The Light Box – Fat Boy Dancing and We Do Not Unhappen

Overview

Natalia Savvides' The Light Box is a creation story that matches the wit and charm of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's nice to have mythological options. Why not start with the unhappy union between woman and toucan? Creationists, if you can have your fun with Adam and Eve, playwrights can have theirs too.

The fable is exotic and whimsical with turns down violent and desperate paths. The piece defies synopsis but, in short, a young woman called Ethel (Hannah Barlow) wets herself in a psych ward, American Annie (Stephanie King) cannot control her discursiveness, a magnetic toucan (Dean Mason) seduces Lesley and a man made of Spoons (Tom Christophersen) fails in his job as a psychiatrist. There are also stuffed birds and blood.

Director James Dalton and set designer Dylan Tonkin have wrangled the shallow space at 107 Projects on Redfern Street into a menagerie in the round, with a curtain of white birds demarcating the space. Benjamin Brockman's lighting design further defines the landscape of the tale: the four corners of the psych ward, the diagonal deck of the cruise liner, the cafe where Ethel inflicts desert spoon retribution on Annie for talking too much.

The play is a creation story as romance, similar to the beautiful animation within Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Origin of Love. With romantic love comes passion and attending violence, but in The Light Box, the climactic moments expire into the ether, with characters remarking that their transgressions are never as satisfying as they had expected. This is an esoteric kind of catharsis, a meditation on boredom and silence as much as love and violence. Incontinent Ethel is the silent opposite of cacophonous Annie and their contrast is accurately realised by Hannah Barlow and Stephanie King respectively.

For all the hypnotic poetry here, Savvides can write good comedy. The first scene between Ethel and Spoons is very funny, not least because of the naive boldness of Spoons' outfit. Tonkin has crafted a wondrous thing, a white jacket spraying desert spoons from the sleeves and collar. Of all the utensils, the desert spoon is clearly the funniest one to have dangling from your face.

This world of tropical birds, steel drums and mating calls holds together within its own logic and Dalton's direction has the poetry rolling forward throughout. A couple of clunky transitions midway interrupt the flow, but when dealing with spoon suits and life-sized rubber toucan garb, this is perhaps unavoidable.

The cast is uniformly great, with special mention due to Tom Christophersen for his agile transformation between characters. His snap from plum-in-mouth English gentleman Cyril to an Australian beneath that veneer is beguiling. He charges through some perilously poetic lines about "tearing at the world" by delivering them as a powerful affront to his wife, avoiding a reflective mode.

The Light Box is a thrilling invitation to dream along in someone else's imagination. This is the world as conceived by a toucan — lush, idiosyncratic and violent.

Image by Gez Xavier Mansfield.