Photo by Lucy Parakhina (Feb 2022 production)
An inventive look at the quickly-departing culture of the suburban video shop, "Coil" combines personal confession, an examination of nostalgia, domestic and international economics, and cutting-edge video techniques into a delightful one-and-a-little-bit-hour show.
There's an interesting structure to the show - Steve Wilson-Alexander introduces himself and the rest of the cast (Solomon Thomas on camera, Rose Maher on an onstage mixing-desk), as he talks about his career in theatre, his childhood friends, and his regular visits to a local video shop which closed in 2020. As he talks, Thomas films small snippets of material, apparently unrelated, with Maher assisting and confirming that they've captured the footage they need. Some of the material apparently fits into the context of Wilson-Alexander's narrative about the closure of the old local video shop, while others very definitely do not - Wilson-Alexander slips back and forth between the two effortlessly and smoothly, letting the tension build as we're not entirely sure what this material is going to be in aid of. Thomas' cameraman duties also extend to a certain amount of direction and guidance, and Maher occasionally leaves the mixing desk to provide support to the footage. At a certain point, Maher starts counting down from 10 to 1 as the last few shots are done ... then, after a short pause, we get to see the movie they've been making - using elements of Wilson Alexander's previous narrative and a separate story reflecting on some of the same issues of personal history and the double-sided knife of nostalgia.
Hybrid-film-theatre projects have been around for a while but with the increased abilities of technology, it's become possible to do broader and more ambitious projects. Sydney Theatre Company's work on "The Picture of Dorian Grey" and "The Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr Hyde" combined virtuosic technology with skillful performances to great effect, and to a certain extent, if those were the blockbuster movie versions of the techniques, this is the indie-flick version - more personal, smaller scale, but able to use those techniques more nimbly and cleverly, without the human scale being swamped by the decoration.
The theme of nostalgia has been hitting me a lot this year (I turn 50 in November, so inevitably you're going to get reflective at that point) - theatre can often be a nostalgia machine, presenting familiar stories, songs, and productions in ways that go out of their way to not discomfort the audience very much. But the best of these use nostalgia to present a remix of the past, to combine the familiar with the innovative, and to push us into re-examining our memories in a different way - and "Coil" definitely ranks with the best of these. You have one more chance to catch this show on Wednesday night, and I'd definitely encourage you to catch this if you can.
No comments:
Post a Comment