Last year the Tasmanian art collective Re:group gave us Coil, a gem of a play that combined live performance with video capture to present a funny but emotionally resonant tale of loss and regret set in the dying days of a small town video store. Now they’re back with UFO, a similarly experimental project that uses video capture and puppetry to follow the experiences of four young people (Matt Abotomey, James Harding, Angela Johnston and Tahlee Leeson) who have been tasked with observing an honest-to-Ed-Wood flying saucer that has set down on a local golf course. But some experiments are less successful than others.
Directed by Solomon Thomas and written by Kirby Medway, and utilising puppets by Chris Howell that are based on 3D scans of the actors, UFO plays out on a miniature set designed by Angus Callander, with the actors manipulating the puppets by hand while a videographer films them. The resultant images projected on two walls in a kind of stop-motion animation style. Effectively, these “screens” are the focus of the action, with the puppets and sets effectively being a glimpse behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, while Griffin Theatre Company’s rather small SBW Stables Theatre has proved itself as a storytelling TARDIS (feeling bigger on the inside) time and time again, it is perhaps not the best venue for such an undertaking. For at least some audience members (including me) both the projected images and the miniature sets were partially obscured, lessening the impact of the innovation. It would certainly play better mounted in a different theatre; as it stands your best practice for this season is to arrive early and grab a seat close to the stage.
Narratively, UFO is rather oblique and elliptical. It eventually becomes clear that our characters are temp workers, the job of recording the alien interloper having been farmed out to a labour hire company. What should be a monumental human event is reduced to a mundane box-ticking exercise as they note the monotonous pattern of flashing lights the craft gives off, and any sense of wonder our protagonists might feel is soon reduced to boredom.
That’s an interesting notion, and a number of science fiction stories have played with the idea that the awesome and inherently unknowable can quickly become rote – the 1972 Russian novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker in 1979, comes immediately to mind, as does Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation, based on the novel by Jeff Vandermeer. Over the course of UFO’s 65 minutes, the titular ship doesn’t do much of anything – it’s a catalyst, a rock thrown in a still pool, and our attention is on the ripples it creates rather than the object itself.
Unfortunately, these themes aren’t dramatised in a particularly interesting way, and UFO just kind of ambles along until it stops, almost as though a mandated run time was dictating the fall of the curtain rather than the arrival of a cathartic climax. Characters bicker over trivialities like their supply of paper running low, they get paranoid over a missing cup of coffee, there’s a fun bit of business when the spaceship interacts with the ducks who call the nearest water home, and that’s about it. By the play’s end you’re left with not a lot of answers, but also a few intriguing questions.
Ultimately, UFO as a work is interesting and frustrating in roughly equal proportions. Re:group is a talented crew – the team’s drive to play around with the formal elements of theatre is admirable and has paid dividends in the past. But UFO feels like a rough draft that could have used more time in development. In its current form and at its current venue, its experimental flourishes are muted, while the story itself doesn’t offer enough to make up for those shortcomings. It’s a production that privileges technique over content, and while I look forward to further explorations of the interplay between live video and theatre from Re:group, this latest offering doesn’t quite measure up.
This season of UFO was presented as part of Griffin Theatre Company’s artist development program, Griffin Lookout, at the SBW Stables Theatre in Kings Cross from April 18-29. Find tickets and info over here.