I’ve seen a couple of shows this year with unrehearsed actors jumping through the hoops of a script they haven’t seen, put to the test by an unseen director or an on-screen writer from the other side of the world. I’ve seen this kind of thing work before, but these more recent shows had interesting hooks without much substance. In both cases, the show depends on a performer who is able to meet the spontaneous moment – which is a huge risk.
One
Night Only by
Jackson Castiglione, in collaboration with theatre ensemble Rawcus, tries a
different approach. Here, the central protagonist is not a performer at all –
just someone who is willing to open up about their lives. During a one-day
workshop, the subject of the opening night – Phil, told stories of his life
that Jackson and Rawcus co-Artistic Director, Morgan Rose, and some of the
Rawcus ensemble, have fashioned into a play.
Knowing the
generous and thoughtful work Rawcus always makes, I was aware that this wouldn’t
be a tightrope walk or an unsafe environment for the one-night-only guest to endure.
It’s one thing to open up about your life in a rehearsal room, and quite
another to relive some of those moments on stage in front of a full house. Rawcus
member Rachel asked Phil for a safe word, that any of them could deploy at any
time, if it all got too much for them.
It's
difficult to talk about the content of the work; the show you see will not be
the show I saw. Each night is a different guest, talking about their unique life
experiences. But as this delicate and honest chamber piece starts to open up,
we begin to see how memory works and how fallible it is. We experience a gentle
moment of Phil at a school dance, a terrifying scene on a lonely road as witness
to an accident, and at the bedside of his dying grandfather – a moment that
will haunt him forever.
As moving
as the show can be, and tough to watch, it never feels exploitative. Phil
follows instructions from an earpiece and reads aloud from a piece of paper he’s
handed now and again. There’s a moment for the performers to regroup, while
Phil has a sip of tea.
Richard
Vabre’s exquisite lighting design helps form places and spaces for Phil and the
actors to inhabit, but on occasion the spaces are indefinable. When things
start to get unstuck in time, Samuel Kreusler and Kate Neal’s sound design
carries us all to dreamlike, liminal spaces.
Our
memories aren’t kept all together in the same place in the brain. Sight and
sound and smell and feel are all isolated from each other until we conjure a
moment. That’s why recollection is imprecise, because our brains recreate memory rather than delivering an exact replica. One Night Only finds a way to
demonstrate that on stage in front of us.
There’s
more going on underneath that is worth discovering and experiencing for yourself.
It might be called One Night Only, but every night of every season of
any theatre show is only around that one time. Theatre creates unique
experiences with unique audiences all the time. But there is always some
connective tissue. As much as we all experience life through our own eyes, a
lot binds us together, too.
The centre of One Night Only is the simple fact - we can all do this only once. This is a gorgeous
piece of theatre – gentle and fully illuminating.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Comments