Coil

Nostalgia is big business these days, as the stresses of these here crazy times drive us to the simpler pleasures of our youths, often mediated through a property like Netflix’s Stranger Things. We don’t just crave the media of our past – the movies, TV shows, and music – but often the medium of the time as well – look at the popularity of vinyl records as a prime example. The humble VHS tape, whose prominence from the '70s through to the turn of the millennium transformed about three successive generations into avid movie heads, hasn’t seen such a revival, largely because as a format it’s unarguably inferior to digital. But we seem to have a collective love for the video store experience, and so it’s in such a place that Tasmanian creative collective re:group set the scene of Coil, their latest work.

In the dying days of a small town video store, Steve (Steve Wilson-Alexander), seemingly the store’s only employee, waxes nostalgic about the fun he used to have with old workmate Carly (Carly Young) and dreams of saving the shop. Wilson-Alexander and writer Mark Rogers weave in autobiographical elements, with the former reminiscing about his formative filmmaking experiences with former re:group artistic director Jackson Davis, who left the arts to retrain as a nurse, along with lengthy – and funny – meditations on the cultural cost of video vanishing. It’s a little bit Clerks, a little bit High Fidelity, and a little bit Suburbia – the Linklater film or the Bogosian play, take your pick – as it becomes apparent that we’re waiting for Carly to re-enter Steve’s life before the final curtain.

Which is on its own engaging enough, but it’s Coil’s formal elements that push the work over the line from pretty good to genuinely impressive. This is a work of live cinema, with cameraman Solomon Thomas filming Wilson-Alexander on the fly as he plays both our protagonist and a handful of other characters who drift in and out of the store. Some of this is projected onto a screen that forms part of the sparse but instantly familiar video store set, but other grabs are mystifying for the audience – until you realise that Young, offstage but still visible at an editing desk for much of the performance, is cutting the footage together on the fly, with the aim being to present with a version of a film that
the fictional Steve and Carly almost made back in their video store heyday.

That’s clever and more than a little bold, not to mention risky – on the preview night a technical issue was quickly papered over by the game and engaging Wilson-Alexander to the point where the audience was wondering if it was all part of the act. Yes and no is the answer – the somewhat chaotic nature of the enterprise demands fast thinking, and everything is an element if it works – and it does.

What really impresses is how re:coil are able to weave themes of loss, ageing, regret, and stagnation into what is still a very funny and energetic work. It gradually emerges that Steve is a bit of an arrested development case, and our perceptions of both him and his idealised take on his video shop job shift as the play progresses. Thus, Coil is that rarest of nostalgic exercises in that it’s not just an empty stab at reviving the storied past, but an attempt to grapple with the very notion of nostalgia in a real and considered manner. It’s a near perfect mix of format and function, blending a fondness for the past with a gentle caution that we shouldn’t hold onto it too tightly.

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