Falling Through the Clouds

Image by Jarrad Seng. 

Those involved in The Last Great Hunt are known for their gadgetry.

The theatre company is new, founded at the end of last year, but its members are not, with many of them producing some of the more exciting theatre to come out of Perth in a long time – if not ever. Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, created by Tim Watts and Arielle Gray, tells its story with a collection of very simple, very clever gadgets that all fit into a single suitcase. The achingly beautiful It’s Dark Outside, created by Chris Isaacs, Tim Watts and Arielle Gray, uses similarly DIY gadgetry and ingenious puppetry to create a story whose simplicity, honesty and visual magic has the power to break its audience members’ hearts into tiny, whimpering shards. Bruce, produced at the Blue Room Theatre last year, consisted almost entirely of two actors playing with a block of foam with ping pong balls for eyes. All three shows were striking for similar reasons, namely the brilliance of their production (the puppetry, the gadgets and the general ingenuity in the detail) and, especially, their simplicity. It was their simplicity that made them striking.

Falling Through the Clouds, the newest work by The Last Great Hunt, lacks this simplicity. The play is set at a time when birds have become extinct. The central figure is a scientist named Mary (Adriane Daff), a nervous, head-dwelling character who, each night, has grand flying dreams. Mary is a bird specialist and has been sent to an island (by hot air balloon, no less) and given one year to hatch a brood of birds and teach them to fly, in an attempt to restore environmental balance. Of three eggs, two survive.

The story is told through a wide variety of very clever puppetry, a fan, a stunningly dramatic original soundtrack (composed by Ash Gibson Greig), plenty of mixed media, and bold, visually arresting lighting. Much of the set and puppets are made of paper, including the two featured birds, who grow from fluffy shredded-paper chicks into butcher paper adult birds. In terms of media, the show plays a lot with projections, including live footage from a camera that is toted around the stage. One of Mary’s colleagues (Tim Watts) is making a documentary about the project, for example, and we see his footage projected on the screen as he films it. In one notable sequence, we get to see the point of view of the birds as they hatch, which is definitely very cool. The device is often unnecessary however (why do we need to see Mary’s crying face?), when it ends up either crowding the story or stripping away its subtlety. I found myself watching a screen a little too often, rather than the live action on stage.

Falling Through the Clouds is playful, clever and entertaining, but it sorely lacks the simplicity that made its creators’ previous works so impressively affecting. Here, gadgetry is King, and this complicates the work to a distracting extent. The work makes references to a range of different cinematic styles, but risks nodding until its head falls off. The devices are so central, so frequent, that everything gets tangled up in them and the story is left behind.Tellingly, it’s the simplest scenes that are easily the most memorable.

It may be unfair to compare Falling Through the Clouds with previous works. If compared to the Perth theatre scene in general, it would be miles ahead of the pack in terms of ingenuity – the work is a clever, entertaining and unique piece of theatre that uses interesting gadgetry and tells a story too. But watching it, I felt a distinct emotional separation from the characters, a lack of personal investment, and its magic sloughed off as soon as the lights went up – if not before. I certainly didn’t have a bad time watching Falling Through the Clouds, but I wasn’t particularly moved, either.