‘Vanishing Point’ had its Australian premiere in at the Canberra Theatre Centre last week. It is the latest production by Compagnie Philippe Genty to tour Australia, following Stowaways in 1996 and Dedale in 2000.

There were some wonderful scenes, of which I had two favourites. One was a conversation between a man and a dog whose mimed gesticulations extended into visual question marks, arrows, punctuation, aggressive lines and sharp angles that attacked, choked and tickled. It reminded me of Victor Borge’s aural Phonetic Punctuation skit, and also of the great ‘piece of rope’ puppet in Company Skylark’s production of Wake Baby some years ago. My other favourite scene involved a puppet that I particularly liked: a grotesque and huge inflated ogre who several times proceeded to swipe and eat the head of one of the men. In an article by Irma Gold in the current issue of Artlook,

“Genty explains that working through these ideas in Vanishing Point was cathartic. ‘I found that this huge, monstrous thing I had inside myself was actually deflating. Indeed, this is actually what happens on stage. At the end you have a huge monster almost four metres high, which is an aspect of the subconscious of the main character, and finally it deflates in the longest fart in theatre history!'”

I thought the manipulation of a bird puppet that was also eating a person was really good, as were the two scenes where people were floating and diving high in the air, and the tiny shadow puppet crowd at the very end. I also enjoyed the aesthetic quality of the music, lighting and illusions.

There were two themes along the lines of ‘maybe what you are seeing is a little bit of yourself ‘ and ‘the murderer is also the victim and vice versa’, but I didn’t follow any particular development of them beyond that. I understand that part of the idea of the play was to present surreal sequences of interior landscapes that, like dreams or inner conflict, are puzzling. The audience interacts by trying to figure it all out and interpret it like the images in a dream, rather than being given a rational path to follow. Hopefully they find different perspectives on their own inner experiences through recognizing some of the images. I have mixed feelings about the success of that. I think one probably needs to see the show more than once to really explore the images and the connections between them, and few of us get that opportunity.

Here are the dates for the Australian Tour of Vanishing Point:

Canberra: July 6-10, Canberra Theatre
Sydney: July 14 – 31, Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay
Adelaide: August 4 – 7, Her Majesty’s Theatre
Melbourne: August 11- 21, Comedy Theatre

A review:
Vanishing Point, Compagnie Philippe Genty, by Jill Sykes, Sydney Morning Herald

Some pictures (by JoJo):
Canberra Theatre Vanishing Point Photo Gallery

The picture accompanying this post is from the collection above.