Writer: Michael Hajiantonis
Director: Michael Zwiauer
Panto season may be behind us for another year, but it can’t help but be present in one’s mind when a play presents us with a princess escaping from a castle. That impression’s reinforced with a fringe budget that requires the representation of royalty to be confined to a costume jewellery tiara and a faux velvet cloak.
But the world in Michael Hajiantonis’s Put Out His Eyes is as far away from pantoland as one could get. Hanna Omisore’s princess and Daniel Morris’s commoner have escaped a city being invaded by outside forces, and now they must watch from a cave in the hills as their homeland is ransacked and destroyed.
Their escape is hampered by a tradition that says the princess must not be looked upon; any commoner who does so will have their eyes put out. Despite their predicament, the princess is adamant that the rule is enforced.
This restriction makes for an awkward first half, as the pair either look away from each other or jointly look out over the audience towards “the city”, awkwardly describing the destruction that both can see to each other. Hajiantonis’s script is replete with such jarring moments, from the suppliant Morris’s overuse of “your grace” to Omisore’s slips from the heightened RP delivery of royalty to drop the occasional f-bomb. The latter, at least, hints that not all is well with her, although one wishes that director Michael Zwiauer made such shifts a little more subtle.
As events proceed, Hajiantonis expands upon the world-building of this city-state, including a forbidden knowledge of a rumoured idyllic community far beyond the city’s wall. As the pair’s discussions expose that each has been less than honest with the other, it becomes clear that the city’s residents, particularly Morris’s commoner, have become so inured to the royal family’s despotic rule that they help to reinforce a class structure that inherently limits and damages them.
Hajiantonis’s world-building and the picture he paints of this world are effective both in what is said and unsaid, providing the audience with enough information to provoke our imagination into extending the world beyond his words. But along with that, what the piece is trying to say about the hierarchies of the world’s social strata feels beyond reach.
Any work of genre fantasy succeeds when we can feel like we are either completely living in its world or when we can comfortably understand that such a world is a sidestep from our own and that its morals have implications for our real lives. Put Out His Eyes never quite manages to do either. As a result, its tale feels little more than an entertaining diversion, and its morals of class and power of little consequence.
Continues until 1 February 2025
