Susan and Darren: The appearance of authenticity

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Notes

1. There were big shifts in the show in response to context or particular changed circumstances, both at Susan's and Darren's home and in the performance space. For example, when we performed our ‘Christmas special’ in Lancaster, Darren was worried that he wouldn't get the ‘Living Room’ section right because Sue had moved everything around the weekend before in order to put their Christmas decorations up. He wouldn't countenance not being (or at least trying to be) faithful to what the reality of furniture layout was at home.

2. Some of this description applies only to how we had to/ chose to configure it at the Nuffield. Also you missed out the parquet dance floor, the four speakers, the CD player, the mic and stand, the mirror ball; they're our set too.

3. It ‘started’ earlier than this. We (and Susan and Darren) always saw the dance workshop one hour before the show, the show and the party afterwards as inseparable parts of the whole ‘event’.

4. The dialogue works in three main ways:

1.	Fixed, scripted (e.g., Wasteland; Pink Bell Dress). It changes as much (or as little) as any text-based performance would.
2.	Improvised within rigid, fixed frames (e.g., Living Room).
3.	Rule-based, to maintain spontaneity, bring in new material, air subjects they wanted to confront in the context of performance (e.g., Darren's ongoing question to Sue on this tour about why she hasn't put him on the tenancy yet).

5. There is a fragment of disco music but the majority of music in the show is reggae and specifically Lover's Rock. This is music that Susan has listened to since her teens and was introduced to in the shebeens and blues clubs Darren talks about in the ‘Wasteland’ section.

6. Dancing is a huge part of Susan's and Darren's lives. Of the approximately 85-minute running time, 32 minutes were dance- or movement-based.

7. Sonia Hughes, the writer, argued for changing this section on the grounds that she was too visible in it. We argued for keeping it, for that very reason. Like some of the choreography and other sections of the show, the momentary movement away from the everyday was deliberate and important.

8. This is my own simplified interpretation of the ‘impossible’ nature of this identification (influenced by Judith Butler), which I am employing to avoid a lengthy and complex diversion from my current argument. Actually, in Disagreement and elsewhere, Rancière discusses this identification in terms of being attached to an ‘empty signifier’ by which he, like Ernesto Laclau, appears to mean a sort of rhetorical catachresis (see Laclau 1996, whose Chapter 3 is titled ‘Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’, pp. 36–44).

9. There is a problem of definition. ‘Non-professional’ or even ‘amateur’ often imply either unpaid or inept. Susan and Darren were neither. We pay all our performers (when we're allowed to: with EatEat's performers, this was illegal). ‘Non-performer’ is absurd, because they clearly are performers in the context they're encountered in (and if the argument is made that this isn't what they do most of the time, let me line up some thousands of self-defined ‘actors’ who haven't done any work paid or unpaid for donkey's years): ‘untrained’ is not specific enough, and what kind of training counts: RADA? BTEC? degree in theatre history? The workshop-hunting autodidact? We prefer Rimini Protokoll's term (or thereabouts) ‘experts in everyday life’. Susan is there because nobody else could replace her.

10. One of the producers is Darren's sister Donna.

11. That's what we all call it too.

12. We have also asked this question of ourselves since we began working as Quarantine and continue to debate it.

13. We asked Susan what had changed for her over the course of repeatedly performing the show. She told us that while she remained nervous before performances, as she became more accustomed to it she didn't see herself as performing at all but rather as having a conversation with people.

14. Susan and Darren (and all of our other work) does use irony, but hopefully it is irony without cynicism.

15. We feel that something of the distance of spectacle is removed by the audience's active relationship with the performance (conversation, making sandwiches, dancing etc.) and also somehow a shift for those audience members sat in rows away from the ‘action’, witnessing others more actively involved. This change in relationship, with Susan in particular, perhaps alters the sense of ‘privilege’.

16. Those pesky armchairs. Always a problem. We proposed losing them entirely for the first tour. We felt that the audience occupying them were neither here nor there (if you know what we mean) and there was something folksy and fake about them as objects (old granny's chairs), that belonged neither in Susan's and Darren's home nor in our theatre space. But when we took them out we had this horrible, clichéd, ‘multi-media performance’ bank of monitors staring back that was way too present. So the armchairs stayed, with some regret.

17. Last words. In the final performance at Contact on the second tour, Darren had begun the ‘Living Room’ section when the back doors of the studio were flung open (not the doors that any of the rest of the audience had entered through). In strode two large middle-aged women. Darren turned and without missing a beat, said ‘Oh come in Dotty, Marie… Grab yourselves a chair, you haven't missed much, I've just been describing our living room’. So Dotty and Marie (old friends of Susan and Darren) grabbed two of the armchairs and stuck them on the dance floor in prime position at the edge of (but clearly ‘on’) the stage. Susan and Darren (show and performers) continued with Dotty and Marie solving our armchair problem.