Internal

It’s not every day that one feels compelled to join an impromptu support group comprising strangers with whom one has just seen a show … but then Belgian company Ontroerend Goed is not in the business of producing everyday shows.

The post-show pub session that followed our 25-minute experience of Internal seemed to serve a number of functions. Firstly, it allowed the five of us to share details of the one-to-one elements of the show – each audience member shares a private booth with an actor, and there’s no way of knowing whether these encounters take the same basic form until after it’s all over.

Secondly, it provided the opportunity to set the record straight regarding any personal comments that were made. This might not seem necessary – surely we could quite easily have shrugged off the experience and gone home, safe in the knowledge that we’d be unlikely to ever bump into our fellow participants again? And yet, some find they cannot just shrug it off … perhaps because it is designed to get under the skin.

Thirdly, it allowed the chance for some to vent the sort of feelings that one wouldn’t imagine could develop in such a small space of time. In our group, these ranged from exhilaration and embarrassment to outrage about the ethical implications of the show’s format, which takes inspiration from speed dating and group therapy.

When I first read the description of Internal in the Fringe programme, it didn’t appeal. While I was sure the show would be interesting, and the notion didn’t fill me with horror, I wasn’t personally very keen to experience it. Having attended at the insistence of friends and colleagues who were still talking about it days later, I wonder if those for whom the concept is instantly appealing – in other words, the majority of those taking part – might have quite a different experience.

The first part of the show serves to test how each participant deals with an intimate situation. Some will be very uncomfortable from the beginning, when the actors wordlessly select their ‘dates’. However, this is just the beginning. Unless they have been given a heads-up, little do they know that they are at the very beginning of a rollercoaster that will later spin them upside down.

Not everyone leaves happy, and just as a single bad date in real life can leave emotional scars, it’s possible that this experience could prompt a unique kind of soul-searching that’s further complicated, but not necessarily made any easier, by the fact that it is, of course, ‘just’ a performance.