Sitting in the lotus position on a mat of taped-together tennis towels, Jamie Wood meditated as the audience idled in. Every now and then he opened one eye to spot someone in the audience, picked up one of the tennis balls encircling him, pointed at the person, and threw it at them. Usually they caught it, and the ones who didn’t had to try again. Any audience member whose energy threatened to disturb Jamie’s Buddhist calm was asked to breathe deeply and control themselves. In other words, don’t go showing off, be centred, and all will be well.
As a young boy, Jamie struggled to find a place in a world divided by fans of John McEnroe and love for Björn Borg. Like Marmite, it was a strictly either/or affair. It was a deeply personal one too, as memories of tennis from that time were tied up in recollections of the performer’s family pinned to the television screen as the famous pair battled it out. Because it was not possible to love both, Jamie stood by Borg, if only for his fetching long blond hair. And of course, unlike McEnroe, Borg exuded the kind of grace and calm under pressure that characterised Jamie’s performance. We, the audience, were therefore being coached in loving Borg; and in loving him we were gently coaxed into falling for Jamie too.
Beating McEnroe’s charm and openness made it hard not to fall for the performer’s argument. This was made all the more remarkable by the fact that the audience was asked to fill in the gaps with possibly the highest levels of participation I have seen recently in theatre. Around Jamie’s coming-of-age narrative, declaimed against a soundtrack sampling news and popular culture from the 1980s onwards, the public were gently invited to step into the performer’s tennis shoes. Your reviewer even made his debut at the Unity Theatre when asked to read out instructions on the back of a postcard for the audience to throw tennis balls at the performer, who stood in the camp pose of the crucified Jesus as we shouted ‘Jamie, you are useless!’ Later, two audience members performed a script that with comical pathos recalled a childhood memory of Jamie and his brother at loggerheads during a tennis match.
The trope of audience participation is obviously well-established in physical theatre circles but can be deployed half-heartedly in some performances. Beating McEnroe went full throttle with it. At times the source of entertainment was the performer flagrantly stepping aside while others did the work. This made complete sense, though, as when another audience member was asked to enact a fight alluded to earlier in the show between Jamie and his schoolyard adversary – only in this instance Jamie played himself. Whether the incident happened or not mattered less than the way in which such clichéd schoolboy angst was mediated through performance. And performance indeed triumphed as the mock fight morphed, hilariously for all concerned, into what seemed like a courtship dance. That the participant performed naturally on stage had everything to do with Jamie’s innate ability to relax his interlocutor – no mean feat in the context of a full auditorium. Referencing autobiographical narrative in order to construct empathy through performance and console the spectator, Jamie Wood will have no problem beating McEnroe again.