Trevor Lock: Let’s Start a Cult!
PBH’S Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms (Venue 68) until 25 August ★★★
Audience Anonymous is a clever show. We, his audience, are all part of a Whatsapp group created by Trevor Lock. We are encouraged to look around, check each other out, choose our favourite person in the room and we are off and running. Well, messaging.
The premise of the show is that we frequently do find other people fascinating but lack the confidence to make contact. Current social mores make it more acceptable to share an opinion online than live. And this is what we do. Within Lock’s group we ask questions, answer, comment, compliment and criticise. We choose our “favourite person”.
Lock is part agent provocateur, part MC. All manner of extraordinary things have come out of these shows, we are told – even an engagement. When we gain the confidence to pop our heads above the digital parapet and communicate “live” then things hot up. There is a whole improvised scenario with Lock’s “ex-wife” in the third row. This is crowd work taken to the next level.
On the other side of town Lock says Let’s Start A Cult!. He has cult experience himself and, in its broadest sense, the “cult” is much more prevalent that you might think. What is fascinating – once Lock points it out to us – is how quickly a room can divide and reshape itself along lines which Lock draws.
Psychologically, it is fascinating, and in Lock’s hands, funny too. He is the master of crowd manipulation and all our laughter is with each other, not at each other. We nominate and choose our cult leader and decide on “core values”.
Lock gently squeezes the comic juice out of everything. The ploy of getting members of the audience to keep notes and then reading them out is a Lock standard, and here reaps a fine harvest of laughter. These shows are always different, always fascinating and always fun.