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Disappearance
The Border Project
Director: Sam Haren
The Space
Thurs 13 Nov
Season closed
Is to 'disappear' a choice or one that unwittingly chooses the disappeared?
The Border Project have rightly indentified this singular obsession and mystery at the heart of Australian culture, something well beyond that every day urge to get away from it all.
The desire of the ordinary person to vanish; the historic reality of Prime Minister Harold Holt's unsolved disappearance during a seaside swim and the fictional mystery of Miranda's disappearance in 'Picnic At Hanging Rock' are the bedrock of the production.
'Disappearance' engages wonderfully with the romantic, yet dark mystery of the desire to disappear as much as the dark unknown of how it happens to individuals in ways that for one reason or another cannot be explained.
The text by No‘lle Janaczewska, in development by the company since 2003, is powerfully evocative. The production hits moments of intense, rich theatricality, yet the urge to go off on a tangent here and there cripples the magic a number of times.
Alirio Zavarce begins the show with a long wonderful monologue taking the audience to two places simultaneously - the everyday life of the ordinary worker his character is and the inner imaginings and desire of such a person to escape their life.
As Zavarce inches his way across the stage, his story grows in poetic power, latching onto the story of Harold Holt on the way. Powerful as it is, the monologue is too long and its links to what follows a little too tenuous, as is the transition from Zavarce's character to the darkly lit scenes to follow set in - and on - Designer Mary Moore's honeycomb skeletal metal dome.
This dome becomes a very effective symbolic representation of that 'other' place the disappeared go, never to be seen again. Andrew Russ' other worldly electro sound design perfectly complements Moore's set.
It is only in this setting that Sam Haren's direction becomes clear and wonderfully concrete in its realisation of the fantastical and ordinary aspects of what in our culture obsesses us about disappearance.
A sacred sense of fear and desire is built out of scenes, played in period costume, based on 'Picnic At Hanging Rock' leading up to Miranda's disappearance, richly portrayed by Jude Henshall with superb support from Katherine Fyffe, Ksenja Logos, Astrid Pill and Rory Walker.
The appearance of Harold Holt from the depths of the stage floor, in wetsuit, allows for a stunningly imagined conversation between Holt and a Chinese spy in traditional dress. Miranda, her fellow picnic friends, Holt, a rock climber from the present time cross paths, even the Tasmanian devil appears. What is imagined versus concrete reality is beautifully played with.
The second off-putting tangent in this production is the unfortunate intrusion of '2001 A Space Odyssey' type parody in which 10 year-old Melissa Pullinger descends in space suit and proffers a brilliant explanation of the physics behind black holes in space. Pullinger's performance is riveting, yet the material is outside the square of where 'Disappearance' wants to take its audience.
David O'Brien
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