In the wake of last year’s Dr Drama Makes a Show, which we got to see just before NZ went into full Lockdown, Dr James Wenley PhD now brings us Dr Drama Makes a Show with You. This being the 64^th review I’ve written since early March 2020, I had forgotten how much I had taken issue with that first show until I checked that review just now, so I approach this new show as optimistically and open-mindedly as always.

Note I have written ‘I’ seven times so far and ‘we’ only once, which it seems is the next thing Dr Wenley wants us to question/ feel bad/ apologise about when it comes to contemporary theatre practice. (Check last year’s review for his earlier litany of apologetics.)

A year ago Dr Wenley’s stated aim was to make “an urgent inquiry about what means to own up to your past and present self to come to terms with your identity.” This year, “Dr Drama’s exploration of performance theory and his own personal association with theatre leads him towards a confrontation with how he has used theatre in an attempt to feel less alone.”

Dr Drama (James Wenley) enters with TikTok-esque pizzaz to declare himself The Performer, the doer, and us The Audience, the viewer. He then canvasses for alternative words for our role in act of Theatre. A number are offered, and I realise now I should have added, Responder. As sensate beings we actively respond with thoughts and feelings – hopefully aligned with the theatre-makers’ strategies for engaging us.  

We are told that Thespis was the first Performer to become an Actor by appearing on stage as a Character. Wiki tells us this was in the 6^th century BC (aka BCE). Further post-show research reminds me Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey between 800 and 700 BC/E, so exploring the human condition and our moral universe through individualised characters and experiences predates Thespis. The step he took, then, I would suggest, was well overdue.  

Yet Dr Wenley, in his role as Dr Drama, seems to suggest some kind of rot set in with Thespis and, at the end of the show, he concludes that our mission must be to drop the ‘me’ and get back to ‘we’. My counter-assertion, here, is that the focus has always been on us, the audience: all but the most egocentric, self-indulgent theatre is made for the audience to relate to, subjectively and objectively; for the enrichment of our human experience at individual, collective and global levels.

So how does Dr Drama Makes a Show with You exemplify Dr D’s apparent mission? We are here, he tells us, “To create a show that can get to the heart of what theatre can do.” While his show is written and designed to be repeated, each iteration will, he tells us, be unrepeatable – because of what we bring to it. Everything is explained – for health and safety reasons, I suspect – so there is not much to discover except within ourselves, in response to the requirement for us to participate in the process.

Between monologue segments where Dr D revisits some of the personal elements traversed in last year’s show, replete with lots of ‘me, myself and I’, we – in the performance space – share interest in Wenley’s suitcase full of theatre programmes and engage in simple exercises that introduce us to each other and create a sense of collegiality. We share personal stories about to our initial connection with theatre, in pairs then with the group – and one story is chosen to be the premise for the show we go on to devise under the tutelage of Dr D.

A visit to the stage show Wicked inspired one of our number to pursue a career in theatre and she is now a stage manager. Our devised piece will therefore be titled The Wicked Stage Manager. Another of our number offers birth as the starting point. Three volunteer role-playing performers enact the birth as Act 1; Act 2 depicts a maths-teacher-led visit to the theatre where the central character experiences her first kiss – with the Stage Manager; Act 3 takes them backstage where the wicked Stage Manager’s death-by-complex-number, uttered by the maths teacher in response to “What did you think of the show?” renders the position vacant, to be filled by central character.  

It’s fun doing this but hey, building from the premise through the basic tenets of improv would have produced a more cohesive and entertaining result. And it cannot be said that we touch on, let alone explore, any of the elements of plot, theme and structure that might allow that initial premise and the offers that followed to be wrought into a play that added up to more than the sum of its parts, in a way that could resonate with any audience as something more than a whimsical anecdote.  

Certainly this iteration of Dr Drama Makes a Show with You is composed entirely of I/Me elements – which is as fine as it is inevitable. And does it “get to the heart of what theatre can do”? Well I suppose it is sort of organic, in the way one through-line grows but …

The promotional material concludes: “Both a love letter celebrating what live theatre uniquely can do, as well as a pointed critique of how theatre can exclude and fall short, Dr Drama Makes A Show With You attempts to give voice to both performer and audience to empower and elevate critical perspectives.”

For me it falls well short of any given one of the memorable shows represented by the theatre programmes which now adorn the stage space, courtesy of the actual stage manager. I would rate it enjoyable in the process but finally inconsequential.

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