ABSTRACT
A group of children, all appearing to be roughly between about ages eight and fourteen, enter the stage. Forming a line across the downstage edge, they address the audience chorally, ‘You feed us. | You dress us. | You choose clothes for us. | You wash us. | You bathe us. | You clean our teeth. | You sing to us. | You watch us when we are sleeping.’ 1 The only adults visibly present are in the audience, the target of the children’s address. Drawing a cue perhaps from Peter Handke’s now-canonical Offending the Audience (1966), the collaboration between Tim Etchells and Belgian theatre company Victoria, That Night Follows Day (2007) confronts the audience with not only the troubling perspective of theatrical labour relations, what Nicholas Ridout has glossed as the embarrassment of an audience member in her leisure time watching a performer in her work time, 2 but with the societal relationship of affective labour performed by adults for children, particularly in this instance within the privileged Western space (of the theatre).
