LAUSR

In the opening of Live: Witness (2013), a performance piece created to celebrate Live Theatre Newcastle’s fortieth birthday, the Deputy House Manager, Michael Davies, met audience members in the box office area of the theatre building, which was refurbished at a cost of £5million in 2007. Davies embarked upon what appeared to be a conventional theatre tour: ‘Can everyone hear me? Can you see me OK at the back? Good evening, my name’s Michael and I’m your guide for tonight.’ As his speech continued, however, fragments of his own memoir interrupted his account of the theatre’s history. Sometimes these interruptions took the form of narrated accounts, such as when he described the events surrounding his own fortieth birthday ‘...left it too late to organise anything special [...] ended up drinking whiskey in the Cumberland [pub]’. At other moments he embodied or acted as ventriloquist for other characters, on one occasion seeming to become his own mother calling him back from a daydream ‘Michael ... Michael, look at me when I’m talking to you’. For me, as an audience member, the combined effect of these interjections was to disrupt the conventions associated with the tour guide format, which include objectivity of tone and a coherent – often chronological – narrative, and the result was that the history of the theatre and Davies’s autobiography become entangled. By the end of the speech, the two narratives had become so difficult to distinguish that it almost seemed as if Davies was the personification of the theatre itself. He described his own childhood sitting at the back of the working men’s club with ‘crisps and pop’, and noted that 1. Newcastle City Council, Property Performance Report 2008/0 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle City Council, 2009), 13.