Stand on the stage, spread your arms to the audience and open a vein. This is how I was taught to be an actor. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. Up until very recently, there was a dominant mode of thought in actor training which germinated throughout the theatre world. The thinking was that suffering was a necessity for good performance. One had to have suffered in their personal life and suffer through their preparation for a work, in order to achieve orgasmic, transcendent relief upon creating the good work. This attitude has been gradually worked over by the “younger generation”. Now, Rehearsal rooms are gentler spaces, in which physical and mental safety come first. In my own experience while studying my Master of Theatre at VCA, myself and other young directors worked to find the balance between our needs and the needs of the cast. New directors check in with the cast’s emotions at the start of rehearsal, new directors do not demand pain or sacrifice beyond reasonable professionalism. They certainly don’t demand nudity, unrehearsed intimacy, or recount of personal sexual experiences. But a trace of the old exists in the new.

This past year, Fergus Morgan of The Stage magazine asked why the Edinburgh Fringe is "flooded with solo shows about awful experiences".

It seems to be that instead of asking others to take on difficult material, performers now wish to shoulder the burden by themselves. One of my acting teachers used to ask us to recall moments from our lives that we could reenact to embody the different facets of Laban technique. This is the kind of emotionally hazardous work that young people seek to destroy and yet we have reinvented it for our own purposes. Why?

Theatre has been hit hardest by this… because it is a permanently unwell thing. Always either too niche or too broad [1], too exclusive, expensive, archaic, and so on. A stubborn grandparent who refuses to die and may well outlive us all. In response to this, theatre grasps desperately for relevance. To those who try to make a living out of it, this is embarrassing. On top of trying to make money where there is none, we must insist that the thing we do is worthwhile. Into this strange brew we introduce Fleabag, the one woman show that launched a thousand ships. When Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote this show, I doubt she anticipated its success would eventually be measured in the tens of millions of dollars. Fleabag is not marketed as being autobiographical [2], but it is personal to Waller-Bridge. Even though it is not about her life, to watch it feels as though you are being let in on a very private story. This sensitivity struck a nerve, and the limited series TV adaptation of Fleabag was a runaway success. On the back of this success, Waller-Bridge was granted a genuinely breathtaking deal by Amazon: she would receive $20m a year for three years to work on shows for them that she did not have to finish or deliver [3]. Unsurprisingly, given the open-endedness of that contract, she did not deliver. Now imagine you’re a young theatre-maker, fighting amongst your friends for the same unpaid residencies, unpaid developments, and thousand dollar grants. Perhaps you’d be motivated to change tack.

[1] I think that in the collective imagination of people outside theatre, there exist only two poles: the most insufferable, nonsensical bullshit you had to watch once in a black box because your relative was in it, and Kinky Boots.

[2] The insistence on every character having a pseudonym does invite the viewer to speculate about who each of them may “be” in real life, even if no such person exists.

[3] For the record, this is cool as fuck.

In the wake of Fleabag-mania, enter a far more literal, distressing, autobiographical beast: Baby Reindeer. This is a capital-T true story. It’s chock full of emotional viscera: stalking, sexual violence, queer identity, drugs and love and pain. It shares a theatre production team with Fleabag, Francesca Moody Productions. Both shows were first performed solo at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. This time, we aren’t shying away from the metatextual/biographical implications. Part of the spectacle in this case is matching the events of the show to real life. The real Martha makes herself known quickly and jumps at the chance to do a sympathy interview with Piers Morgan. Viewers try to line up writing credits with the timeline of the show to determine which writer sexually assaulted Richard Gadd, the creator. For a time he becomes a dark mirror of Taylor Swift. Rabid fans want to puzzle out every detail, to get closer to the Truth. The onus to communicate to the audience is no longer on the artist and what craftsmanship they use to engage. The art is a puzzle of signs to be decoded to figure out the goings on of the author’s life. In ninety-three, David Foster Wallace pointed out that TV had given up gesturing towards “versions of ‘real life’ made prettier, sweeter, better” and instead only referred inwards, to itself.

“It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It’s that any such connection has become otiose.”

Now we find ourselves thinking about what’s offscreen again, but we split the difference, blurring fiction and reality. What does this show have to say about its author’s personal life? It’s no coincidence that this shift takes place in the highest saturation point of reality TV we’ve ever experienced [4]. On top of this, we find ourselves inundated with information about millions of random people via social media. We have been conditioned to be nosy rather than curious.

[4] This is not to say that Baby Reindeer and Fleabag are on par with MAFS. Both Gadd and Waller-Bridge made arresting, truthful works that I enjoyed. Their impact, however, is beyond their control.

I was prompted to write this because I saw an advertisement for a show that left a strange taste in my mouth. Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen, recently staged at the Arts Centre, promises a vulnerable dark comedy from “the Olivier Award winning producers of Fleabag and Baby Reindeer”. I check off the mental list: solo, angsty, premiered at Edinburgh Fringe. I feel that a pattern is forming, but I didn’t see enough stuff at Fringe to make the call. I inquire with a close friend, Martha (not THE Martha from Baby Reindeer, fortunately), who sees theatre more often than me:

“I saw this one harrowing show about a woman experiencing psychosis, and it feels like there’s a never ending supply of that sort of thing. When you were at Fringe this year, did you feel like you were seeing a lot of solo shows about horrifying trauma?”

“Yes!”, she tells me, “so much so that I’m writing an article about it.” [5].

[5] Fucker!

The sentiment is gaining popularity, it seems. We exchange notes. I fork over the $70 to see Feeling Afraid. It doesn’t have a tremendous impact on me. A neurotic young man performing a stand-up confessional to the audience recounts his difficulty navigating gay hook up culture and a monogamous relationship. (Frankly, I experience that performance every time I get coffee with Zack.) The play wrestles with the distance between audience and subject. Our protagonist can’t let people get close; his relationship with a sweet and sincere American is hamstrung by his shield of humour. The audience is also held at a distance in the same way. Feeling Afraid is a stand-up comedy hour, in which we are occasionally reminded that it is ‘theatre’ in the more traditional sense, in the moments when the protagonist’s true feelings peek through. This is what the play gives me, what I latch onto. A distancing from theatre itself, as the form by which we should tell stories. I get the sense that this show, and the many others like it happening at fringe festivals, are each hoping to be the next Fleabag. In an interview with the ABC, playwright Marcelo Dos Santos refers to Fleabag when describing his own work [6]. He reveals that after COVID devastated the momentum of his career, he “wanted to make a play that I would like to see and not second-guess what the industry and audiences want.”

[6] Crucially, he notes that “He [the protagonist] is not a complete simulacrum of me… if I was just reading out my diary, that would be terrible.” The article, however, does reference him “mining” his friend’s dating horror stories.

As I said before, theatre is the sick man of the arts. It is made up of people who collaborate and compete with each other for slim chances at slimmer opportunities. When pitching things to festivals, producers, funding bodies etc. there is an increasing impetus to strip things down, remove artifice. The smaller the cast, the cheaper the show. A show that is staged as a confessional requires little in the way of set dressing, props, tech, and so on. What we end up with is a swathe of young theatre makers feeling as though the best story they have to tell is their own traumatic experience and the most viable way to get it out into the world is by reducing its theatrical artifice as much as possible. Without being cynical or judging these people, there must also be the germ of hope that their story will be seen as outrageous enough to get a TV adaptation. Maybe they will be plucked out of obscurity; out of the trenches of independent theatre [7]. Is this not an assembly line of people attempting to escape the thing they’ve trained for? Surely that can’t be sustainable. It leaves us with a glut of shows that don’t actually want to be theatre. Ideally, an artist chooses a medium because it isn’t just the best medium to tell their story with, it’s the only medium. A play shines when you feel it could only exist in the room you’re in, watching it. Why should I watch a play that wants to be something else, somewhere else?

[7] I have to imagine that there are now television producers trawling through Edinburgh looking carefully for the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer