Hello, Goodbye and Happy Birthday

Overview

Roslyn Oades has built her theatremaking practice on a distinctive 'headphone verbatim' technique; wearing headphones in performance, actors attempt to replicate Oades’ constructed recordings of interviews with real life figures. While her 2012 work for Belvoir, I’m Your Man stuck closely to its origins, with actors whose physicality at least partially resembled the original characters they portrayed, Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday Oades dislocates these voices to stunning effect.

With the text built from Oades’ interviews with 18 and 80-year-olds, the excellent ensemble cast (Matthew Connell, Jim Daly, Evelyn Krape, HaiHa Le, Roger Oakley, Diana Perini) inhabit a performance space that suggests the communal room of a nursing home, or the inside of suburban high school’s demountable. Designed by Christina Hayes, it’s the perfect, amorphous setting for a vivid assembly of rehearsed moments and memories. Although all the actors play different roles throughout the work, the typical set-up is a younger performer representing an older character, or vice versa. The best parts of the show are found in this divergence, especially when an older actor like Jim Daly perfectly captures an 18-year-old girl’s slightly tipsy, improvised birthday speech.

Hello, Goodbye & Happy Birthday never once succumbs to trite sentimentality or didactic exposition of the issues that permeate its text, such as the treatment of the elderly, fears and dreams of death, and the relationship between music and memory. The work is utterly heartwarming, and often hilarious, and in its depiction of a man whose wife has slid into dementia — captured with exceptional sensitivity and skill by Matthew Connell — it harbours the kind of heart-rending depth that’s hard to find on any Melbourne mainstage.