Take Me I’m Yours: Beyond the Supermarket

Beyond the Supermarket is a show that features supermarket goods as actors. Using the publicly available smart phone app Take Me I’m Yours, a human actor interacts on stage with local products that are usually found in the cupboards and fridges of our kitchens.

Beyond the Supermarket was first performed at the Expanded Narrative symposium earlier this year and developed by Chris Speed, Duncan Shingleton and Lytton Smith: http://expandednarrative.org/symposium/ and introduced theatre goers to the secret lives and opinions of Marmite, sugar cubes and steel wool. This humorous and disturbing tale changed the way that audience members perceived how they might in future pick up products, and encourages them to listen to what they have to say.

The piece was performed twice and involved an actor using an iPhone extend a relationship with 8 physical objects on stage. The set up was simple, a troupe of actors has failed to turn up for a performance leaving the script writer with no show. Handed an iPhone the distraught professor turns to the objects for help. What follows is a shared audience / actor experience in which neither are entirely sure what the objects have in mind as the script unfolds revealing the personalities of the objects.

The iPhone was connected to a data projector to display the live messages that are spoken back to the actor, and allows the audience to share in the emergence of a meta-narrative.