Domini Public – The Lowry Theatre, Salford

Creator: Roger Bernat

Reviewer: Katherine Kirwin

The Public Reviews Rating:

Domini Public is a performance with a twist; the audience becomes not only the spectator of the piece but also participant, performer and pawn. Initially. the audience/cast of Domini Public as they enter The Lowry are told to take a pair of headphones and follow instructions. We entered the theatre space and congregated on the stage of the Main Theatre. The space is completely bare apart from two giant red signs at either side of the stage marking ‘left’ and ‘right’.

As the performance begins the soothing Mozart music which had been piping through our headphones is replaced by an authoritative voice with the slightly unusual greeting of ‘Welcome to the Lowry, switch off your phones. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’

Thus, followed a 3D poll of the audience discovering our reasons for attending, the city we’ve travelled from, and our relationship to each other by use of the space on the stage. The questions varied widely from the mundane to the philosophical and indoctrinated us to answer them honestly. For example, by following up an easy-to-answer question such as ‘Who looked at themselves in the mirror before they came out? Place a hand on your head’ with ‘If you believe that your appearance improves your social cohesion, place a hand over your eyes’, I found myself answering the second question more truthfully because my mind was already engaged in factual information about myself.

The movements across the stage of the 40 or so members of the audience created a kind of life-size board game, highlighting our relationships to each other through differences of opinion or facts. It also indulged our spectator, voyeuristic instinct as you found yourself craning to see who had cried at the last Olympics. The intriguing element of the production for me was the sense of participation and interaction and yet no-one spoke and we only truly interacted with the voice in our ears.

Gradually, almost without noticing, the authoritative voice began to divide us into social groups by placing us into different coloured jackets of accessories. The second half became a more literal sense of performance in which each audience member was assigned a role and identity which allied them with certain other members or isolated them from others. We began to obey the orders of the voice, creating the bizarre, orchestrated tale of prisoners and prison guards. Retrospectively the link to the Stanford prison experiment (a psychology experiment in which students turned into fearsome guards or willing victims through obeying orders) is clear; we had become indoctrinated into obeying the voice’s questions/demands and therefore continued to do so within the performance. However, it was pleasing to note that our audience did not obey all directions, when informed that the male police officers were now to rape the female prisoners, no-one moved and there were several nervous giggles, marking the decision that this crossed a line in our willingness to obey the voice.

Domini Public preyed upon the psychology of human behaviour, our willingness to follow orders, to create hierarchies, to group others by appearance or social type, and our enjoyment of games. Domini Public allowed for the tension and drama of a life-size board game in which we were involved in faking a fate which was not our own and yet was still innately our own, i.e. as a pawn or character. It also steadily dragged each audience/cast member away from the questions we knew the answer to, to questions we’d rather not answer, to questions where we were denied the opportunity to provide an answer. This performance was fascinating, thought-provoking, enjoyable and sure to re-surface in your mind in the days to come.