When they take the stage this week, the cast of The Record will meet each other for the first time. The 45 Bristolians taking part don’t know one another’s names. They’ll be strangers sharing a stage, just as they share a city. Part of Bristol’s In Between Time festival, The Record is the first show that 600 Highwaymen have brought to Britain, but Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone have been quietly shaking up American theatre since 2009. The New Yorker critic Hilton Als has piled on the praise: “I wish to hear anything that 600 Highwaymen has to say.”
Sometimes, they don’t say anything at all. The Record is a wordless piece, an hour-long movement score for group performance. Sometimes the performers stand alone, striking a pose. Sometimes they band together and pick up one another’s actions.
The Record is rehearsed individually. Over a month, each participant works one-on-one with Browde and Silverstone. They get their own script, a personal score, and their own technical rehearsal. “They never meet each other,” explains Silverstone. “Even when they show up to perform, they only sit in a circle backstage. Then they step on stage together and it happens.” All these pieces, all these people, slot together into a show.
That’s not The Record’s USP though, he insists, nor what it’s about. “It’s just the way we choose to work, like preferring one-on-one conversations to group chats.”
The Record takes its time, very deliberately. Those on stage are silent and, mostly, still. “It’s about giving people permission to really stare,” says Silverstone. “We feel that’s important.” The show is designed to change the way we see others, not at a glance, but in depth. “I think the piece is most successful if we can rewire the audience’s time signature,” Browde adds. “Our engagement with one another.”
Watching a recording of a New York performance, I felt I understood diversity a little more precisely. Here was a stage filled by performers of different races, ages, sizes, shapes and genders. A stage of individuals, but also a group. Performed so soon after Women’s marches and anti-Trump protests worldwide, it might seem like an act of resistance. Browde takes that thought in. “A lot of the things that are particularly problematic about Trump’s America are about invisibility or erasure, not seeing or acknowledging this group of people. To be whoever you are and to be on a stage or on a podium, that’s an act of resistance.”
“It’s scary,” he says, “Standing there, facing the audience or what you imagine the audience to be, what you think they see in you, what you think they’re looking at.” A lot of 600 Highwaymen’s work in rehearsal is about getting comfortable with that vulnerability – not getting over it, but being open to it. “We’re all here, all looking at one another. We’re all in this together. How are we going to handle each other? How are we going to meet each other?”
Their show The Fever, which premiered at the Under the Radar festival in New York in January, takes the idea a step further. It invites the audience to step up and take part, there and then. “What if we really are all in this together?” wonders Silverstone. “What if we have to be?”
That’s 600 Highwaymen all over. Browde and Silverstone had both worked in traditional theatre before collaborating. “The insularity of that world was very apparent to us,” says Browde. “We made a lot of choices early on about working against the insider-ness of theatre – not wanting to work with our friends or people who spoke the same language as us.” Instead, they’d use theatre to bring people together.
The politics is in the process – “refusing to operate within a set model” – as much as the end result. When they started out, the company set up in the basement of a church in Brooklyn. “If we weren’t seeking anyone’s permission, we could write all the rules: who we were working with, what we were making, where we were making it.” Browde’s words recall that old hypothetical question: if theatre had never existed, if you were starting from scratch, what would it look like? How would it work?
It’s a question of ownership. Who gets to stand on stage? Who is theatre for? Their version of Death of a Salesman, This Great Country, cast men and women of all ages and races as Willy Loman, America’s everyman. His wife was played by six women, from pre-teens to pensioners. It was put on in a rundown bingo hall in Texas. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” Browde admits. “We started with the people in the room.” This year, they’ll do the same in Salzburg for Odon von Horvath’s Kasimir and Karoline. It’s giving a state-of-the-nation play back to the nation, somehow; handing a play over to the people.
Some describe such casts as “non-performers” but 600 Highwaymen reject the term, mostly because to be involved is to perform. Silverstone pulls a face: “What does it even mean to be a non-performer?” (Ditto: non-professional.) “Our hackles go up because it’s a way of reducing something,” Browde continues. “It says: ‘Not this, this is amateur, this is other. We’re on the stage of the Bristol Old Vic, but, yeah, that’s not actually theatre.’ Well … why not?”
- At Bristol Old Vic, 9 to 11 February. Box office: 0117 987 7877.
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