The Volition Project and The Volition Experiment

Here are two separate, stand-alone but thematically linked pieces presented principally to showcase the graduates of Theatre Works Early Career Artists Program Cohort.  So we see on stage a variety of sixteen intriguing, attractive, energetic and mostly talented young performers. 

The Volition Project is group-devised but it has the characteristic cynical, satirical Belle Hansen stamp: take a contemporary pop culture phenomenon – here the so-called television ‘game show’ – raise the stakes, push competition and boundaries into the ridiculous, demeaning, humiliating and cruel – all as a scathing allegory and critique of modern life.  The audience is (supposedly) implicated in this. 

As we enter the theatre, the performers - dressed in stylised, black and white costumes – enhanced by more black and white eccentric make-up - stand stock still on stage, and another – the Host – gives us a handful of discs, each with a character label typical of game show ‘types’.  There are such things as Moral Compass, Dark Horse, Irrelevant, Comic Relief, Fuckable and so on.  We are invited to distribute these discs among the performers on stage as we see them, with the instruction that we are not to worry about stereotypes because that’s what it’s all about.  Of course we do that – i.e. that’s exactly what we do when we watch game shows on TV – and maybe in ‘real life’.  The performers then check their discs to see how many of each label they’ve got and therefore which type they are to play.  It’s a good if abstract idea – but it seems not to have too much effect on what follows.  But these performers do mostly use their bodies with verve and confidence – including basic dance moves.  (The performers are Ella Le Fournour, Jasper Jordan, Kasey Barrett, Ozzy Breen-Carr, Hugo Gutteridge, Charlie Morris, Paolo Bartolomei, Eleanor Golding, Ryan Henry and Schuki Thotahewage.)

The second piece, The Volition Experiment, is ‘mentored and facilitated’ by Stephen Mitchell Wright and it is characteristically much darker (which is not to say the horrors of Project are not dark): it’s a cry of pain from some dystopian crypt or bunker (although I may be misreading here).  Six damaged beings – but the program note calls them ‘contestants’ – who seem to be survivors of some overwhelming catastrophe – stumble and limp onto the stage with strange headgear: helmet, gasmask or disguise.  They’re wrapped in Clingwrap and cloaked in golden foil.  One gender fluid member of the group emerges in a frock and flowing white wig.  They bemoan their fate in agonised monolougue, but hope fervently for a future.  The intention and the idea are clear enough, but there is a lot of text most of which is indecipherable.  (Experiment performers are Sarah Frenchman, Rosa Ablett-Johnstone, Liam Crevola, River Stevens, Murdoch Keane and Amir Yacoub.)

Both pieces feel as if they have been conceived – or assembled – in haste by competing egos and under-rehearsed – with Hansen and Mitchell Wright trying to give the pieces some coherence.  Project is a pointed, topical idea, even if it verges on cliché, and too bad it devolves into that familiar group devised muddle and excess.  Experiment is more layered and psychologically acute – despite the survivors-huddled-in-a-bunker trope - but its reliance on text drags it down.  Speech training does not seem to’ve been included in the training; too much dialogue here is shouted or garbled.  As a showcase then, the two pieces do succeed in putting these interesting performers before us – but not perhaps in the best light.

Michael Brindley