[2015093] dotMaze: Get Lost!
dotComedy @ Royal Croquet Club
12:00pm, Sun 1 Mar 2015
As the Fringe approached, I could see the construction of a large hedge-maze in Victoria Square; it didn’t look massive – maybe a square of twenty metre sides – but it certainly took a chunk out of the northern side of the Square. And when I saw dotMaze in the Fringe Guide – then discovered that tickets were selling fast – I managed to squeeze in one final Fringe event for my Significant Other… a family adventure, of which she would be more familiar than I.
We turned up about ten minutes before our allotted starting time to find a queue wrapped around the side of the maze in the baking sun. Chatting with the people around us, we discovered there was no consistency in their ticket times: some had tickets for the session before ours, others for the session after. The line only moved occasionally, and we eventually found out why: the dotMaze had a very limited capacity, so people could only be admitted once existing wanderers had escaped.
After some solid Vitamin D time, we gained entry to the maze to find that we were sharing the space with a whole bunch of people who appeared to be wandering aimlessly… that’d explain why the line was moving slowly, then. But there was also a wealth of genteel storybook characters – I spotted old friend Seb in old English explorer khakis – and there were also a handful of strange creatures wandering around, made from the same synthetic grass as the maze itself: the people inside the teacup and (functioning!) teapot must have been super uncomfortable.
The storybook characters focused most of their dialogue on the children, providing clues about where to go… and their suggested route took people back and forth to landmarks within the maze (and explained, again, why the queue outside moved so slowly). There was something super-whimsical about their presence and presentation, but they conjured a sense of mystery – and some of the more obscure parts of the maze contained some darker secrets, too (the cage was a bit… grim).
The exit to the maze was surprisingly obscure, I thought, and required an engagement with the players in the maze that doesn’t come naturally to Australian audiences (in my opinion, anyway); but dotMaze was a reasonably interesting, if uncomfortably hot and muggy, chance to explore and interact with all manner of English twee-ness. I’m certainly thankful – for myself and the performers – that it wasn’t a hotter day.
(93) dotMaze- Get Lost!: Curious wander thru maze filled with fanciful characters. Trickier than it would first appear. #ff2015 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) March 1, 2015