Adelaide Festival: Blackout

Adelaide Festival -
Stone/Castro: Blackout -
AC Arts Main Theatre, 7 March -

Given that Blackout is essentially movement theatre, its inclusion in the dance program of this year’s Adelaide Festival is somewhat disingenuous on the part of director David Sefton. Most probably it was included to beef up a program that otherwise included only two works, Batsheva’s Sadeh21 and Shaun Parker’s Am I. That said, Blackout is an interesting work that features a strong cast of local and international dancers and actors. Conceived by the partnership of Jo Stone and Paulo Castro and scripted and directed by Castro, Blackout explores the aggression, selfishness and self-delusion that are often revealed when the veneer of polite social intercourse is stripped away. Problems with the staging and the execution of Castro’s excellent script, however, result in a show that only partly realises its potential.

The action devolves upon a wedding party on a boat, the boat being rendered through verbal references, sound and movement, rather than through props or setting. The bridal pair, four guests, a waitress and the boat’s captain begin the party in good will, with a welcoming speech from the captain, Vincent Crowley, who invites each character to show off their mojo. We are then treated to a razor sharp breaking sequence from groom, dancer Alisdair Macindoe, some nice moves from bride Larissa McGowan, and a rude refusal to participate on the part of the bride’s father, Stephen Sheehan. As the party gets underway, stilted social interactions are interspersed with sequences of movement in slow motion, beautifully executed.

A sense of impending catastrophe is then signaled by flickering lighting—the blackout of the title—which, coupled with the quantity of alcohol consumed, quickly erodes the social niceties and all manner of confessions and accusations spew forth. The father’s ‘spiritual journey’ to India, recounted with mounting aggression by Sheehan, is revealed to be little more than an excuse to abandon his family. The groom’s best friend, a performance artist played by Portuguese dancer John Romao, inadvertently gives away his long-repressed desire for the groom. Nathan O’Keefe gives a fantastic rendition of the night’s entertainment, a guitarist, whose delusions of his own musical importance are matched only by his rage at the lover who has left him. The waitress confesses to murdering her husband’s dog, the bride to hearing voices. Jo Stone gives a masterful portrayal of the increasingly drunk and disinhibited sister of the bride, turning upon the father and accusing him of driving her sister to madness These vignettes are mostly delivered strongly, and are by turns funny and excruciating.

Yet somehow the work as a whole is not as convincing as it could be. In part this is because it is over-long, but the stage design also contributes. Instead of using a confined space, which would have indicated the claustrophobic confines of a boat, a very wide performance space, including the wing space, is used, which has the effect of defusing the mounting tension and dissipating the energy. The mixed cast of dancers and actors are not uniformly skilled across disciplines, and some of the monologues could be delivered more dynamically. The ending too, which sees the bride and the groom’s best friend thrashing around in a pool of water, does not feel organically linked to the show that has preceded it. Nevertheless, this is a show with great promise, and with some reworking could be powerful theatre.

- Maggie Tonkin