chit chatting with

friends of friends at a low-key get-together, but at least in real life you can
participate in the small talk rather than just listening to it listlessly. Even a
potentially intriguing new conceptualization of the role of the observer falls
flat when proper character development and storytelling are not fully realized.

In the second Vanishing

Point production, The
Destroyed Room, Jeff
Wall's 1978 photograph
of the same name serves
as the premise for a
conversation amongst
three actors. The image
is of a ransacked room
that leaves the viewer to
ponder what happened
moments before the
The Destroyed Room picture was snapped.
What caused such
destruction and why?

The audience is deceptively told by one of two cameramen filming the

discussion that what we are about to see is an entirely unplanned and
unscripted event; that a different yet photo-related question kicks off the
nightly round of discourse so that a distinct discussion takes place each night.
Some audience members may, at this point, silently question when a
discussion amongst actors began to pass for theatre.

Thankfully, this is not the actual case. Although there is some witty, off-the-
cuff banter early on, the conversation quickly, and just a little too obviously,
switches over to a scripted conversation that addresses how Westerners
observe from afar the horrors of war and natural disasters half a world away.
The play asks the uncomfortable question of how we know when we've
crossed the line from concerned observer to accessorial voyeur. When does a
desire to be informed become straightforward morbid curiosity? And what
kind of social fallout does that shift generate?

Unlike Interiors, which imposes a physical fourth wall to make us examine

our supposed desire to get around it, The Destroyed Room removes the
theatrical fourth wall in order to show us that our TV and computer screens
are the new fourth wall, creating a safe barrier from which we watch the rest
of humanity without actively participating. It is a thought-provoking piece
that, hopefully, has us questioning our own motives each time we choose to
look at video or photographs of the death and anguish of others. It’s an
extremely timely piece that should be seen far and wide regardless of how
uncomfortable its themes might make us.

Read previously published Theatre essays

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