Long Distance Affair[author-post-rating] (3/5 stars)

“Would you like a kiss?” asks my Long Distance Affair guide during her off-beat and quasi-poetic opening speech that explains the practicalities of what’s about to happen. Dumbstruck, bewildered and probably a bit excited, I simply stare at her. She promptly offers me a small Hershey’s chocolate Kiss and smiles consolingly. Strangely, this exchange is a particularly accurate summation of the experience of Pop Up Theatrics’s Long Distance Affair – an innovative interactive work where audience members engage in a one-on-one live Skype call with a character in another country.  At first, when you sit down in front of the screen and hear the familiar burble of the ringtone, there’s a piercing moment of limitless promise, the thrilling immediate threat of actual human connection, before what you actually receive: a sweet, harmless and totally ephemeral treat.

Now, every experience of Long Distance Affair is entirely different depending on the individual you talk to. That’s the beauty of it, and why it’s difficult to discuss the exercise as a cohesive whole. My only complaint is that the majority of my encounters didn’t actually make much use of the immediacy and intimacy of this mode of communication. Of course, it’s quite strange and disruptive and wonderful when someone in another country who you’ve never met, and you will never meet, is staring into your eyes and saying your name, responding specifically to your every gesture and facial expression in a way that an actor in a traditional theatre space could only dream of. It’s an encounter of the most intimate kind and it’s a pointedly theatrical one. My pre-show briefing had no qualms about acknowledging that there is a script and you are an audience, but it also warns you that involvement is almost unavoidable, and it’s right to do so.  It’s so difficult not play along whole-heartedly, even when you laugh or roll your eyes, they laugh with you or ask you what you’re rolling your eyes at – because this is ‘liveness’ at its most, well, live.

The entire operation is undoubtedly effective, but I preferred the outright surrealism of my final encounter to the earlier attempts at pure realism, whose provocations of complicity and guilt only resulted in the eager onset of compassion fatigue. Angel, an earthbound angelic messenger in skinny jeans and yellow t-shirt, receives my call in Madrid. He looks at me like he’s fallen in love, or more like he fell in love with me a long time ago and this is our moment of reunion. He  tells me that he’s been seeing my face everywhere, and even though he’d pulled out his wings in avoidance of the task, my phone call to him is a providential sign that he has to deliver his message. I won’t tell you what the message was because you’ll definitely laugh, but hey, “Faith is belief without proof,” Angel asserts. I’ll admit to you, I managed to sort of, actually, maybe, get convinced. Now that sounds utterly foolish, but it’s all in the moment. Long Distance Affair may still be a work-in-progress and a little imperfect, with greater quality control needed in terms of participating performers, but I doubt there’s anything else quite like it.

Long Distance Affair (make possible an impossible trip) played at Summerhall as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.