Live Performance Review: Phantasmagoria
Images courtesy of Rick Evertsz.
What I think I will remember best about Bernadette Trench-Thiedman’s Phantasmagoria is its themes. Not the spontaneous song, nor the deceased father qua talking pot plant, but the themes. First and foremost, despite its absurd, fantastical and dreamlike dressing, Phantasmagoria is a story of untreated grief and trauma, and the attempts we continually make to ‘place’ these feelings within ourselves.
The play follows Briony, who is played by three different actors to represent this character at three very different stages of her life. These characters are able to talk with one another, reminiscing together on shared memories of their deceased father, who is the engine through which this show runs. The presence and memory of ‘Father’ both literally and figuratively haunts Briony, who died when she was young, but is still trying to reconcile her relationship with him, a feat that becomes increasingly difficult the more she learns about him. Father is a complex character, and each piece of information we are able to glean only serves to muddy our perceptions of him. He fought in World War 2, he struggled with alcoholism, he migrated to an entirely new country, and eventually drove his wife and child to flee from him in terror. All of this and more is left for Briony to decipher and sift through. We watch her, intrigued as she is made to sort the good memories from the bad, and desperately search for some kind of stance she can take on her terrifyingly complex father. Magical realism and collapsed timelines serve to emphasise the themes of memory and nostalgia, and how so often buried feelings from the past have their way of erupting when we least expect it, and flooding our present day.
The theme that perhaps struck me the most within this play was its running emphasis on interconnectedness. Briony can never escape her roots and her history, much in the same way that her father cannot either. As Briony reflects on her dad’s role in her life, so too does he reflect on his own life, and the experiences he had that made him the man and father he was to Briony. This play above all else proclaims and reminds us all that we do not exist as singular beings in a vacuum. We are all constantly having to reinterpret the work and trauma of generations past in our constant search for self-actualisation. Evidently, as Trench-Thiedman resolutely points out, the only way forward, is to look to the past.
Phantasmagoria is showing at Theatre Works from the 2nd to the 12th of March. For tickets and more info, click here.