Kieran Boland

"What year did Jesus think it was?"– George CARLIN (1937 – 2008)

On the streets of Melbourne, two professional actors, Tom Hobbs and Lachlan Woods, play amateur preachers who substitute the bible for a Stanislavski text on acting. The two preachers are afflicted by a literal rain of canned laughter whenever they read bible passages containing the phrase I tell you most solemnly.

Despite little evidence in the Bible to suggest that Jesus was prone to great bouts of laughter, the phrase I tell you most solemnly hints at the possibility of a previous omission in the text; a change in tone as the result of an undocumented joke between Jesus and his audience. If the medium is at least partly the message, the (amateur) public preacher's invariable lack of success in converting anyone at all suggests that he needs to examine his own role as a performer and take acting classes. If he is to avoid becoming just another clichéd street entertainer though, what approach to acting should he choose? Perhaps ‘the method’ proposed by Stanislavski could provide a suitable parallel to the process of redemption and transformation he speaks of.

This work also presented itself as a 'witness' to the raw material from which the preachers have ironically been transformed—that being the two (professional) actors who play them. This pairing was based on the time-traveling scientists from the short-lived 1960s television show The Time Tunnel—a duo that was forever lost in time but nevertheless always reprieved through teleportation to another time and location at the end of every episode.

West Space (2012)