Brighton playwright Tim Crouch is aiming to create a never-ending piece of performance art beginning in the city’s Fringe festival.

He will start a relay play, the first piece as part of The Nightingale Theatre’s long-term project to demonstrate “theatre can happen anywhere”, from a Victorian-style bathing hut in New Road.

He’s penned a five-minute one- to-one play about a relationship called Host. It will be passed on as the audience becomes performer once they’ve seen it.

“It’s free and requires a small amount of commitment from an audience,”

he explains. “Inside the bathing huts parked up in New Road and on the Old Steine there will be a table and two chairs.

“I start it by reading it to the first audience member and then on it goes. You can book a slot or just turn up. Unless you are the first in the day, you won’t encounter me. You will encounter the person who has just been an audience member to someone else. They will become the performer and you will be the audience. Then you will become the performer before leaving and a new audience member comes in.”

At the end of each performance, the performer passes the text on to the listener and so the relay begins. Each exchange will last for ten minutes.

“It’s like a kinetic energy thing. It carries on and on and on – it is like a chain of links.”

It’s Chinese Whispers if the words stayed the same, because for this first piece, the only thing to change will be the delivery.

“Our plan is that there is always a thread back to the first person who performed it – that would be me in this case 30 performances earlier – and their memory of how they were performed to effects how they then perform and so on.”

The piece has been written for people who are not rehearsed, Crouch says.

“What you can also do is collect a copy of the script and set off another thread. As long as it is someone has been in some way connected back to me. You are welcome to go to your kitchen, to go to your house, to a pub, and start another chain.

“The ultimate plan is to have people set up performances of their own. It is like genealogy. You can trace your performance back to the first ancestry.”

  • Host, Bathing Machines, New Road, Brighton, and War Memorial, Old Steine, Brighton, Fridays and Saturdays, May 3, to May 31
  • Ten-minute slots from 6pm to 8pm, free.