Bye Bye World

If you have ever organised a birthday party that you later regreted – wondering who you are and what your connection is to the people around you – you may easily relate to the story of Olga and Dino, who simply choose to “disappear”, eschewing the trappings of middle-class domesticity and embracing the indeterminate seduction of freedom.

In a final gesture of domestic attachment, Olga wipes the icing from the knife that cut her birthday cake, walks out the door and catches the local bus, presumably never to return again. Unbeknownst to Olga, the only other passenger on the bus, Dino, is embarking on a similar escape.

A Best of Amsterdam Fringe winner, Bye Bye World is a beautifully crafted tale of the desire to reject one’s accumulated existence, with two characters driven by the slow terror of bourgeois mundanity to drop their assumed masks of conditioned convention in order to potentially find new meaning in their lives.

Production company Gehring & Ketelaars | Frijling proclaims a desire to create transparent performances in which the line between fiction and non-fiction is exposed as extremely thin. Bye Bye World is an example of this ethos and, in conjunction with dramaturg Nienke Scholts, the company have produced a taut, finely-structured script. Anna Gehring (Olga) and Vera Ketelaars (Dino) deliver sophisticated performances exploring a range of nuanced energies, neuroses and vulnerabilities. They also seamlessly present a number of minor characters conjoined to Olga and Dino, creating a backdrop of social entrapment that fuels an internal struggle of loyalty and guilt against the need to break away.

Marjolein Frijling’s direction is deceptively simple. The minimalist set leaves no room for distraction – all attention is focused upon the performers and each character invites you, seemingly personally, to witness the confession of her need to drop out and vanish: for one character, it is meticulously planned; the other, it is an act of impulsive whim. The direction of the piece possesses an assured and continuous flow, riding a crest of emotional distress and need for escape through to a becalmed yet disorienting state of empowerment.

Gehring’s Olga presents a disturbing scene of trying to be what everyone expects – the gracious social butterfly – but on the dance-floor, her seeming joy and lightness very quickly turn to an excruciating portrayal of anxiety and torture, all in the name of keeping together a ‘happy face’. It is hard to watch: you want to be able to place a hand on her shoulder and tell her to stop, or join in her frenzy so she is not alone.

As Dino, Ketelaars excels in subtle expressions of interior pain, as exemplified in a scene where she furtively explores her own potential desirability, as she strokes, scratches and pulls at the flesh of her back in a delicate then progressively punishing manner. The audience is uncomfortably placed into the position of voyeur, spying on Dino’s most private anxieties. We witness how she is trapped by her mother’s societal expectations of engaging in intimate relationships, and finally how she sets out to renegotiate her personal parameters. The first flowering of this is beautifully encapsulated by Ketelaars’ delivery of “Good morning” to Olga upon the bus-ride out of town: two words full of relief and promise.

The only jarring moment comes in the form of an attempt to tailor content to locality, in a scene where newspaper stories of national and local significance are woven into the dialogue. This is clumsily juxtaposed with a weather forecast of Northern Hemisphere frost, whilst the actors and audience alike sweltered in an oppressively hot performance space under the conditions of a Perth summer heat-wave. Perhaps the forecast of impending frost is meant to serve as metaphoric impetus for the characters’ decisions, but the extreme heat of Perth would have worked equally well to accompany the characters’ simmering to ‘boiling point’, forcing them to take radical action.

Thematically, Bye Bye World is another instalment in the long Western tradition of excavating the experience of middle-class alienation and dissatisfaction. It does, however, also pose the slightly unnerving proposition of making the radical upheaval to leave behind all that confines and chokes. And here is where we meet the fine line between fiction and non-fiction: who amongst us will merely dream of making a bold change and who will act on the radical desire to start completely afresh?

There is a potential contradiction here as well; although the presumption seems to be that at the end of the play the characters have made a positive step towards some sort of liberation, what exactly would this new existence look like? Would it not be some other sort of incarnation of middle class “success” or will they choose to embrace another set of values that sets them outside of this paradigm? With these questions in mind, the show’s resolution is paradoxical, and somewhat unsatisfactory.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Amsterdam Fringe and Gehring & Ketelaars | Frijling present
BYE BYE WORLD
Director: Marjolein Frijling
Cast: Anna Gehring, Vera Ketelaars

The Treasury Back Room
Corner St Georges Tce & Barrack St, Perth
January 27–February 18, 2012
Bookings and more information: www.fringeworld.com.au