The Perpetual
Theatre.
The Perpetual Theatre is the brainchild
of playwright Sven Right.
"I used to write my plays one at a
time, and every time I began a new script it was the same old story.
At the start I was alive. I was illuminated with passion for this
tale I was going to tell. Hooray! I am thinking to myself, every
single time. But then the ending would come towards me and my
thoughts would become black. Oh no. I could never think of good
endings. My mind sank into the darkness and I was depressed, my
bones was depressed, it was all depressed: kaput!
'After a
while of this I began to ask questions about the role of endings.
Why do we need them for? Simple: because the audience needs to go
home. Why do the audience not go home in the middle? Is it because
they afraid of missing something? Yes, that is it. Ah, but what if
the play never did end, so they could leave whenever they wanted and
know that they are not missing anything? That would be the best!
'It is also true that the actors are always having more fun
from the play than the audience. The actors have been allowed to go
through the rehearsing and the developing and building of the play
which is it's life. The performances that you pay to see, they are
the corpses of a living project. I think it is not fair that people
pay money to look at corpses.
'My Perpetual Theatre is where
I make a culmination out of these two thoughts. We are renting a
space in the theatre district in Ex, and then we are building no
sets and no curtain. Phoo, away with the curtain! Now we only put on
one play. The play had its beginning two years ago and it has never
had an ending. The actors, they come and go. The script, I write
part of it, then they improvise, then I write more and come back
with more. They say, "Thank you," and do my script for a while. Then
they improvise again. Sometimes the audience joins in. We had one
girl, she joined us for four months and we did not know her name.
She brought biscuits from home. The biscuits joined the performance.
One was a door and one was a picture of a kitten. The kitten was
dead; that was in the story. The audience, they come and go. They
feed us fruit, it is the custom. They are seeing something that is
always alive and it does not need to end.
'This is the
best."
You can see the Perpetual Theatre in action at 50
Riddworthy Lane. Read the Exian Theatre
Guide.
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