Writer: Ethan McLucas
Director: Rio Rose Joubert
The importance of good stage design and its integral role in storytelling is often vastly underestimated, and a clever use of set should enhance the audience experience, helping the viewer to navigate between the different locations as well as the play’s themes. So, it is rather baffling that Director Rio Rose Joubert’s production of new play 113 at the small Hope Theatre chooses to carve the room into two prison cells but places the audience on three sides of the stage, preventing at least half the room from seeing the performer on the opposite side of the wall.
That would be fine if Ethan McLucas’ play had actively chosen to show the audience only one side of the story, creating the possibility of going twice and sitting in different parts of the room to observe both sides of the action, but 113 is a conventionally-told two hander about prisoners 49 and 64 who wake up with no memory and have to recall who they are and what they have done before they can be released. The staging device, then, is not part of a deliberate storytelling approach to conceal or surprise the audience, which makes the viewing of the play a distracting and incomplete experience.
113 itself is full of ideas that it never fully realises, starting in a totalitarian world where misdemeanours seem to be punished with memory loss and imprisonment, visited by faceless guards who demand the inmates’ clothes for cleaning and undertake invasive medical examinations, but beyond this, we learn too little about the regime around them. Within that setting, McLucas places two contrasting characters, the newly arrived and rather hysterical 64, who objects to every indignity, scrambling hurriedly for the memories that will support his release, and the longer-serving 49, who has seen more than 15 companions come and go but still cannot recall her own former life.
What begins as a Beckett-style chaining together, an odd couple waiting for something to happen while passing the time with games and repetitive chatter, soon unravels as the pair start to form a bond that blurs into a romantic, even borderline sexual, attraction that belies the wall between them. Suddenly, the play is in Love is Blind territory as the plot together while flirting – the title of the play taken from the addition of their monikers – although it is a concept that doesn’t develop. There are some nascent themes here about trust and inspiration, yet there is little character development to give the play a feeling of propulsion.
Later in the story, a more interesting potential direction emerges when 49 (Isobel Glover) starts to recall who she is and is disappointed by her discovery, preferring to think of herself as the tough, action figure she believed herself to be when she was freed from her real memories. The play could also do more with 64’s identity (George Loynes) in thinking through what it means to discover their real selves and the release their numerical anonymity has given them to invent who they want to be. 113 has some good concepts, but focuses too much on the double cell scenario and thinking of things for the characters to say to pass the time rather than exploring who they become or could be because of it. And there are a lot of much better ways to build a wall between them through imagination, cutaways and transparent materials that let the audience see the whole story even if the characters cannot.
Runs until 25 July 2025
