‘Playing the game’: authenticity and invitation in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience

Abstract

Ontroerend Goed’s Audience is a theatre performance exploring the varying divisions between an audience, a crowd, a community, witness and mob. This article considers the responses of audience members to this performance, focusing on a pivotal moment of abuse. It reveals a plurality of ways in which individual spectators may experience the same event. In doing so, it explores how audience members experience such moments in terms of the perceived ‘authenticity’ or otherwise of theatrical abuse. It further considers the tensions between the kinds of participation that are offered by this performance and how this is taken up by audiences, showing how ‘non-activity’ can itself be seen as a kind of participation.