Director: He Zhang
There are red balloons, and a bright yellow hazmat suit, and an iPhone filming everything. There are interactive interludes where the audience plays Pictionary to introduce a new scene. There are long passages of exposition that are very hard to hear, despite the proximity of the three actors and the microphones they wear. And every so often the action moves upstage and the front row of seating blocks the view for anyone sitting in the second row, which is also the back row. It makes for a frustrating experience, trying to work out just what is happening.
Five young East Asian theatre workers have come together to form Ensemble Not Found, with the declared intention of ‘exploring theatres unsaid, unshown, and unfound’. They deserve much credit for good intentions, and the technical ambition of this show is great, but no amount of video and sound enhancement can overcome indistinct dialogue and murky story-telling.
The company, Xiaonan Wang, Francesca Marcolina, and Kelvin Chan, improvise much of their interaction, and work well together. They engage with the audience, they elicit interesting drawings from volunteers who are filmed while drawing and have that film projected, and the drawings illustrate a key concept that will be explored in the following scene. The drawing aspect of the production is the best rehearsed element, and the most fun.
The narrative, concerning a young Chinese girl re-connecting with her nuclear physicist grandfather in a deserted city called Factory 404, built by the Chinese state to house nuclear weapons, is intriguing, and there are moments of connection between the three actors, but the narrative ideas are taken from projected slides and not the mouths of the actors. The technology is employed to hide problems of blocking, of clarity, of projection. If those problems were addressed, the technology would enhance the piece. As it is, the show has too many problems to give the interesting topics they address a proper representation.
Runs until 29 January 2023
The VAULT Festival runs from 24 January to 19 March 2023
