Tiny Bricks. Plants 1 – Bowden. 8 March
Beckett for the internet era?
Phillip Kavanagh’s Deluge, in Director Nescha Jelk’s and Designer Elizabeth Gadsby’s hands profoundly invokes the despair, isolation, hopelessness and intractability of modern life of Samuel Beckett’s era summed up in Waiting for Godot and Krapp’s Last Tape.
The difference being playwright Kavanagh’s characters are reaching across to, and over, each other in a search for meaning and connection in real life via the digital world, in which their physical selves never move anywhere.
Nothing, seemingly, actually eventuates. Nothing is achieved. Nothing is saved. Nothing is better.
Yet something is going on. What? Information overload, and all of the above.
Deluge, set in Gadsby’s steel-fenced oblong, filled with square blocks of white Styrofoam, above which is set Lighting Designer Chris Petridis’s white/green flickering roof of LED cable, proves the perfect existential expression of the digital world. It is one in which the cast bob up from underneath the Styrofoam blocks to communicate across the sea of white. It is arguably one of the most intense, freeing yet scary spaces capable of nursing, and oppressing the expressions of human feeling and thought imaginable, given it’s very clear in a flash, this is the internet.
A fascinating duality comes into play for an audience. Are these characters real people? Digital archetypes based on ‘reality’? Are their fears, feelings and expressions genuine or mindless spam? Do we really care about any of them?
Amongst the sea of wires are two gamers. There’s a jousting couple’s one night stand, one person who questions everything, a lone soul falling apart, and more. For the audience, it’s a case of quickly creating snap shot digestions of character relations and story lines and hanging on to them as the production veers wildly away under its own criss crossing over and under narratives.
The ensemble of ten is uniformly brilliant in balancing the questioning depths of Kavanagh’s text while eliciting, with effective care, the rich vein of humour flowing through it. Each actor’s work within the small confines of the Styrofoam space is deftly managed with emotional aplomb. Their characterisations wonderfully skirt the boundaries of archetype and full blooded individual personality. They offer a uniform sense of isolation, confusion and loss particular to a character that’s nonetheless fully realised and individually appropriate to character.
Deluge begins a serious inquiry into the ‘other world’ the bricks and mortar one which we physically inhabit now parallels, just as Beckett’s work did the same for his equally far different world.
David O’Brien
When: 8 to 13 March
Where: Plant 1 Bowden (cnr Fifth Street and Park Terrace, Bowden)
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
