Andrew Peek ABC Radio Interview

The following audio recording is from an ABC Northern Tasmania interview with Penny Terry and Andrew Peek discussing the upcoming performance of 'Profuge'. It was broadcast on November 29, 2011. The still images are from the performance.

Experiencing 'Profuge', a review by Barbara Hatley

The following is a review of 'Profuge' by Professor Emeritus Barbara Hatley

Stage in semi-darkness; actors already in position, motionless, as the audience enters the theatre. Three black-clad figures lie in  a semi-circle. face-downwards,  with haunches raised and  arms stretched out before them. A man bound to a kind of wall near the back of the stage is frozen in an agonised struggle  to break free.   Above  him several hooded figures are grouped around  an amazing construction –  long sinews clustered together at the top, stretching  outwards and downwards in  triangular formation to a large illuminated base. With its eerie, spine-tingling sounds,  it projects an image of a futuristic space station somewhere out in the cosmos. To the left a  man in tie and jacket with a hat perched sideways across his head leans casually against the wall, like a character in a 1930s -1940s film, waiting  to meet a shady acquaintance  in a bar or on a street corner.

I thrill with anticipation of the drama to come. And when the actors on stage come to life these expectations are amply fulfilled.

The constrained figure breaks loose from his bonds as the man in the hat, the Chorus, announces ‘We must perform the form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad’.  The newly-freed  man , Dr Faustus, now confronts  the three figures arrayed before him,  the Angels of  Good and Evil and Mephisthophilis. His interactions with them, together and separately,  form  a kind of  core  motif of the play. They move towards  him with intense, acrobatic, dance-like movements,  reinforced  by scraping, plucking music  from the sinews of a large leather harp, my imagined space station. Faustus responds  - now with stiff-limbed, blind-eyed terror, now with a conjuring dance. They urge Faustus  on to pierce his body, then lick up the gushing flow as he enscribes with his own blood  on his limbs a deed of gift  – the gift of his soul to Lucifer, in return for boundless knowledge. Chorus inspects his body and reads the deed aloud.  He announces various events – the appearance of the seven deadly sins, Faustus’ visit to Rome -  sometimes  in  loud, booming tones, sometimes in garbled, muffled confusion as his words pass through the  strange machine at his side, the Contraption. Finally great thunder claps and bolts of lightning accompany the tragedy of  Faustus’ demise. The three figures drag him off to hell – a hell symbolised by a return to chains, the reimposition of bondage.

Watching Profuge is an intensely dramatic physical and emotional experience. The patterned the movements of the actors’ bodies, the tones and timbres of their voices and the accompanying, punctuating sounds of the harp music create a visceral sense of the themes of the play.  We  feel the seduction of ambition, the threatening power and menace of evil and the helpless terror of its victims. Could there be suggestion, too,  in the subversive impact of the Contraption and the control of  the space-station/ harp, of the seductive, destructive power of contemporary technology?  

Aiming to move beyond literal reality and the semantics of conventional play texts,  the Voice  Theatre Lab succeeds strikingly in focusing attention instead on the phsysical, emotional,  symbolic aspects of theatre, opening up new paths for the  imagination.  And yet…..

Considering the small audience numbers at  the performance of Profuge that I  attended, and my own  feelings of frustration at times at not quite understanding  what was going on, I wonder if  more could be done about communication. Actors  who have  been rehearsing together for many months understand and revel in their new discoveries about theatre;  for audience members seeing the performance for the first time, however, absorbing meanings and interpreting nuances is much harder. Could the experimental activities of the  Voice Theatre Lab be extended to canvassing reactions to their work by some outside observers?  Might discussion sessions  be held after some performances? Conceivably, engaging more   fully  and directly with  the texts of some iconic dramatic works could result in wonderfully rich fusions of the known and the new. There would seem to be many exciting opportunities for extending the reach of the activities of the Voice Theatre Lab more widely.