Review: Trevor Lock’s We Are Each Other at The Spring, Havant: ‘a truly collaborative performance’

The Spring is beautiful at the moment, decked out with hanging greenery and paper lanterns.

After arriving, my companion and I pull up a chair in the main gallery space, where there’s only a microphone and a row of plastic seats facing the audience space.

Although everyone gets comfortable before the show begins, it’s not long before Lock is moving people between chairs and onto different tables, making sure we can all see eye-to-eye.

The show was one that centre director Sophie Fullerlove was keen to bring to Havant after she saw it at the Edinburgh Fringe, and it really is a perfect fit for the venue.

Somewhere in between experimental theatre and very interactive comedy, We Are Each Other is all about connection.

Quite literally ‘a show unlike any other’, each performance is determined by the unique mix of people who happen to be sharing the room that evening.

Nothing is rushed - you feel that there’s plenty of time to get the vibe right before ‘the real show’ starts - and Lock begins to mine slithers of information from each person around him.

It couldn’t be further from the tense, adversarial relationship between a stand-up comic and a heckler (or unlucky front row target) - instead, Lock uses the snippets of identity to gently tease out comedy, finding the humour in our individual mundanes.

He holds his own against some of the more bristly audience members, and invites us to riff off each other, making the show a truly collaborative performance.

There’s no real topic - the conversation happily rambles from local churches to first languages and from Martin Luther’s 95 theses to the material make-up of one man’s jumper - but topic isn’t the point.

Lock’s game is to help us to connect to each other, and find the things that link us: the most bizarre connection he pulls out between two strangers is that they both, in different countries and at different times of their lives, have been escorted by armed guards.

When I think back to the show, instead of focusing on Lock’s performance, I instead remember the other audience members - the couple who met in Wuhan, the lady who grew up in Detroit, the Feng Shui expert who taught ballet in China, the GP in the rainbow jumper filling in for someone’s poorly mum.

I think that means that whatever Lock was trying to do - it worked.

An interesting, unique, and thought-provoking show.

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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