Image supplied by La Mama.
Time Out! – an ABC Circus Education Production – wears its re-found heart on its up-cycled sleeve. A circus consort, the production includes acrobatics, balancing and shadow puppetry – using everyday objects and recycled materials – within an overarching narrative of sibling rivalry.
The play opens with three sibling runaways arriving at vacated Aunt Leslie’s, as, in the words of eight-year-old Jules (Anna Thomson), ‘Mummy’s a dragon’s toenail.’ The three siblings ranging from five upward roughly equate to representations of the id, ego and superego, with the eldest aping her teacher’s instruction, the middle child battling with assertion and the youngest impulsive and playful. The title takes itself from a well-worn maternal interdiction – ‘You kids need some time out!’ – with the less subtle message of being able to self-entertain without the electronic gadgetry so commonplace, it would seem, in contemporary childhood.
The inability to self-occupy or play without a reliance on electronic devices is squarely – and admirably – faced by this circus performing trio. Propelling the action, however, the narrative lurches. The technological vernacular used is aimed at an adult audience, while the action is directly targeted to over fives. Freely associating word play, once they discover they have no charger, the siblings can’t ‘Google’, ‘upload photos on drop box’, ‘Skype’, or create a ‘hash tag’ twitter account to get their ‘selfie’ to mum.
Similarly, the comic twists on these tech associations juggled between the siblings – ‘iphone/ipad/ibook/I think therefore I am’ – present an uncomfortable division in the implied audience. At times, the dialogue, while it embraces diverse family groups, sits unappealingly in the narration of sibling rivalry: five-year-old Jamie (Alice Robinson) ‘has a different dad’ and ‘her dad never takes her anywhere’, remains without context other than one sibling rejecting the other.
Once the action opens up, however, the raised stage becomes magical with plastic bottle jellyfish and crafted anemones in an underwater scene of shadow puppetry with a makeshift sheet screen. The ‘game boy’, where the two older siblings – with the use of a tissue box, paper roll and bike bell – control the movements of the younger, who hoola-hoops through the game levels, cleverly substitutes the high-tech games with imaginative play. A semi-dream sequence with an unsuspecting sleeping elder sister that involves terrific balancing and acrobatics is both captivating and comic in its unsuspected mockery of the Queen. There is the usual, but perhaps forgotten, use of refuse as toys – a tin can telephone – that involves a message on self-directed play, further evident in soliciting an audience member to ‘draw a selfie’ of the trio to send home to Mum.
It is in the latter that the play’s message almost becomes didactic as they attempt to send the selfie in a plastic bottle. For what goes down the drain, goes into the river and into the ocean – a scene that sends the trio scuttling back to Mum and Mum’s spaghetti. But this message is also the play’s strength – where the performance and narrative, at times, are uneven, the clarity of its philosophy and clever incorporation of re found and up-cycled refuse celebrates the novelty of child play.
Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 stars
Time Out!
An ABC Circus Education Production
Created by: Meiki Apted, Anna Thomson, Alice Robinson
Performed by: Meiki Apted, Anna Thomson, Alice Robinson
La Mama Courthouse, Drummond St, Carlton
Melbourne International Comedy Festival for Kids
www.lamama.com.au
16-20 April
