work.txt: 5 stars
As we’re leaving the mesmerising communal experience that is Work.txt, the best of two fabulous form and reality-bending shows presented by UK outfit Subject Object during this year’s Melbourne Fringe, my plus-one turns to me and asks if any of the audience members were plants.
It’s an entirely reasonable question, because what we’ve just seen is too good to be true.
Your mileage may vary, depending on how bold your cohort is. Still, I’m willing to bet that even if you’re genuinely afraid of audience participation, you’ll probably play some role in making this magic happen.
I pointed out that my plus-one insisted he absolutely would not, but when we sat down in Trades Hall’s Commons Room, he promptly did.
Was he a plant?
Nope. Rest assured, no matter how thrillingly magnetic this contemporary adventure in self-worth measured against work-life balance becomes, the only cast is us. And occasionally a tech person.
Most of us gamely respond to commands delivered from on high, reading lines projected on a rear screen in yellow, like we’re communing with an SBS movie.
I’m now presented with a remarkable challenge, because the best way to experience this command shift in motion, written and directed by Subject Object creative director Nathan Ellis, is to go in knowing as little as possible with an open heart.
Work, for so many of us these days, is all-consuming. Cost-of-living and housing crises alongside soaring rents and diminishing rights force us on edge. Wars and worries. Swipe-rights and social media flurries.
Do we love what we do to keep those wolves at bay and our heads afloat? Are we ensconced at home, screaming into the void, or all alone in a crowded office, unsure if we know that dude at the water cooler?
Is the daily grind of work too much for you? Maybe you’ll need a lie down. To build something new or knock it out. Perhaps you’ll guess a classic pop banger as we relay it one word at a time in unison. Or go to war with another star sign.
As printouts spill, and Jenga blocks fall, the meaning of art is dissected. It all gets a bit hectic before Work.txt soars into the sublime, transforming each of us into a microcosm of millennia, an afterimage and incandescent presence all at once.
Are we plants?
We kinda once were and will be again. As this electrifying hour winds its way beyond the stars and back again to deliver us home before our alarm clocks shriek us from our sleep once more, the fourth wall explodes and is rebuilt anew.
We’ll all feel like, for one bright night, our roots are interconnected.
Instructions: 4.5 stars
The perfect warm-up act for Work.txt, Subject Object’s second Fringe offering, Instructions, is simpler in shape and scope, yet still enticingly ephemeral in its unhinging of reality.
This time, us plants get to take a back seat as a rotating ensemble of stars, including Christie Whelan Browne, Vidya Rajan, Tom Ballard and Ash Flanders appear for one night only.
Only they have no more clue what’s going on than we do. Each will, much as we are asked to in Work.txt, read their previously unseen lines – instructions, if you will – from a teleprompter, or listen to them via headphones.
An audition of sorts, they already have the role. Or do they?
Filipino-Australian theatre-maker and performer John Marc Desengano was our abundantly amiable company for the evening, playing an actor auditioning for a role. Not for Instructions, but instead for a film within the show. We watch as he gives it his all, then agonises when neither the director nor his agent calls.
As his anxiety roils, giving way to anger, the ill-defined lines between fact and fiction blur further, as Desengano acts out whatever may come without warning, and things take a turn for the even trippier. Think dramatic fades. Faces overlapping. Ears in lips.
All and more in a show that works with cameras, lights and revolves to bring film to the theatrical and vice versa.
All the world is a stage, Shakespeare wisely has Jaques say in As You Like It, and the powers that be at Subject Object have our player repeat. We have our exits and entrances. Listen, rapt, to others’ Instructions, and/or choose to act, or not, in Work.txt.
Each show asks us, literally, if they’re worth our $32?
The answer is a thousand times yes, Work.txt even more so.
