It’s 11.50pm on a Friday night, and I’m about to attend a theatre show. Less of a show, more of an experience, perhaps, and I’m going to be at it for the next seven hours.

This is The Night is Always Darkest, a seven-hour durational theatre encounter, brought to you somewhat by the team behind a similar long-form work One Night Band. There’s maybe twenty people in the audience, a number that will rise and fall across the night, and we’re all dressed for comfort.

This show is a pseudo-real insomniac experience of Lia (played by Lia Kelly) and her desire and fear around sending a daunting text message. You may not think that’s enough to base a seven-hour show on, and you’d be wrong about that. The irony is that the text message is sent – and then unsent – within the first two hours of the show, and yet becomes the thread that pulls us through the rest of the evening.

Phoebe (played by Phoebe Caldeiro) is leaving Wellington, and Lia’s not feeling so great about it. After she left a show of Phoebe’s earlier in the night, she’s sleepless in her room, ruminating over sending a text to Phoebe. We’ve all been there. We, as the audience, get to control Lia’s night.

Some very clever projection use (tech by Campbell Wright) shows us a live feed of Lia’s phone, her computer, and gives us a choice of prompts which we can tell Lia to action in five-minute chunks. Things like ‘turn on lights’ and ‘check messages’ become bolder and more ludicrous across the night – moving into things like ‘have a dance party’, ‘find all the apples in your room’ and even ‘drink a spoonful of canola oil’ (which is an ongoing meme from one of the audience across the night and fortunately doesn’t actually happen).

We are Lia’s intrusive thoughts, and after so many hours awake, these thoughts get weirder and sadder and more frenetic. This layer of audience interaction becomes voyeuristic and often even discomforting.

The audience requests that Lia scrolls through her past messages with Austin (Harrison), way back to the start of their friendship, and this isn’t staged. They’re real messages, real private conversation laid out in front of us and it feels… invasive. I don’t know how much of this was discussed beforehand, but I don’t love being part of it. Austin sticks his head through the curtain behind me and says, to the tune of, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever been part of.” No kidding.

A particular prompt about taking a particular daily medication – which I recognise the name of immediately but the rest of the audience clearly doesn’t as they prompt Lia to Google it – being left by the wayside by the audience for far too long really gets to me. I know it’s staged, but it still feels like we’re being negligent, and I find myself being annoyed by the rest of the groupthink, who prompt Lia with collage or cooking or something else lighter for what feels like far too long.

That is, in essence, the skill of this production. Good theatre makes you feel things, and I’m certainly feeling a lot right now from a situation I know is staged but hits me altogether too hard in the chest. If we are Lia’s intrusive thoughts, what are we representing? It’s 4am and I’m queasy, adrift at sea.

I don’t know if the audience is feeling the same about this experience as I am, but I do have to duck out of the room a few times during the show because it just gets too much. Utilising social media and integrating projection into theatre isn’t new – hell, I’ve done a similar real time show set on social media myself – but it’s more complex when these people are playing themselves, or at least a version of themselves that bleeds into the real.

It’s clever, but it’s surreal. Audience members divorced from context who have wandered into this show on a whim might not have this experience, but tonight’s audience is almost entirely people from the interwoven web that is Pōneke improv & theatre and, as such, we all have this ‘insider’s knowledge’, this glimpse beyond the stage. It’s an uneasy feeling that’ll continue to haunt me across the night.

Off audience prompts, Lia bakes bread (shared with us near the end of the show), does a get ready with me (GRWM), donates to charity and frets about contacting Phoebe. Lia’s anxieties get worse and worse as we near the end of the show period – one does tend to spiral if they’ve been up the entire night – and she ends up destroying her room, pulling her bed onto the floor. I won’t spoil the ending of the show for you, but relationships are restored, and the sun does come up in the end.

Even in our darkest moments there’s always a new day.

The Night is Always Darkest is an incredibly audacious show. I will always give patronage to something that’s as bold and clever as this, and that takes this much effort. Performing for seven hours, solo, is not an easy task; and Lia should be proud of her time spent on stage, for this performance is incredibly revealing and brave. The set is gorgeous (Izzi Lao) – a full bedroom and lounge space with working lights, computer, and cooking equipment on stage – and the technical work is an absolute undertaking.

Campbell lets me poke my nose behind the scenes sometime between hour ??? and ??? The workflow for the technical side of things is super inspired and impressive. I also can’t even conceive how much went into the directorial (Rosie Glover) and production (Austin Harrison & Dylan Hutton) areas.  

Durational theatre is an experience that you truly don’t understand until you’ve been part of it. It becomes less a disparate theatre, performer and audience, more a world where we all meld together in the end. The fourth wall, if there was one, melts away entirely, as audience members pick up Lia’s nail polish colours and prompt her to pick a specific one.

In Lia’s insomnia we find our own.

I truly don’t know how much I liked this show. There was a lot of joy, a lot of hilarity, and a whole lot of moments that hit me hard in the chest. I was so tired that I was seeing things by the end, and it’s taken me such a long time to unpack the experience that this review is coming out ten days after the fact.

Time grew softer, in that performance space. Edges melted away from things. The experience felt somehow longer and shorter than it was. You gain a different perspective on people you know when you’ve seen how they are at four am.

Though I can’t exactly place my feelings on a scale, The Night is Always Darkest is a vital theatrical experience. It’s one that I’m certain will change across its iterations, but at its core it is something you’ll be thinking about long after being a part of it. There’s no more effective, moving theatre than that.

[It happens once more, but differently, from 11.59pm on Saturday 8 March: https://tickets.fringe.co.nz/event/446:6208/446:23874/ – ED]

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