The Telephone Game

The Telephone Game is a long performance game, lasting between 4 and 6 hours. Dialling 9 for an outside line, The Special Guests while away the hours in gallery spaces and small rooms, making calls to each other, to the outside world and asking the audience to leave us answer phone messages, responding to the question “What are you missing?

The Telephone Game sprung from a concept we touched on in This Much I Know (Part One), and quickly developed into a piece in its own right. Armed with telephones adapted by sound artist Tom Bugs, the piece is a durational game for three or four players. In early versions of the game, we played with prank calls, real calls and taped messages from our audience, and as the hours wore on the atmosphere in the room became more and more hysterical. Rules were made and then immediately broken, we thought we knew where we were heading and then one call would change the direction of the piece completely. It was less of a durational performance, and more of a long performance game, where if you put in the hours, you might be able to figure out some kind of loose narrative, a theme here and there, a reason for us all being in the room. Some people described the show as like watching daytime TV – you wanted to get up and leave, but something pulled you in and made you stay.

In later versions of the show, we tightened up the rules, basing all our games on answer phone messages left for us in the 24 hours prior to the (close of) show. People were invited to call our ‘Missing Hotline’ and leave messages in response to the questions: What’s missing? What are you missing? What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find? Divided into departments, including “leisure and tourism” and “science and nature,” we then processed these messages making real and fake calls in an attempt to find, or find a strategy, to locate what was being missed.

Created by: The Special Guests
Creative Advisor: Sara Jane Bailes

2006
4 February: Inbetween Time Festival, Arnolfini, Bristol
6 May: BURST, BAC, London

2007
21 July: Westival, The Brewhouse, Taunton

2009
24 October: Bristol Jam, Bristol Old Vic

In grey caretakers overalls, 4 performers call one another on touch tone phones and make mock calls to unseen ‘characters.’ When I come in to the 6-hour durational installation … Suzie is curled into the wall, sobbing on the receiver. At intervals, we’re played tape recordings of messages the artists have invited people to leave on The Special Guests’ answer phone between 12pm January 28 and midnight January 29: What’s missing? What are they looking for? What are they hoping to find? Replies range from a philosophical enquiry about the nature of loss to the mundane misplacing of objects – like the man who’s always losing his glasses and his car keys and says it’s hard to find the latter without the former. There are also recordings made by one of the performers in the Arnolfini foyer at various intervals throughout the show.

As the work progresses, it becomes clear that each performers has a signature. Suzie calls her mother: ‘Just phoning to see if everything’s okay and you’re not missing me too much’; Matthew is always expecting someone; Lucy rings ‘Sandra’ obsessively, with an update on her progress throughout the day. The behaviours and codes around telephoning are acutely observed (the lovers, neither of whom wants to put the phone down first; the family catch up that goes on forever). The importance of the telephone in out lives is also explored. It can be a lifeline; a source of irritation, an interruption, an accomplice to deception.

The experience of this performance is cumulative, becoming more rewarding. For instance, Suzie tells her mother on the phone that a man has come into the room and he may be ‘The One.’ It becomes clear that she’s talking about an audience member. He blushes. She asks his name. At her mother’s prompting, she asks what he does for a living. Much later, she references this moment so it becomes an in-joke for those of us who were there at the time.

Gallery 5 is packed for most of the day and there is a real sense of camaraderie in the room. The work is wonderfully manipulated without feeling manipulative. The performers get us all to cheer when the next person walks in; they offer us cups of tea and throw us chocolate biscuits. Performers Matthew Austin, Lucy Gibbs, Nina Wyllie and Suzie Zara make for compulsive viewing. Even after hearing the same elements over and over again, I am convinced by their veracity, impressed by their concentration and impeccable comic timing. People spend a long time here; I am in Gallery 5 for 40 minutes the first time. I need to see something else, otherwise I could stay all day. ‘No one seems to want to leave’, one of them says. I feel like a guest who doesn’t want to accept that the party is over.

Marie-Ann Mancio, realtimearts.net, 2006

Commissioned by Inbetween Time. Funded by Arts Council England. Supported by Prema Arts Centre.