Autoeulogy

‘Everyone is dead and there’s nothing left but chickpeas’ sobs the last surviving woman on the planet, who has been alone in a bunker for a very long time. She makes a daily broadcast to the unknown – sharing her musings on the world: how it got to this apocalyptic event, debating how much of her science knowledge was derived from Star Trek, and surviving on tins of the beige  legumes. Alone, that is, until she involves us, the audience, in curating her bunker-cast.

Lucy Haas-Hennessy brought her first iteration of Autoeulogy to the 2020 Adelaide Fringe, days before the pandemic made a fanciful idea of world obliteration terrifyingly real. This year, she’s reworked the performance with director, designer and dramaturg, Mary Angley – highlighting that despite her warnings from two years ago, not a lot has changed.

Delivered as a manic stream of consciousness, the ends of sentences are unspoken as she begins the next, leaving our brains desperately trying to fill the gaps and keep up – tremendously chaotic yet effective in reminding us of our contributions to the end of the world. It’s much more than a rant on climate change – cryptocurrency gets a severe beating too – it also considers how we would survive without our addictions to Google, how we’ve entrusted the recall of our treasured memories to a voice-activated electronic assistant, and how do we live without evocative art, without human touch.

Haas-Hennessy is terrific delivering such eloquence at full speed – leaving us breathless and captivated – her charm gets the audience on-side and despite the challenging subject matter, she doesn’t patronise or preach. Her frequent interactions with the audience don’t always work, filling the auditorium with light as she first talks to us outside of her broadcast, then asks us questions whose answers are brought back into the bunker, but she does well in combining those contributions with her own words. Her ending is as simple as it is a call to action – and leads beautifully into the next show in the venue, You’re All Invited To My Son Samuel’s Fourth Birthday Party (Autoeulogy’s director Angley is one of this show’s actors) – the two performances cover similar themes in different ways, and make a great pairing.

Mark Wickett

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