Waiting in the Summerhall lobby, three other people and I are greeted by a smiling American in chunky glasses who takes us downstairs. She explains that we are about to experience three different Skype calls to theatre makers around the world. We’ll be encouraged to interact with them, as they’re performing solely for us. She asks us where we’d like to go first - I choose Singapore - and gives us each a Hershey’s Kiss.
The room where you actually make the calls is a stone-walled basement with washing lines of postcards hanging from the ceiling. An attendant puts headphones on me, starts the call, and the performance begins. My first call is with Ethan, a friendly guy in Singapore, who gives me a series of instructions on cards. My second is with a fallen angel in Madrid, who has a message from above. My third is with a woman called Kim who seems to be my ex-lover. Each performer is engaging, though in different ways: Ethan interacts with me a lot, laughing and joking, while Kim unleashes a barrage of memories in my direction. The angel spins the camera round the room, lies on his back, puts his hands over the camera, making use of the visual possibilities of the format.
It’s a strange sensation being plunged into an intimate conversation with a stranger. You feel exposed, under pressure to say the right sort of thing. This isn’t perhaps an experience for the faint-hearted or the socially awkward, but it’s an admirable project. Too often, as a theatre-goer, it’s easy to sit back and wait for someone on a far-off stage to entertain you. There’s no responsibility, no reciprocity. Here, the intimacy of the one-to-one format means you are forced to acknowledge that the performer is a person too. You have to connect with them, share something. There’s plenty of merit in the performances I saw in Long Distance Affair, but the value of the experience is far more than that: it forces you to forge a bond with another human being.
