THE SOUND OF SILENCE

Tuesdays show consisted of three audience members all of whom were suffering from involuntary muteness. Every question was rebutted with stoney silence and grim looks, I turned to the live stream in the hope one of the four people watching might interact with me give me something to build the night around get things started and yet at every turn all I received was silence. Trapped in a vacuum of my own making, at Rats no one can hear you scream because it's usualy internally and well there is no one there, how can you end a show if your audience won't even let you start it.  

The phrase "car crash" is thrown around but I like to think Rats is the closest thing to when drivers slow down on the motorway to see mangled bodies of car crash victims stuck in their twisted steel coffins. Like the sirens call our audience is drawn to the show through the eerie silence emanating from whatever dark basement we've been allowed to host this weeks horror show and the first halfs silence was one of the loudest we've had. As the various voyeurs took their seats throughout the evening some transfixed for the whole night, others unable to suffer the pain of the night longer than one act we built some sort of momentum which culminated in instructing the whole audience, which was now about twenty people to hide from the only audience member who had bought a ticket when she went to the toilet. As I stood on stage whilst our only paying audience member was in the toilet and the others were hiding in the stairwell it dawned on me that I was born to play to empty chairs in empty rooms anyone can build an audience up but not building an audience up and still carrying on that takes real talent.