Theatre / Blank. At Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, until February 24. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

Nassim Soleimanpour’s Blank is a bit of a curiosity. Is it a play or an experiment? Is it an acting exercise?

This is the Iranian playwright who also wrote White Rabbit Red Rabbit, where a different actor performs every night, having not seen the script before.

In Blank, a single actor (on opening night Christopher Samuel Carroll) organises audience participation in a way that develops into the story of a life. This requires that the audience are willing to go along with requests. Old-fashioned panto comes to mind, so it won’t be an evening of pure sitting and receiving and laughing. It’s a little like going back to those old traditions.

Or it could be the mindset that takes a group of students through an acting class.

Whatever it is, it certainly requires an actor who, like Carroll, can look after the audience while opening up some powerful storytelling possibilities. Audience participation is a delicate thing and he manages its surprises with sensitivity and humour.

There’s no real possibility of predicting what will come up or the direction in which the narrative will go when there’s a large element of chance. Carroll stays very conscious of this.

On other nights the ephemeral nature of performance (no live performances are ever identical) will be underlined by having a different and experienced actor in charge.

Here’s the list: February 10, Stefanie Lekkas; February 17,  Ali Clinch; February 23, Heidi Silberman; February 24, Sarah Nathan-Truesdale.

To say more would be to spoil a potentially powerful evening of filling in the blanks.

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