Thaddeus Phillips Australian premiere at Perth’s FringeWorld 2016 is a one man show 17 Border Crossings that’s a great delight. Clever, entertaining, full of light and shadows – literally as well as metaphorically – great acting and writing, the brilliant technique behind this show deserves a wider audience.
He shifts swiftly from one scenario to the next puncturing our exotic beliefs in the transformative power of travel with the banal, the ridiculously stereotypical (think Croat border guard ostentatiously grabbing his own balls in a parade of macho-ism) and the downright ridiculous. His own country of origin, the United States of America, comes in for no small measure of balloon puncturing.
Phillips masterful use of the various microphones is positively musical in the way he manipulates his tone of voice to imitate airport announcements, border crossings muffled cacophony, immersive Central American rapid fire lingo and creating near and far perspectives for his rapt 100 plus audience at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.
Thaddeus Phillips is a theatre director, stage designer and Film/TV actor from Colorado, USA who is the brains behind 17 Border Crossings. Using minimal props, he creatively re-imagines the space in a compellingly believable way. This is theatre that pulls you from one reality to the next without effort. You are there, with him, the upside down table top creating another small box border room. A huge tin cup projected on the back wall in an insect encounter was side splittingly funny. Phillips’ imagination is one clever room that’s constantly bursting its borders.
His border crossings range from walking from the USA to Mexico: oddly one of the more compassionate moments of a border guard; through to a number of Eastern European crossings from the 1990s. Echoing master storyteller Spalding Gray his frankly hilarious pastiche in travelling from Italy to Croatia in the midst of the war with that ear-worm Ace of Base tune ‘All that she wants…’ and the State Department insistence that there is no conflict results in some surreal cave encounters. Much of this rings totally true for someone who experienced Eastern Europe in the 1990s. However each vignette is utterly convincing in its careful observations assisted by Phillips switches from Spanish to French and Serbian in an instant. This multi-talented performer transports us with poetic language riffs, a minimalist lighting rack and a powerful imagination.
17 Border Crossings comes to Fringe World after sell out runs at Summerhall in Edinburgh and the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York. It has been touring through Europe and Central America and hopefully there are more Australian towns and cities that get to experience 17 Border Crossings as this kind of travel certainly broadens the mind!
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
17 Border Crossings
Written and Performed by Thaddeus Phillips
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts at FringeWorld 2016, Perth
2nd – 6th February 2016
