Patch Theatre Company. AC Arts Main Theatre. 9 Mar 2018
There’s a delicious promise of suggestive magic in asking, “can you hear colour?” Yet sometimes it’s a little dispiriting if the person who can hear colour, finds asking if others can too puts them totally off side with the whole world.
This simple premise; breaking through communication barriers, connecting to feelings, and sharing extraordinary sensations, is explored with an honest and fiercely direct, child-like delight. All approved by spell bound children seated at the front of the space.
Naomi Edwards’ direction renders highly complex experiential sensory concepts involving light, sound and vision, instantly comprehendible in a passionate production centred on Michaela Burger’s deeply beautiful, heartfelt performance as the girl with that special gift.
Composer Alan John’s score for clarinet, violin and trumpet is not his only contribution. He adds an engaging, lightly comic performance as a pugnacious hunter of colour and sound that the Girl discovers in bright feathers, littering Kathryn Sproul’s gentle off white cloth set with tree trunk.
Edwards’ fusion of sensory elements depends on a successful lighting design, and Ben Flett delivers the magic with seemingly audacious simplicity, bringing full emotional life to the Girl’s description of each colour’s emotional sound. Binding all these things together is Bethany Hill’s performance as the beautiful Song Bird of the Rainbow.
No mere song utters forth, but the emotionally joyous power of operatic phrase and aria from and the Girl and Bird in celebration of seeing, hearing and feeling colour.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 18 Mar
Where: AC Arts Main Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
