The Blind Date: Promising Beginning Fails To Deliver

Dating is not my favourite topic for a play. I feel it's over-used and usually petty. So I wasn't going in expecting to be blown away to begin with. And I was almost pleasantly surprised. This play does have potential and I know this is the debut performance, so I have high hopes for future incarnations. The first few minutes in BC Ceramics had me thinking “Huh. Maybe this will be an unassuming but human piece, saved from its cliched subject matter by involving the audience and getting us to really care for the character's plight.” And, for the first few moments, it did. And I want the writer and performers to remember that.

All new works have teething trouble. And often you can highlight your strengths in a way that makes the audience forgive your weaknesses. The downfall of Blind Date wasn't any particular major failing, just a collection of poor choices, any of which on its own is not such a big deal, but cumulatively they left the show with few redeeming qualities.

The writing was clumsy and cliched, padded with meaningless dialogue. The “multimedia” was pointless and distracting. Our “flight attendant”, while bravely commandeering a group of rambunctious audience members, didn't seem entirely comfortable speaking to a group of people and kept trailing off uncomfortably. The choice of locations could have been more thought out. The sites themselves were fine, but they were so far away from each other that the audience spent half the play walking, talking amongst ourselves. Next time, work the action into the travel so you don't have to fight to regain the audience's attention every time the play resumes.

Perhaps I am too hard to please. Perhaps this play was just put together in a hurry. Perhaps it was a brave attempt that just had too many poor choices in a row for me to see the heart of it. Personally, I just didn't care about the characters. It was a pointless production executed artlessly and all the good intentions in the world don't compensation for a lack of discipline and lack of planning. To me (and I know it's different for everyone) the magic of theatre is that connection between actor and audience, that attempt to reach into our hearts and share whatever they're feeling and make us see that essentially we're all the same. Not necessarily in a big profound way, but in a human way. Not that any of this is easy to achieve with actors lip-syncing to pre-recorded, vacuous dialogue with the audience so far away that the we could barely read their body language never mind their facial expressions.

I hope this play gets reworked and remounted. I'd like to see it with some different choices. A bit more thought out. And I would really love to see the play I saw taking shape in those first few minutes in BC Ceramics. If Blind Date does get remounted, I hope they market it as a “date” event. The locations were picturesque, the musical interlude was a lovely touch and the atmosphere was perfect for a date night.  The seeds of a good show are already there, it just needs to be taken further. If you're gonna break the fourth wall, go in there with dynamite, then cross the threshold and engage your audience. The distance put between performers and audience was entirely inappropriate, I felt like a stalker peering through a window.

My advice for a redevelopment of this piece is: be brave! Take your choices and make them mean something. Hire an editor or a dramaturg and tighten up the dialogue. Work on filling silences with subtext, not letting them drop. Scrap ALL of the electronics. You don't need them. Let the audience into your world, don't keep them at arms length: let them sit closer, talk to them. And if the actors really can't project enough to be heard 10 meters away (which really, they should) MIC them. This play could be really sweet, romantic and red-faced with embarrassment. It just needs some more work.

Site specific theatre has to be really riveting to compensate for the potential distractions of your environment. I doubt this production could have held my attention in a silent auditorium lit with a big spotlight. Then again, I don't have popular taste. I don't watch sitcoms or cringe comedy, so perhaps I was just the wrong person to review this show. If you did enjoy this play, please do comment on this review, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Over beers after the show, there was one comment that I feel put it all in a nutshell: “I could have forgiven all of the grievous technical errors if the writing had been better.” I would like to make an additional “and the the acting too”. Three dimensional characters would have drastically improved the performance But the good news is, all of these things can be surmounted. It's never easy creating theatre. Especially if you're doing it all yourself on a low budget and not enough rehearsal time. And perhaps this is the first brave attempt in a journey towards a really great piece of work. I hope so.