Rio Saki and Other Falling Debris

Rio Saki and Other Falling Debris
By Shaun Charles
At The Carlton Courthouse
Until June 21

Where to start? Should I start with a positive? No? Well, let’s start with the writing then.

Firstly, Shaun Charles demonstrates a remarkably tin ear for dialogue some how managing to capture what people would say in a given situation and then torturing it into a rigid parody of actually human speech. Secondly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a narrative in which so little happens that is so heavily contrived. This characters girlfriend leaves him and goes and hooks up with that characters sister while that character ends up in a bar with the best friend of the first character, as interesting as a merry go round in Geelong.

By the way, incase the plays constant unvaried repetition of this single fact doesn’t clue you in; Rio Saki was known as the Artist of Love.

Directorially the play staggers along without too much intervention though the odd bit of slow mo walking at the back of the stage, occasional significance heavy blocking and an awful lot of unprompted and detached screaming

Detached is, in fact, an excellent word for the performance being given by the six actors involved. Not that they can be blamed. At some point in the rehearsal process ol’ Doc Episode himself would have mentally stepped out for a fag and never come back if he was acting in it. There’s just so little to hang your hat on emotionally. Which is contextually not surprising as the stakes are set impossibly high from the very beginning. It’s not giving anything away to tell you now that Rio Saki is set in a world fated to be destroyed by a meteor strike in four days. Consequently, as an audience member, it’s a little hard to care about the emotional ups and downs of these people on stage as we know that less than a week’s time will see them all ashes floating in space.

The design of the set is quite pretty in that post apocalyptic way but once you’ve taken that in you’re left with nothing to do but wait for the asteroid to hit and wipe us all out.


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