Austin Harrison
Limbo is the b4 25-shortlisted, return season of a sellout hit in this year’s 6 Degrees Festival produced by Keane As and Believable Arts Management. It’s inspired by Dante’s 1321 epic poem Inferno and has all the hallmarks of a young company full of ideas. They’ve thrown everything at this production; some sticks and some doesn’t.
Like this inspo text, the play centres on a self-absorbed artist living the high life without thought of anyone else- in this case, comedian David (Ben Lamb). The show opens with David boarding a train, being vaguely creepy to a femme passenger before she reveals herself to be Virgil (Ava O’Brien) who will guide him through the underworld to reflect on his life choices.
The play then takes us through a series of memories and recreations from David’s life performed by “the twins” (Blake Boston and Sophie Helm) who are demons that multirole different scenarios aimed at getting David to admit to his wrongs and reconnect with the important people he’s left behind in his career success.
O’Brien’s Virgil is a real highlight of the production. She plays the restrained patience of a moral guide, with great control and a lightness which keeps us engaged and entertained from woe to go. Her performance is captivating, and the role is well-written (by Kathy Keane, Tom Smith and Jimmy Williamson).
Set design from Nathan Arnott (and built by Lachlan Oosterman) features a big train compartment which is painted and decked out to incredible detail, making for a striking opening stage image. It’s really accomplished work from a designer I look forward to seeing more of.
Likewise, the sound design from Roco Moroi Thorn nails the creepy and at times demonic ambient noise of the underworld. There’s a huge amount of scoring underpinning the tension and world-building of this 75-minute epic and Thorn’s atmospheric pieces lift the show to another level.
There must also be big plaudits to lighting design by Josiah Matagi and Ethan Cranefield. Their lighting design, especially to create the sense of a moving train and to extenuate the demons kept behind locked doors are highly effective- with the former making me audibly exclaim “oh cool” in the opening scene. Nice!
So, there’s a lot of stuff in this show which is working. That reflects a fact which is also one of the challenges of the show- there’s just a heck of a lot going on. A scattergun approach to conventions, ideas, and styles means that the work overall lacks cohesion and concision.
There are a few features which I felt lowered the overall tone and quality of the show. One was the use of the twins as twitching demons. While these roles were performed with full commitment by Boston and Helm, less is more when it comes to creating horror and suspense on stage. There is one particular section which features these two in masks, with weird hand-gloves which just goes on too long and loses any sense of tension. I’ve also seen several new companies using this technique on stage this year, and each time I’m reminded of the disturbing power of stillness, where writhing loses its charm.
Another is in the staging of the tension arc of the show. The staging and direction pretty much operate on two levels for David as a character. First denial, then overwhelming horror. The switch between the two is quick (and linked to the scene discussed in the previous paragraph) which means we spend most of the show witnessing no real change in the character. These supernatural, unbelievable things are happening, and there is very little build-up in the character’s response, or the magnitude of the performance of them. The only nod is O’Brien’s increasing exasperation. Some of this is in the writing, but it’s also in the performance and staging choices.
As a director, it’s important to look at these arcs and make the size, volume and style of the performance match the tension you want the audience to experience throughout the show. This time, we hit our straps too early and then asked the audience to linger in one place for too long. It’s a challenge not helped by a 75-minute run time.
Finally, a note on the script. The dialogue is good. The reframing of an ancient text into 2024 is pretty successful as well. There are two things which made it harder for me to enjoy the show.
The first is that we do not get any sense of David’s “now” until it sprinkled in when we learn his past. This is a structure which works for lots of plays, but at its heart this is a morality play. Unfortunately, without having a baseline understanding of the (im)morality of the character, we are unsurprised and unaffected when his ethics are brought into question. I think a beat at the top of the play, showing us who he is, would allow us to tune in and be more invested for the first couple of scenarios.
Second, the three scenarios presented by the twins before the big change up, are too samey. Similarly to my note earlier, they don’t really grow in significance or morality. The result is that the first hour of the show ends up feeling like a lot of repetition of the same themes and reactions. A look at the poetic justice of what Dante experiences in the original Inferno may be a great place to draw from to reshape these scenes into more of a journey for David as a character.
Limbo is a smorgasbord of creative choices. Some of them are fab. Unfortunately for me, those that aren’t took away too much from my experience for this iteration of the work to hit the highs it’s capable of.
⭐⭐⭐- 3 stars
Limbo is on until this Saturday at BATS Theatre and tickets are available on the BATS website.
Wondering what those stars are? We have a star rating as an opt-in option now and you can read more about the system and why we’re doing it here.