THEATRE-LIVE STREAM
At La Mama Theatre, live streamed on Fri 27 May 2022
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
I reviewed this as a live stream on Fri 27 May 2022. This may explain some of my confusion about the content of the production. KH
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| Annabel Marshall-Roth & Lliam Amor, Point8Six image by Darren Gill |
To describe Point8Six as a non-linear performance is a huge understatement!
It is a fragmented, absurd, non-narrative collision of ideas and styles, snatches of history, computer-speak, imagery, sound effects and quirky mutating characters.
The problem is that all of its elements lack any sort of linking membrane, so the piece is almost impenetrable. As one character says, I admit I didn’t follow all of that’, – and nor did I! Perhaps I missed some crucial dialogue because I was watching a live stream of the show.
So, it seems that .86 seconds is the time it takes for a heart to beat, but you should stop trying to figure out how that is the theme of the performance. This heart has gone into tachycardia and then had a full-on cardiac arrest.
Tim Wotherspoon’s text is like a mad stream of consciousness for six people. It is an absurd cacophony that is constantly shifting from reality to unreality to digital reality, from past to present and into the future and back again.
The characters appear to be products, victims and prisoners of computer programs created by a pompous, rambling mad scientist (played by Wotherspoon) who is searching for a model of reality.
There is reference to the years 2142 and 1971 and to various wars and conflicts, so it seems the scientist is involved in creating time travel. He controls the realities of his characters, but he is as fragmented and demented as his creations. This confused collection of odd characters keeps transforming into other versions of themselves.
The scientist refers to two women as his daughters: Charlotte (Rebecca Bower) a pale, fay creature who repeats ‘zero, zero, zero, one, one, one’ in a loop of binary code. Her ‘sister’ Maidie (Annabel Marshall-Roth), a tough, determined woman, indulges in long, poetical, political rants and seems to be a revolutionary revolting against – the scientist? – or the world? – or herself?
Liam Amor is the comic highlight, playing a cartoonish character who shifts from being a goofy, pyjama-clad American who always wanted to be a spy, into another version of himself who is a militaristic, capitalistic American army Captain in uniform. Ernst AKA Ernie (Matt Furlani) plays a German in an East German Stazi uniform. Another woman (Leigh Lule) wanders about, seemingly aimlessly, until the end when she seems to have a purpose.
Director, Kirsten Von Bibra, wrangles the text into a 75-minute performance but there is a bit too much shouting and too little meaning or clarity in Point8Six. There is violence, menace, gunfire and conflict. There are war sound effects, snapshots of past, present and future, fragments of conflated history, political rants about Communism or Capitalism or Berlin or Americans and Germans or something else incomprehensible. There are glitches in the computer, so who knows?
To reiterate the quote from the scientist, ‘I admit I didn’t follow all of that.’
By Kate Herbert
NB: Others
have gleaned much more specific detail from this play. As I said, I. must have
missed something, or they had explanatory notes that I didn't have.
NB #2: Director's notes arrived after I had seen the show and written the review.
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