2022: The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes

 

 The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes.  Back to Back Theatre at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse, May 11 – 13, 2022.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
May 11

Authors                         Mark Deans, Michael Chan, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, Sonia Teuben
Composition                 Luke Howard Trio – Daniel Farrugia, Luke Howard, Jonathon Zion
Performers                    Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price
Director                         Bruce Gladwin

Screen Design               Rhian Hinkley, lowercase
Lighting Design            Andrew Livingston, bluebottle
Costume Design           Shio Otani
Sound Design               Lachlan Carrick

For more details, go to https://backtobacktheatre.com/project/shadow/

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The title and the image above, used to advertise this Back to Back stage play, are deliberately mysterious.  You will actually see Simon Laherty, not in a singlet among African safari trophies, but in a business suit when he comes on to a stage, empty except for the couple, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, who have set up a few seats for a community hall meeting.  

Scott has been trying to explain to Sarah about how to avoid sexual harassment in public situations, amusing the audience when describing when touching a crotch is inappropriate; and pointing out that it’s OK in your own bedroom, which is a private place.  

Simon’s task appears to be to announce who they are to us, the people attending this meeting, but nothing goes quite to plan.  Will Sarah do the introduction?  To make sure that her voice is heard?  While Scott is not as respectful in public as Simon wants them all to be, because he is so angry about the centuries and centuries of mistreatment of people with disabilities.  Because all three actually have speaking disabilities, everything they say is reproduced on a high screen by a voice recognition Artificial Intelligence program on a computer we later find is named Siri.

So what is this Shadow, what is it hunting, and how does what it planned to catch become the hunter instead?  It turns out to be a metaphor of a very philosophical kind.  It makes a very unusual kind of theatre – but as Sarah points out, they all think in different ways, challenging in one quite extensive interchange, for example, what it is to be ‘normal’ – when they are as normal as ‘normal’ people who think they are not normal.

Our response in the audience to the sense of humour subtly changes as the ‘meeting’ becomes a real meeting of minds.  Our laughter at ‘crotch’ jokes becomes a warm recognition of the reality of how these people on stage are treated by ‘normal’ people like us.  The form of theatre, where they are actors and we are audience, shifts.  These people are using their real names and are really unable to speak in standard forms of pronunciation.  We need Siri to translate what they say, just as they – and we – need to trust Siri to write on the screen what they mean to say.  

Ironically, for hearing impaired people “All Australian free-to-air broadcasters must provide closed captions on programs shown between 6:00am and midnight on their primary channel (for example: Nine, Seven, Ten, ABC1 and SBS1). News and current affairs programs must have captions at all times.”  But Sarah hates captions because they represent the divide between “able” and “disabled”.

The important, and original, idea in this play is that Siri, like those computers in Hollywood movies, with artificial intelligence will come to rule the world when she (she has a smooth kindly-sounding woman’s voice) becomes more intelligent than any one of us.  We will all be disabled then.  

How would you like that, eh?  That’s the challenge these actors who are not really acting present to us, who find ourselves taking part in a fictional community meeting.  Will we vote for all power to Siri?  Will we vote for all power to the ‘normals’?

If we can say that the value of theatre is that it can change the world, by creating in our imaginations a fiction that seems real, that gives us a new understanding, and that makes us re-think how we behave – then The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes is a great example of the best in theatre.  

It’s no wonder then, “The Norwegian Ministry of Culture has announced Australia's Back to Back Theatre as the 2022 recipient of the International Ibsen Award.

“Considered to be ‘the Nobel Prize for Theatre’, the International Ibsen Award is gifted every two years and comes with a $2.5 million Norwegian kroner (equivalent to almost $400,000 Australian Dollars) cash prize. It aims to honour an individual or company that has brought new artistic dimensions to the world of drama or theatre. Back to Back Theatre, a professional theatre company with an ensemble of actors with disabilities at its core, is the first Australian company to win this award.

“The Chair of the International Ibsen Award Committee Ingrid Lorentzen said: "We are proud to be able to honor an outstanding and unique theater company that asks questions of their audience, of society and of each other through groundbreaking productions. Back to Back's work is exciting, unsettling and thought-provoking. It inspires us to be better artists and better people.

"Back to Back gives voice to social and political issues, and their work is a relentlessly collective practice, where several creators, ideas and perspectives are always present and create a space for inclusion and opportunities. This is part of what makes their work so memorable and so important. Back to Back's work has inspired and moved each of us in the committee, and we look forward to presenting this well-earned award to this theatre company."

[ Reported by Stephi Wild, April 1, 2022 in Broadway World at
https://www.broadwayworld.com/norway/article/Back-to-Back-Theatre-Wins-2022-International-Ibsen-Award-20220401 ]

 © Frank McKone, Canberra