The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes
Back to Back Theatre
10 October 2019
Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 20 October
www.festival.melbourne
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| "The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes". Back to Back Theatre |
Five activists are having a meeting. It's like every meeting anyone has been to in a community space. It's like the meetings the Extinction Rebellion organisers have been having. It's like every work meeting about collecting for charity or organising a staff outing. This one is so low key that there isn't even a tray of biscuits from the supermarket.
Back to Back Theatre are extraordinary.
The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes has a short season for the festival and heads to the USA in January. Unlike previous works, there's no holy-wow design, historically/spiritually encompassing themes or unanswerable questions to offer safe distance (Ganesh Versus the Third Reich, Lady Eats Apple).
With only five chairs, a screen showing voice-recognition surtitles, some tape, a ladder and a large foam block, there's no artifice to make assumptions about the script, the company and the performers. It may even be the kind of show that some people expect when they go to show by a company whose members have intellectual disabilities.
And it's nothing like what it looks like.
Michael Chan, Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price talk about things that they'd like to change in the world and their lives.
They get it wrong and make assumptions. Scott tells Sarah that she needs to be careful of paedophiles; she reminds him that she's a 36-year-old woman. The "Siri"s voice recognition makes mistakes – and there's an argument about if it should even be there. Mark Chan gets Wadawurrung and Wurundjeri mixed up. Mark Deans puts a tape line on the ground that isn't to be crossed. Siri makes choices.
Most of the cast have been with the company for years. They've created and performed in some of the most internationally acclaimed works ever made in Australia. They are among the handful of permanently employed actors in the country. To think that they are just having a conversation about what it's like to have having an intellectual disability is as condescending as some of the things they discuss. To assume they are even talking about their own experiences dismisses the basic conceit of acting.
Director Bruce Galdwin, the cast and other members of the company have been developing this new work for about two and a half years. It's changed a lot during that time.
Somewhere towards the end of the night, the cast ask each other if "they" – the other people in meeting who are smiling politely and laughing when they think they should – get it. They know that "they don't get it". I didn't get it until then; I made many assumptions and want to see it again to try to see everything I didn't get.
The Shadow Whose Prey The Hunter Becomes is unexpected and may only make complete sense in the context of Back to Back's years of work – which makes it even more extraordinary as a stand alone piece.
