As a way of showcasing the emerging skills of young performers, Platform Youth Theatre’s season at La Mama is a very clever idea.
Audiences arrive at La Mama and pick up a program with 24 nine-minute shows listed. They can make a selection or take a lucky dip. Either way, they receive a ‘dance card’ (actually a lanyard fitted with coloured clothes pegs clipped to it) indicating which shows they will see.
Young performers use the numbers on the pegs to guide audiences members to the next show, where they are treated to an intimate theatrical experience, as an audience of between one and five people.
You may find yourself crouching under the stairs, listening to a solo performer as she reminisces about her childhood and makes torchlight play on old photographs. Or you may be in the doorway of the kitchen, where two young flatmates provoke one another into revealing secrets – and (be warned) start provoking you too.
Each bijoux performance is filled with the vitality of youthful creative energy. None is wholly polished or unblemished but most of the six we saw were genuinely satisfying in some aspect – script, dramaturgy, acting, directing – if not all at once.
But even when parts of the writing or acting are clunky or undergraduate, there is something appealing about the whole set-up. The sense of intimacy and directness in the theatrical experience more than compensates for any specific weakness in skills. Just crawling into a cubby or sitting on the floor inches away from an actor is enough to reawaken a childhood sense of play in audiences, and that is a treat.
Each of the young performers has taken turns with writing, directing, dramaturgy and acting across a range of the pieces so there is a depth of multiple perspectives in each work.
Some reveal considerable skill. Performer Sandra Chui meditating on the dreams of childhood has a marvellous expressiveness and capacity to capture the child. The writer of Pandora’s Flatpack, Danae Crawford has created a complex and satisfying short narrative with considerable maturity. The space design of the under-the-stairs work, Briefcase by Cassandra-Elli Yiannacou, is delightful.
This performance is a great way to rediscover the playfulness and sense of exploration that’s where theatre begins. It deserves an audience of theatre enthusiasts, not just the cheer-leading of family and friends.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
The Platform at La Mama Collaboration
La Mama Theatre, Carlton
lamama.com.au
12-23 August
