★★★☆
Wandering into a Sydney Town Hall garlanded with cardboard boxes and the oddly familiar detritus of somebody else’s life is a strange experience to say the least. Encouraged to gingerly pick through boxes and drawers, pondering over the hastily-scrawled labels – this box for clothes never worn but moved across oceans, this for kisses from past lovers – makes for a rather humbling kind of voyeurism.
Prior to the performance beginning (which really began, of course, the moment you arrived), you are left to your own imaginative devices, trying to assemble some shape of what this strange and intimate show might entail while conscious of the many other audience members furtively exploring, fashioning stories of their own.
Having won top honours at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – and scored various other accolades in the journey to Sydney – The Object Lesson is immersive theatre at perhaps its most whimsical. Camped out before a towering cluster of cardboard boxes, the audience gradually finds itself engaged in a story whose features and form are constantly shifting. If this sounds a touch baroque, it is only because where Geoff Sobelle’s performance truly soars is when the surface of the play suddenly shifts, and what we thought we were experiencing was but a strange echo of something very different; that is, you’d shoot me if I gave away any of the twists.
Sobelle describes his theatrical tastes running to the “sublime ridiculous”, and throughout this charming, disarming production this becomes quite clear. Outlandish as the world he creates may be, it is hard not to have the scattered bric-a-brac and compartmentalised chaos of this walk-through set resonate personally. Trained in physical theatre, Sobelle clambers through this precarious landscape with amusing aplomb, and the moments of clownish bravado – dancing upon a table in roller blades, say, in order to prepare a salad – are delightful.
Yet in such a cavernous space, the production does suffer some drawbacks. While much of the dialogue is amplified, there are (arguably necessary) occasions Sobelle speaks sans microphone; unless you are fortunate enough to sit close to his various points of performance, you might miss important reveals or observations. There are also several instances of audience interaction which, when they work, work tremendously. But when you find yourself reliant on an audience member who just doesn’t care, the whole show comes to an awkward halt.
The Object Lesson is a tremendous exercise in imagination, memory and illusion. A Sydney Festival must-see.
The Object Lessonis showing at Sydney Town Halluntil Friday January 22 as part of Sydney Festival 2016.
