"Look," says the woman, holding out a shoebox with two holes at one end. So you do - and find two eyes looking back at you. Some three hours later, you realise this was, at a glance, what Portuguese artist Patricia Portela's refreshingly ambitious, astutely engineered trilogy would have you ponder - the relationship between watcher and watched that says: "If you can be seen, you exist".
The pivotal figure in the piece is Flatman, played with roguish panache by Anton Skrzypiciel. Part one introduces us to his world, the two-dimensional Flatland: projected on to a huge "book", it is a multimedia realm of documented fact and fiction that Flatman can inhabit but never experience. He wants to live it large in a 3D world - ours - and he has a plan. As long as we keep him in our sights, he is "for real". Cue a blacked-out bus ride to a deserted warehouse where there's a pell-mell slippage between audience as spectators and audience as hostages.
Skrzypiciel, in James Bond tuxedo and Dorothy's glittery red shoes, keeps switching from the terrorist who needs visibility - so he threatens brutality - to the cabaret illusionist who cuts people up for our entertainment. We're released, but brought back. Fed pizza and cocktails. Shown alarming footage that might be fact or fantasy while our own experiences - including escape down a bouncy chute - are filmed, to become part of the final "recovery" section back at the Tramway. A monolith of monitors beams out the news, with our kidnapping the springboard for a stream of "reality" that we know, for a fact, was brilliantly contrived play-acting with Skrzypiciel the puppet-master par excellence.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article