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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Saturday, March 30, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review: Learning little about love

 

WHEN approaching David Temme’s “Our Shadows Pass Only Once”, you can forget the old, dramatic rule that says characters shouldn’t present their emotions through self-analysis (unless you’re Hamlet) but in action. In this play, it’s all self-analytical talk and little action.

Two nameless couples, one older, one younger, teeter on the edge of an emotional precipice as they come together, tear apart, recover, perpetrate acts of violence and finally head for the exit sign in the theatre.

This abstract piece is structured into 15 vignettes through the use of postcards that project emotional and physical states such as “love”, “dreams”, “little things” and “gone” on to an upstage screen.

Additional layering used by director Andrew Holmes to create a sense of continuity includes a dream-like soundscape by Shoeb Ahmad and simultaneous live-feed video projections of great beauty, focusing closely on the emotional reactions of each character. Exquisite, maybe, but I fear that neither the soundscape nor the projections contributed much to the delineation of the relationships.

Instead, it was left to the characters, played by Raoul Craemer, Caroline O’Brien, Sarah Nathan-Truesdale and Josh Wiseman to tell the audience directly, “I feel paralysed”, “I want to hurt you”, “I feel alone,” and so on.

In his sophisticated script, Temme indicates connections between the couples through overlapping dialogue, so that a character from one relationship may answer a question posed by a character in the other.

But in the end, what did we learn about love? Not much.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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