Theatre Review: Pin Drop

Pin Drop. Created and performed by Tamara Saulwick. Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall until Sunday August 29.

Sometimes, but only very occasionally, theatre-makers redefine what’s possible. Sometimes, the often fraught act of ‘collaboration’ evolves to result in a piece of theatre so hypnotic that you can’t actually believe what you are seeing. But rarely, in my experience, does a piece of theatre-making get so entirely under my skin that every single sense is startled into being in ways that I had never imagined possible.

With what can only be described as pure genius, Ms Saulwick and her expert team of artists and eleven additional recorded voices, has created one of the most extraordinarily involving and rewarding theatrical experiences. Every one of my senses was awoken by this intoxicating and hypnotic symphony of sound and light from the exceptional Ms Saulwick – and anyone who has any interest whatsoever in sensory perception or a stunning showcase in breath-taking technical skill should rush to the Arts House at the North Melbourne Town Hall this weekend to experience this supreme example of it.

Even with a grueling review schedule in the punishing Melbourne mid-Winter, I was compelled to walk home from North Melbourne with every one of my senses newly awakened to anything and everything that was going on around me. The sound of a creaking door in a shop across the road, distant voices, my heels on the footpath, screeching tyres and trundling, clanging trams – every familiar sound was highlighted in a totally new and unique way, such is the sensory power harvested and elucidated in this magnificent performance of immense theatrical adventurousness.

Sound Artist Peter Knight (composition, sound design and operation) is a genius. The intricate, other-worldly qualities of Mr Knight’s soundscape are astonishingly good, and in all my theatre-going experiences, I have never experienced technical artistry of such profound sensory invigoration like this. Ever. The design – credited to Bluebottle – Ben Cobham and Frog Peck – is extraordinary, deceptively simple yet masterful and remarkably perceptive. It makes me almost grieve for that way sound and light is so unjustly mis-used in the theatre (where even just turning a couple of lights on and pointing them at the stage seems to be considered ‘design’).

But it doesn’t stop there – such is the determination of Ms Saulwick for her peformance to be one of such alarming originality that even (and one might say especially) the good old theatre term ‘blackout’ takes on an entirely new dimension. Michelle Heaven’s movement is absolute and performed by Ms Saulwick with such a heightened level of skill and awareness that it is almost brutal in its sparsity, constantly surprising in its invention and never less than entirely of service to the soundscape and the almost filmic visions that unfold with pure poetic beauty.

Unforgettable. Go.

This review was commissioned by Stage Whispers magazine @ www.stagewhispers.com.au

Theatre Review: The Bougainville Photoplay Project

The Bougainville Photoplay Project. Devised and performed by Paul Dwyer. Directed by David Williams. Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall until August 15.

In the award-winning 1999 documentary Facing The Demons, the family and friends of murder victim Michael Marslew meet face-to-face in a ‘restorative justice conference’ between two of the offenders responsible for Michael’s death. Produced by the Dee Cameron Company, the documentary was broadcast to widespread critical and public acclaim – going on to win the Logie for ‘Best Documentary’ and the Award for Best Television at the United Nations’ annual Media Peace Awards.

‘Restorative justice’ and ‘restorative practice’ are both more- and less-complex versions of the concept of mediation, fuelled by society’s need (and preference) for understanding, forgiveness, harmony and mutual respect and cooperation as opposed to the ‘criminal justice system’ that focuses exclusively on argument, punishment, incarceration and – hopefully – rehabilitation.

In this beautifully directed and performed lecture, Dr Dwyer explores the essence of restorative justice through his engrossing, intimate reminiscence of his father Allan’s work (and his young family’s experience of it) as a renowned orthopedic surgeon in Bougainville during the 1960s. Gradually, the performance shifts its focus to the post-colonial relationships between the people of Bougainville, the Australian Government and BCL (a subsidiary of the mining giant Rio Tinto) whose enormous open-cut copper mine resulted in social and environmental armageddon.

Through the use of archival video (including the mining company’s shocking propaganda film My Valley is Changing), slides of a young family’s visits to Bougainville, photographs, projections and a collection of the “miracle doctor’s” tools the ghost of Dr Allan Dwyer pervades the performance, which makes its capitulation into agitprop a little discomforting. The juxtaposition between the pure-hearted goodness of one (the good doctor) with the capitalistic, imperialistic and self-serving actions of the other (the evil mining corporation) fails to do the argument complete justice. There is no illumination with regards to what the advantages of this mine might have been (if in fact there even were any), and yet without it, there is a hint of political opportunism that for inquiring minds, decreases the overall effectiveness of the piece. The resulting simplistic strain of revenging and avenging the horrors of destructive industry in the bountiful region also fails to meet the complex psychological imperatives within the concept of ‘restorative practice’ – abandoning us, instead, approximately halfway up the great Silvan Tomkins’s ‘Nine Affects’ scale of the human expression of emotion (disgust, distress and shame).

Interestingly, apart from the stunning recreations of his father’s surgical procedures, Dr Dwyer really ups the stakes with a stunning performance of his dangerous nighttime trek to a local forgiveness ceremony. With the use of only a tiny flashlight and a complete command of Bougainville’s lingua franca – Tok Pisin – we experience another level of engagement entirely both with and between the performer and his story. It becomes something like an exorcism – and is at once thrilling, dangerous and exciting. It is also the only point at where the performance embodies the fundamental cultural differences and similarities that define the accepted endpoint of restorative practice in action – which is euphoria, discovered through the act of understanding, acceptance and forgiveness, not the conceptualisation and analysis of it.

Dr Dwyer’s quiet and disarming final statement is that he plans to return to Bougainville with his two sons sometime in the not too distant future. I, for one, wish him well. What it will ultimately take for our nation to follow, sadly, remains anyone’s guess.

This review was commissioned by Stage Whispers Magazine @ www.stagewhispers.com.au