ANYTHING can happen in a site-specific show, says theatre director Paul McLaughlin.
During Hotel, the multiple award winning Fringe Festival show (2008) set in a hotel room, All Black Rodney So’oialo walked in. He was staying at the Museum Hotel at the same time and strolled into the wrong room by mistake.
And with the audience only an arm’s length away from the performers you never know what people might say during the show.
“A few inappropriate comments were made [during Hotel].” Including “check out her legs.”
“Somehow people think they are watching TV or a film,” McLaughlin laughs.
His latest site-specific show, Salon, is a prequel to Hotel. And like the first intimate and confronting performance, Salon is bound to be cutting edge.
Set in an actual hairdresser, Fallen From Grace on Ghuznee St, Salon is the story of the airhostess in Hotel who has obsessive compulsive disorder. The new play is completely self-contained so you needn’t have seen Hotel to understand the plot.
The unmistakable authenticity of these site-specific works comes from the amount of research that McLaughlin goes into. This time he invited members of The Phobic Trust and the Head Injury Association to help two actors nail their parts.
McLaughlin, who directed Chapman Tripp Award winning show The Blackening, describes conventional theatre as “sterile” and enjoys the challenges involved with site-specific works.
For one, the salon is small and restricts the audience numbers to 15 per show, second, McLaughlin likes to work with “what is there”.
“If there is a desk in the front [of the salon] we have to use it.”
Salon, Fallen From Grace, 64 Ghuznee St, to March 6, to book call 3843982.