The Blue Room Summer Nights series as part of Perth’s 2015 Fringe World has a startling array of original theatre. Sadly, 10,000 could have been better than it was. Conflating a relationship breakdown with fighting for your life while caught up in a video game sounds like an interesting idea, but unfortunately it didn’t quite make it over the line.
10,000 starts with our two performers dressed in their hotel dressing gowns staring at the small audience of 50 as if we are the computer screen simulacrum. The opening scene seems to pose all sorts of questions with its visual set up, but joint writer-performers Jessica Messenger and Nick Maclaine probably need more than 60 minutes to really explore their ideas.
Both Messenger and Maclaine energetically engaged with their characters, Eddie and AJ, with Maclaine honing in particularly on AJ’s wheedling tone. There was much appreciative laughter when those over 20 year of age in the audience recognised the video game moves, particularly the slow motion fighting scenes. Despite Eddie’s much stated ‘I’m not a violent woman’ she ends up playing the game for the relationship, which in fact involves quite a lot of violence.
While the fighting scenes and the voice of the game controller (difficulty level: psychotic) were pretty entertaining, a number of moral conundrums, such as how much you love your three year old child, were wrapped up too quickly and unsatisfyingly. The production’s script and performances seemed to be exploring the positioning of gender roles in modern relationships within the context of sexist video game content, and this seems like territory ripe for satirising and questioning. But 10,000 side-stepped the point that all relationships are complex, and the intrigue of them is in how we negotiate meeting diverse needs – including parenting. So pressing ‘restart’, in effect, does nothing except remind one in the end of the banality of game playing.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
10 000
Presented by The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights & Ellandar Productions
Performed by Jessica Messenger and Nick Maclaine
Written by Jessica Messenger and Nick Maclaine
The Blue Room Studio at FringeWorld 2015
Pleasure Garden, Northbridge
3–7 February 2015
