Never Never Theatre Co. White Queen. 3 Mar 2016
It wasn't a publicity stunt. It was just uncanny happenstance that there was a fire alarm at the Old Queen's Theatre just as a play about a massive fire was about to open.
The fire of the drama is set in Sydney's Botanic Gardens in the year 2020. In the production, it is depicted by a long row of orange fluorescent light tubes stretching above the performance space like a blazing sky. This is a brilliant piece of design.
It is almost a star in the play, so potently does it play its part - the tubes going out one or two at a time as the play progresses and smoke eclipses the sky.
The soundscape works less well. It makes its point and then some. It is a droning rush of ambient thrum, ever-present, sometimes rising. It is like agonising tinnitus. The actors have to play over this city din and the audience members have to deal with it. It is a comment, perhaps, on the ugliness of urban noise pollution as well as a heavy-handed sound effect. It is too oppressive and for some audience members it undermines the lucidity of the words on stage.
Not that the play is exactly about lucidity.
It is more Brechtian than Brecht.
It is an absurdist fantasy about two survivors who colonise a park bench like specks in a calamity. They are just Woman 1 and Woman 2, argumentative abstractions from the imagination of playwright Harry Black. He's an Adelaidean and, while this play premiered in Sydney, it has come to Adelaide with strong Adelaide links, including the brilliant designer, Jeremy Allen.
Black's women toss about acrimonious exchanges, ponder possessions, survival, the point of things or lack thereof. The waters boil around them. The sky darkens. Their nasty little park-bench-island world shrinks.
Mix Godot and Endgame, throw in some Ray Bradbury, Neville Shute and a spectrum of apocalypse dreamers. Add some captivating prose from an interesting new young Australian writer, and you have the picture.
Perhaps director Jessica Arthur could have eked a bit more vocal light and dark from the dialogue to better play against the drone of the soundscape, but the performances by both Eliza Scott and Emma Harvie are strong and the characters they play are memorable.
It is hard to imagine a more intensely atmospheric venue for such a work than the rustic old demolition-dodge survivor we are now calling the White Queen.
And, we can only look forward with curiosity to what next the lively pen of playwright Harry Black may deliver.
Samela Harris
When: 3 to 6 Mar
Where: White Queen
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
