Are we not drawn onward to new erA
Ontroerend Goed
Perth Festival
Heath Ledger Theatre
 
Logue Lake
Written by Geordie Crawley and directed by Elise Wilson
Perth Festival
Studio Underground

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Hegel wrote that ‘the owl of Minerva spreads her wings at dusk’ – meaning that historical understanding only takes place when a particular era or ‘shape of life’ has ‘grown old’. Kierkegaard gave this an existential twist when he wrote that ‘life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards’. For Marx, more pithily, ‘history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. 

 

All three sayings apply to Belgian contemporary performance group Ontroerend Goed’s concept-driven and image-based work Are we not drawn onward to new erA, which challenged and divided audiences at Perth Festival last week.

 

In fact, it’s difficult to write about the work in other than abstract terms without spoiling it for those who might one day see it. This is because it depends on what’s called in theatre parlance a ‘reveal’, which occurs at a turning-point (or more precisely, given the content of the work, a tipping-point) halfway through. However, prior to that (depending on the perspicacity of the viewer) there’s a sudden (or dawning) realisation about the apparent senselessness of what’s being said and done onstage (as well as the apparent senselessness of what we as a species are doing to the planet).

 

The opening image (no spoiler here) is of a bare stage apart from a single tree standing in a mound of earth and a woman lying on the floor with her back to us. She’s in contemporary clothes, but the image is already mythical, even Biblical (the tree bears a single apple). Soon she wakes up, heads downstage, and speaks in a mysterious language. Shortly afterwards she’s joined by others – and by an increasingly mysterious accumulation of other objects, to which increasingly mysterious things are done.

 

Perhaps paradoxically (given its palindromic title) Are we not drawn onward to new erA is fundamentally about irreversibility. As Lady Macbeth says: ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ In this show, the reverse turns out to be true – at least with the help of a certain technological trickery (which I won’t reveal here). However, despite its cleverness (which at times makes us want to laugh or clap), this trickery only underscores its own deceptiveness. Any elation we feel is followed by sadness, because of the fundamental impossibility of what we are witnessing; we might laugh and clap, but (inwardly at least) we also weep.

 

What German aesthetics refers to as the ‘beautiful appearance’ or ‘beautiful illusion’ (schöne Schein) of art is, precisely, an appearance or illusion only – one that, according to Schiller, acknowledges its own unreality. For Adorno, writing at the tail-end of this tradition, all art is sad – not only because of the transitory nature of its illusions, but because it shows us (and here Adorno quotes Beckett) both ‘how it is’ and ‘how things are’ (‘comment c’est’).

 

In showing us ‘how it is’ as well as ‘how things are’ in its form and content – which are perfectly matched and rigorously followed-through – Are we not drawn is a more sophisticated work than the two other shows I’ve seen in this Festival that deal with ecological crisis. The sentimentality and anthropocentrism of The Jungle Book Reimagined (‘man-cub saves the world’) or the fatalism and misanthropy of Food (‘man eats the world’) are here surpassed by a meta-theatrical reflection on the use of technology in live performance. 

 

To be sure, as in Food, there’s an acknowledgement that (as a species and as individuals) ‘we need to leave’ (this planet, this life). However, this recognition is humbler (and more modestly executed) than the former show’s final act of self-burial. Instead, there’s a sense in Are we not drawn that we must do what we can to ‘reverse’ things; but also that, from a cosmic perspective, ‘all things must pass’, including ourselves.

 

Finally, the themes of irreversibility, illusions, transience, and the melancholy sense of ‘how things are’ also appear in what might be called the ‘relationship plot’ of the work. This concerns our relationships with each other – including love, as well as an acknowledgement of love’s inevitable failure. In this regard, it’s surely no accident that (to my ears at least) the first (comprehensible) word spoken in the show is ‘eros’ – and the last, ‘sorry’.

 

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There’s something of a craze at the moment for ‘immersive’ theatre that plays with the audience’s relationship with the actors and the physical space. Perhaps this has something to do with the impact of film, TV and more recently streaming (accelerated by the pandemic) on our capacity to focus on and contemplate action collectively or from a fixed point of view; instead, we’ve become accustomed to the intervention of cameras and editing techniques that zoom in and out, pan, cut, dissolve and reframe what we’re watching; not to mention changing channels, getting up and moving around, or interrupting at will our increasingly personalised and even privatised ‘viewing-experience’. There are arguably sociological as well as technological reasons for this development; one might even posit that contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism have led to increasingly individualised and atomised forms of cultural production and consumption. Alternatively, one might simply argue that there’s more than one way to watch a show.

 

In many ways the experience of seeing Logue Lake resembles both watching a film (or even being on a film set) and viewing a visual art installation. We’re free to wander around the set and action (as long as we don’t interact with the actors – ‘no touching or talking’ is the general rule – or enter the house without walls or roof that sits in the centre of the space) and can also head upstairs for an overview from the gallery seats. Crucially, we’re equipped with headphones (a device which is also used in two other Festival show this year, The Pool and The Invisible Opera) and handheld radios, and are free to switch between five audio channels, each of which represents one of the characters’ subjective points of view (including dialogue, music and internal monologue), regardless of where we are in the space or what we happen to be watching. 

 

It’s impossible to take in the entire show, as scenes are occurring simultaneously in different parts of the set. I spent the first ten to fifteen minutes upstairs in the gallery, which gave me a ‘wide-shot’ (so to speak) of the whole space (including most of the audience who were moving around the set at floor-level); but found myself occasionally changing audio channels so as to pick out different scenes. Then I moved downstairs and spent the rest of the play circling the action and sitting at various points along the way, while changing channels in order to hear whatever scene I was watching. 

 

Sometimes I chose a particular character and followed them; at other times something in my peripheral vision attracted my attention and I allowed it to lead me. At times I felt like a camera or boom operator choosing my own ‘angle’ on things; at other times I felt more like an editor, assembling my own ‘cut’. In general, I noticed that the dialogue scenes drew my attention more strongly; I found myself less intrigued by the interior monologues, perhaps because I felt that I didn’t really need to hear the character’s thoughts or see the characters having them (possibly this wouldn’t have been the case had I been watching a film). 

 

Unlike the immersive dance theatre show Sleep No More, Logue Lake is narrative-driven, and the action takes place in a single location and unfolds in real time. Essentially, it’s an outback Australian Gothic horror movie (interestingly, Malthouse Theatre’s immersive, headphone-based, narrative-driven Hour of the Wolflast year was in a similar vein). 

 

Four friends in their twenties or thirties spend the night in a cabin by a lake that has a demonic legend attached to it; a mysterious fifth character shows up, who seems to have a connection with the legend; mayhem ensues. Other familiar horror tropes include the figure of the double (echoing another Festival show inspired by genre-movies, Stunt Double, but in this case harking back to films like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or John Carpenter’s The Thing); one scene involving a knife-wielding cross-dresser recalls Psycho or Dressed To Kill. 

 

I wasn’t entirely clear as to whether these and other motifs – or the intermittently ‘spooky’ soundtrack – were meant to scare us (an effect which is notoriously difficult to achieve in theatre as opposed to film) or invite us not to take things too seriously (or perhaps both). I felt something similar about the occasionally clunky dialogue, which would have been unexceptionable in a horror movie, but sometimes sounded a little awkward onstage (I felt a similar tonal ambiguity and occasional awkwardness in The Hour of the Wolf at Malthouse).

 

In fact, a certain ‘queering’ of the narrative and (at least potentially) the overall form of the work is potentially one of the script’s more original strengths and could have been pushed further; but I sensed a certain ambivalence about pursuing this stylistically. Perhaps this was connected to the use of headphones and body-mics, and the related attempt to achieve the effect of naturalistic ‘film-acting’ onstage (again, I sensed a similar ambivalence and tendency towards naturalism in The Hour of the Wolf).

 

Notwithstanding these reservations, Logue Lake is an enjoyable evening of fun and games, with some more thoughtful provocations about the effects of internalised homophobia and denial on the Australian psyche. The sound design by Ben Collins and Chloe McCormack is a technical tour de force; Samuel Diamond’s production design and Peter Young’s lighting are beautifully judged and evocative, especially given the challenges of the immersive staging. Performers Isaac Diamond, Timothy Green, Lila McGuire, Will O’Mahony and Alicia Osyka navigate the (sometimes conflicting) demands of the script and staging with admirable skill and integrity, especially given the consummate timing involved in moving around the set from one overlapping scene to the next. 

 

Abiding questions remain. What do we gain (and what do we lose) by staging this story in this particular way – as opposed to watching a horror film, or even seeing things play out onstage in sequence, one scene at a time? And conversely: why choose this particular genre in order to explore the form of immersive theatre itself? Is the latter even really suited to narrative-driven theatre at all?

 

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Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende= Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. 

 

Professor von Flügelhorn is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations),Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.