an Eyewitness Account


The author of the Sad Magazine article was kind enough to send us a few additional details about the performance he witnessed:


Subj: No Shame Theatre UK
Date: 6/20/00 12:20:11 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: (Robert M.J. Morris)
To: No Shame Theatre

Hiya,

Sadly I can't tell you very much about the No-Shame Theatre idea over here. I saw a version of it at the Who's Seven convention in Ashford, Kent (in October '96 I think it was). It was a gathering of Doctor Who and Blake's Seven fans and that in itself was very very scary. The theatre session was one of the entertainments on offer.

Presumably the people staging it had seen (or heard) of it in a US form and decided to do something similar. They asked for a few volunteers to turn up on the first day for an hour or so then staged it the day after.

Unfortunately, it was all designed to be funny but relied on thin ideas and extremely poor jokes. Not a good experience for those of us squiriming in the small audience.

Perhaps No Shame relies to a certain extent on the indulgent goodwill of the audience. If that's the case, staging it on the second day of a gathering of SF fans was probably not a good idea - we're a cynical bunch at the best of times and us Brits aren't jollied along by people very well. There's a tendency to lean back and say "well, entertain me!". The few of us that were there woud probably have forgiven the ametuerishness of it all (we love underdogs after all) if the organsiers hadn't been so quick to apologise beforehand.

I don't know what the concept behind No Shame originally is or how close these people were to it, but it was as far as I am aware a one-off. I put it in the glossary simply becuase the effect it had on me was quite profound.

So there you go. All I know and a bit of cultural and audience analysis thrown in.

Good luck with the work. Hope you're enjoying it, anyway.

Take care,

Rob.

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