A man and a woman sit across a table from one anoth­er at a Wel­ling­ton cafe. He’s mak­ing some­thing from a ball of Blu-tack, she’s draw­ing some­thing with chalk.

The latest pro­duc­tion from Down­stage, Etiquette, does things a little dif­fer­ently. Gone is the famil­i­ar loc­a­tion of the Han­nah Play­house. Instead the action takes place at a table at the Mat­ter­horn. Also gone are the act­ors, with the audi­ence becom­ing the per­formers. (OMG, I know.)

The two audi­ence members/performers are seated at a reg­u­lar Mat­ter­horn table, which is set with a num­ber of curi­ous props, includ­ing a glass of water, tiny fig­ur­ines and that ball of Blu-tack. These two par­ti­cipants each have an iPod, which provides them with their spe­cif­ic instruc­tions for the pro­duc­tion.

Lines are fed, stage dir­ec­tions are giv­en. Some­times the action takes place lit­er­ally between the two par­ti­cipants, oth­er times it’s with­in the audio, com­plete with a sampling of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

This 30-minute pro­duc­tion is a lot of fun. Sit­ting at the table, fol­low­ing instruc­tions, wait­ing to see what your tablem­ate is going to say or do to you is a big part of the exper­i­ence.

There are two Etiquette tables set up at Mat­ter­horn, both off in a side alcove, so you (hope­fully) won’t be dis­turbed by noisy and/or mun­ted diners. The two tables also run 15 minutes apart from each oth­er, so you won’t end up run­ning sim­ul­tae­n­ously with the oth­er table.

Etiquette was cre­ated by UK theatre com­pany Rotozaza, and is part of their “Autoteatro” concept of “self-gen­er­at­ing per­form­ance”. It left me want­ing to run through it again, and again in the man’s role, or even exper­i­ence anoth­er story in this format.

And here’s a tip: Etiquette make for an excel­lent date activ­ity. While it’s just fine for ser­i­ous couples, friends or fam­ily, the close­ness, inter­activ­ity and the abil­ity to take on anoth­er char­ac­ter and say out­rageous things would be a bril­liant thing to do with someone you fancy. Aw yeah.

  • Etiquette runs daily until 20 Feb­ru­ary at Mat­ter­horn on Cuba Mall.

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For an idea of what to expect, here’s a little trail­er for an earli­er Glas­gow pro­duc­tion. It does­n’t give too much away – in fact, it even looks a little dif­fer­ent to the Wel­ling­ton pro­duc­tion.