Fight Night

(Sydney Theatre Company)

'Fight Night', currently staged by the Sydney Theatre Company, is more an inter active festival event than a play. The audience is handed transmitters as they enter the auditorium which they are to use to post votes at regular stages through the performance.

The performance space is a boxing ring without the ropes which is placed diagonally in front of the audience. A compere appears and a microphone drops from above as in a boxing match. He introduces the evening and explains the voting mechanisms and gets the audience involved in immediate voting by answering a series of personal questions such as our gender, age group, income level etc.

Then the compere introduces the five 'contestants' who appear wearing hooded dressing gowns again as in a boxing match. We are asked to vote for the contestant we are most interested to learn about purely from their appearance and from that point the audience votes regularly on a whole range of issues the contestants themselves have expressed an opinion about without us knowing at the time of voting which opinion belongs to which contestant.

By this means we gradually, and in some ways unwittingly, eliminate one contestant after another until there is one final 'winner'.

It is an original and highly entertaining, indeed involving, evening as well as a fascinating exercise in the vagaries of polls and polling.

Highly recommended.
★★★★