THE ORDINARY AND THE UNSPECTACULAR by The Theatre Practice

“The Ordinary and the Unspectacular”

Reviewer: Liana Gurung
Performance: 16 August 2018

The Theatre Practice’s The Ordinary and The Unspectacular is a brave piece that pushes its audience and its actors by stretching the definitions of storytelling. Comprising a series of seemingly disparate vignettes, I found myself referencing the piece in ‘chapters’, with each sequence centred on a particular character and their interactions with an element of the everyday – a bench, a box, a ladle… the list goes on.

Probably most impressive is the actors’ conviction to the performance. This hugely vulnerable production calls attention to the innate beauty, ugliness and strength of the human body, at every and any age. The slowness of the piece, paced by the long, lumbering gaits of its performers, belies great physical discipline. The Ordinary and The Unspectacular deconstructs and defamiliarises the mundaneness of living. It displays exquisite detail, with clearly careful, measured choreography that forces the audience to pay painful attention to the banal motions of the everyday – with this magnification transforming even the benign act of sitting into something almost grotesque.

But perhaps the obscurity and opaqueness of the piece does its audience a disservice, where at times the piece seems self-indulgent. In such a nonverbal piece reliant on minute detail as this, much more care and consideration must be given to audience experience in terms of stage positioning and seating. The play begins with long, drawn minutes of silence and darkness in a kind of enforced meditation. But the tone of stillness and concentration fostered by the beginning of the play is hampered later as the audience stretches and strains in their seats to get a glimpse of a man, hunched over a pair of bright red slippers near the foreground of the stage, distracting not only each other but perhaps even the actors from immersing entirely in The Ordinary and The Unspectacular.

As respite from the repetitive monotony of fast-paced living, The Ordinary and The Unspectacular accomplishes this with aplomb. Yet, in doing so, it thrusts its audience into another kind of monotony in its incomprehensibility as the play veers towards its end. However, it is commendable that in today’s commercialized theatre, there is still space to incubate such difficult pieces. My only hope is that for future projects the audience, too, will be given a stronger consideration in the shared space of the performance stage.