Backstage at Melbourne’s Arts Centre, patrons line up, receive a headset and one-by-one are ushered into a hushed area that resembles a library carrel.
Once there, we sit at our own desk, put on headphones and watch characters in a rotating miniature diorama tell the story of a voyage across Europe.
Flight, based on the novel Hinterland by Caroline Brothers, tells what is now a familiar story: the journey of two orphaned Afghan brothers, fleeing the war-torn Middle East for the UK.
The boys have an uncle in London, and they want to go to school. Their route is repeated throughout the play as a kind of prayer or incantation: “KabulTehranIstanbulAthensRomeParisLondon!”
Terrible and occasionally wonderful things happen to the boys along the way. But for the main, their journey, which takes two years, is perilous. They are forced into farm labour, assaulted, arrested and they endure terrible hunger.
Chillingly, this story is still ongoing; right now across Europe there may be thousands of unaccompanied children undergoing the same flight.
Instead of actors telling the story from a stage, the characters of two orphaned Afghan boys are moulded into clay figurines and placed in scenes that flick past like the pages of a graphic novel, or as if from an old-fashioned Viewfinder. We hear their story via our headsets, with impressive sound design perfectly timed with the revolving images.
Scotland’s Vox Motus told Fairfax that they chose the unusual storytelling method because they feared issue fatigue. As they were planning to adapt Hinterland, the refugee crisis in Europe was dominating the news cycle.
“We could have gone and made another show,” says director Candice Edmunds, “but we didn’t want to tell a different story.”
The type of storytelling they arrived at has an old-fashioned, almost childlike aspect to it: it’s like being a kid and taken by your parents to see the annual Christmas window display.
But this is an asylum storyline, so there’s pain, brutality and horror in the young brothers’ journey. There is something unsettling about seeing the camps at Calais, and the inside of a refrigerated truck taking asylum seekers across the border, rendered in miniature clay.
But during the more devastating sequences, I was grateful for the privacy of the carrel: it was difficult to emerge from the performance (if you can call it that – it has more in common with an art installation) with dry eyes. And as an audience of one, seeing the characters up close adds an additional emotional punch to the journey we have seen repeated many times, and which – like the carousel itself – continues on loop.
Flight is apiece with this year’s Melbourne festival program, which is marked by risk and innovation. Frogman (by Curious Directive) also used new technologies to tell the story of a girl missing in 1990s Queensland. Audiences were given 3D glasses and switched between a performance on stage set in the presence, and 1995 in virtual reality.
One Infinity – a virtuoso piece of dance by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek which runs until 20 October – is innovative in an entirely different way, combining ancient Chinese instruments with audience participation.
The festival’s centrepiece was Fire Gardens by French company Compagnie Carabosse, which also used old techniques to stun. On for four nights only, the event transformed Melbourne’s botanical gardens into a dreamscape lit by fire and music. Patrons were only meant to be in the gardens to see the fires for an hour but many lingered longer. The elemental attraction of fire remains undimmed.
