Escaping the Burning Sun

This new dystopian play from Quasar Arts tells us what we might face if we work out how to live forever yet do nothing to slow down our resource consumption. You could get ‘qualified’, which is like winning the lottery, except the prize is to go to the sun.

Opening in an orphanage (presumably because the parents both ‘qualified’ before the children became adults), Camille (Sahra Cresshull) and Blake (Zachary Borthwick) pore over the accounts, when one of the orphans, Sagan (Bianco Facundo), returns unexpectedly. She is smart beyond her fifteen years and has invented a device that can talk to the pods transporting qualifiers to their deaths. Cresshull and Borthwick have good chemistry together as guardians of the orphanage, and Facundo is confident in the emotional range demanded by the story.

From orphanage to pod, we meet an eclectic range of characters, each with a different response to the outcome we’re experiencing: men and woman who choose how to deal with their situations imposed by corporation-controlled governments. Some are exaggerated caricatures, but Nathan Hamilton gives us the most by dialling it down as Ford, a man who has managed to escape qualification for seven hundred years.

The set is simple, lighting (by Sara-Ross Millar) is effective, and the young performers steer us through the narrative. It’s a little shouty and melodramatic, and there are chunks of story that distract from the thrust of the messages about choice: when you have it, and when you don’t – and what you can do about it. With some judicial editing and just a little restraint from his enthusiastic cast, writer/director Jaziel Siegertsz could have a decent play here.

Mark Wickett

Click here to read more Adelaide Fringe 2022 reviews