The opening performance of One Night Echo marked five years for The Duck House, a Perth-based contemporary theatre company who enjoy exploring the quirks and difficulties of the modern world for a modern audience. Typically, the company’s members devise their theatre collaboratively, starting with a few basic ideas or characters and then letting their collective imaginations guide them from there. One Night Echo was no different. It did feel devised, however, which worked to its benefit in some ways, but unfortunately to its detriment in others.
The story arc follows the well-trodden narrative of a birthday party. The birthday boy is silver-shirted Theo, a modern Narcissus with an iPhone in place of a pond. The party is bar-tended by the socially awkward and näive Echo and attended by a disparate collection of people situated at various points along the awkward, dark, and mysterious spectrums. All are in some way a little strange. These are the party-goers we get to see, anyway – the fringe element occupying the patio out back. The stage is laid out in series of steps, tiering up to a curtain of black gauze, behind which live musicians sit, becoming visible only when lit.
It is on these steps that the engagingly physical power play between characters takes place. No-one can reach Celeste on the top step, who manipulates gravity to her own ends and dances softly by herself in her chiffon, while Eddie awkwardly occupies the ground level for much of the production. Contemporary dancer Tyrone Robinson, whose character remains both nameless and speechless, whirls from top to bottom and everywhere in between, communicating only with his body and becoming almost paralysed when the music stops. He is the dark one, a source of tension and intrigue throughout, and an antagonist by the end. A highlight of the piece comes about a third of the way through, when bubbly, oblivious Echo finally stops talking and she and Robinson’s character have an intense conversation without saying a word.
Instead of veering off in unexpected directions, where plot and characters are concerned the production tends to err towards the predictable. The device of a party, with its social nuances and participants, is a common one, but instead taking it somewhere new, the devisers have used it as an incidental base on which to showcase the visual and choreographic elements of the piece. The self-absorbed birthday boy, the nerd, the awkward girl, the hot chick and the dark drug peddler all attend a party and speak, interact and develop accordingly.
Fortunately, the technical elements save it. The live music – a lone trumpeter juxtaposed with your average party band with bowl haircuts and bad posture all round – swings artfully between haunting, humorously clunky, and thunderous, and is almost another character in its interactions. The lighting is stark and simple, the set design ideal, while the staging makes full, dynamic use of all of it.
One Night Echo is not a play to go and see for the storyline. Its artistic merits lie in other, more sensorially stimulating areas.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
The Duck House present:
One Night Echo
Director / Producer: Kathryn Osborne
Writer / Production Manager: Gita Bezard
Dramaturg: Humphrey Bower
Movement Mentor: Brooke Leeder
Composer / Musician: Elliott Hughes
Lighting Design: Jenny Vila
Set and costume design: Lea Klein
Sound Design: Dean Hall
Performers: Alissa Claessens, Brendan Ewing, Will O’Mahony, Fran Middleton and Tyrone Robinson.
Musicians: Kate Pass, Ethan Darnelli, Jeremy Thompson
PICA Performance Space, Perth Cultural Centre, Northbridge
7 – 17 November 2012
