Clifftop farewell
NORWAY.TODAY: Bakehouse Theatre Company
Bakehouse Theatre
To November 18
GERMANY'S best known contemporary playwright IGOR Bauersima's
European hit play, Norway.Today,
will leave you eager to experience more of his work.
Julie and August are two young people who meet in an Internet chat room
and form a suicide pact.
It's only when they meet on a cliff face over a Norwegian fjord that
their straightforward plan falls apart as they come know, understand and love
each other.
Director Justin McGuinness's production
features this year's finest acting, direction and design with some deliciously
infectious black humour.
Antje Guenther, as Julie, and Nathan
O'Keefe, as August, are a tour de force duo.
They play their roles as if they were the tramps from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
actually having a good time – and then some!
Her self assured, controlled approach to the final moment begins with
supreme intellectual confidence, only to slowly be eroded by his awkward,
emotionally truthful outbursts which continually frustrate their leap off the
cliff face.
August, blurting out he's thinking about pimples just as after Julie
has prematurely gone over the edge, is a classic moment.
The bravura comic performances are matched by a refreshing and engaging
use of set design and multimedia elements.
Director McGuinness's set is a simple white
block with steps to create the cliff and a drop down door, which reveals a tent
front.
Though this is a live theatre piece, video/lighting designer Nic Mollison's use of film
projection and direct video feed gives the sense of watching, in part,
something a lot like television, without confusing the audience as to whether
it's TV or theatre they're dealing with.
Norway.Today has the smarts, laughs,
heart and passion that we expect from the first class theatre we continually
crave, but rarely get. Don't miss it.
DAVID
O'BRIEN
● Review published in the