Neandellus: Theatre: Melbourne

At the Sans Hotel
created and performed by Nicola Gunn
La Mama Theatre
21 Sep-2 Oct

Nicola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel is like a rocket with one of those deceptive slow-burning fuses that snake up the inside of the cylinder. At first, nothing seems to happen. The flame disappears from sight. There’s a little smoke and some hissing.
The production starts with apologies, confusing explanations and diversion, and plenty of contradictions. There’s also wine, lots of audience banter and just a light note of hysteria. Then, without warning, it takes off on a brilliant zigzag flight across the night sky, illuminating and beautiful, before it finally detonates in a bewildering constellation of exploded subjectivity.

Formally, this is a fascinating production, exploring different affective ways of ordering movement and time in the portrayal of various psychological states. The material is inspired by the experience of Cornelia Rau, the possibly schizophrenic German-born Australian resident who was unlawfully detained by Australian immigration officials in 2004-5, but it goes so much deeper, getting so far beneath the mere facts of the case that we ultimately lose sight of them entirely.

Black Box 149
written and conceived by Rosemary Johns, performed by Majid Shokor and Dennis Coard, directed by Matt Scholten
La Mama Theatre
21 Sep-2 Oct

A dramatic interpretation of the grounding of British Airways Flight 149 at Kuwait International Airport during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Central to this work is the warning “fear rots your mind”. Dennis Coard plays the pilot of flight 149. The action is set some time post-9/11, and the now retired pilot has gone to ground in the Australian outback, hiding from who knows who. Much of the opening half an hour is taken up with a more-or-less deranged political rant that sounds a lot like something from a semi-rabid conspiracist’s forum, with a little family history thrown in to break up the black tar. The point here is that, yes, clearly the rot has set in. But the point is over extended and this is not time well spent. When the pilot finally takes off his tin-foil hat and begins describing his actual experience in Iraq, things improve markedly.

As a spy thriller this tale is engrossing. The question is whether American or British forces deliberately put the civilian aircraft and its passengers in harm’s way. There are some genuinely impressive descriptive scenes of what life was like for the crew and passengers held captive by Iraqi forces. Majid Shokar is wonderful as both an Iraqi interrogator and especially as a bus driver, but is somewhat underused.

I know there’s a lot of noise outside but you have to close your eyes
by I’m trying to kiss you
137 Greeves Street
21-28 Sep

Despite being staged in a share house kitchen down Fitzroy way, the production values here, in the set and lighting, while definitely low-tech, demonstrate a fair degree of professional talent and a more-than-passing interest in what might be called the dramaturgy of design.

Two old friends meet up at a bar for a girls’ night out. Immediately we see that something has come between them. What? It is the “female experience”. Thus begins a spiky but not humourless series of devised scenes, monologues and disruptions aimed at a sort of vivisection of female frustration.

I loved their unabashed addiction to verbal poetry, to long imagistic riffs on anger and dissatisfaction. Many of these dramatic poems have a terrific clarity about them.

One might complain that the political aspects of the drama are undercut by a solipsistic tendency in their analysis, a tendency perhaps typical of this kind of ambitious devised theatre; but what is most impressive here is the play’s resilience at precisely these moments. This work is spiky, but not brittle. We don’t cringe when an image slips from place and clatters to the floor – we don’t recoil, expecting the whole piece to shatter like glass. Instead, there is a humour in the work that, like a transparent coating, subtly strengthens the material without affecting its reflective quality.