Seven Seconds – In God We Trust (FringeTIX)
Accidental Productions @ Higher Ground (Theatre)
2:00pm, Sat 23 Feb 2008
I’m really starting to get suspicious of tickets which have “Preview” printed on them now; not only were we 10 minutes late getting into the venue (and what a shit front-of-house the new Higher Ground Theatre has!), but we got to experience the joys of a production crew learning about their lighting rig – all while I traced patterns in the dust on top of the seats. There’s another 10 minutes down the drain.
And when the performance does eventually start, it’s clear that this is a blunt and blustering production that only youth can provide. Maybe it’s a very straight translation of Falk Richter’s original work – after all, Richter is German, and we all know about the subtlety of the kraut (don’t worry, I’m a kraut too ;) – but Seven Seconds feels like someone’s taken the Subtle Stick, snapped it in half, and thrown it away. And burnt it. And mixed the ashes with water from the River of Repetition, baked it in the Oven of the Overtly Obvious, then thrown it off the Bluff of the Bloody Blunt.
Ahem.
We’re watching a fighter pilot, abstracted from the mass devastation he’s causing by his on-board computers. We cut – often – to narrated scenes of his family at home, happy in their consumerism, blinkered by the media. We cut to the media being used to control the consumers. The five performers all narrate, all cross roles, and manipulate the five cubes that constitute the set – in general, the stage production is sparse, but effective.
The problem, as I alluded above, is that the work itself – and the delivery – is so bloody blunt. I walked away feeling that I’d just been smacked around the head by someone yelling “WAR IS BAD! CONSUMERISM IS BAD! MEDIA MANIPULATION IS BAD!”. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
I feel like a real grumpy bastard having written all that, so let’s look for some more positives: the young cast were fine, Mark Fantasia and Jessica Barnden being the standouts. The lighting – once it got going – was great, and worked really well with the neat backdrop of the stage. And, as I mentioned above, the direction was OK (though the ending stretched out a bit too long).
Oliver Stone would love this; it’s right up his tree. Not me, though. I prefer to do a little bit of the thinking myself.