Sydney Reviews

Photos – Jamie Williams

The Experiment is aptly named due to both its subject matter and unusual style. An unnamed man (actor and guitarist Mauricio Carrasco) does medical experiments on his children in the hope he can find a cure for his partner’s disease. From reading the above premise, you’d expect the man to go on a gut wrenching character journey and be filled with moral guilt as he plummets into despair. Surprisingly, the whole show is very clinical in tone and you hardly feel for the man at all. The audience’s experience is more about sights and sounds than it is about the character’s journey.

The man behind the show is composer David Chisholm who adapted Mark Ravenhill’s short horror monologue, The Experiment, into what he calls a Musical Monodrama. Popular in Paris in the early 1760’s, this genre consisted of monologues and music. The idea was that the spoken phrase was announced and prepared by the musical phrase. Mark Ravenhilll had the idea for the play after a discussion he had with a group of acting students in London, about whether disabled children should be used for medical experiments instead of animals.

Sound and music play a central role in the show. Small speakers dangle above the audience in rows of six. The man delivers his first monologue, surrounded by a circle of microphones which are also suspended from the ceiling. The dark, inhuman electronic soundscape is a feature, and swirls around the audience, almost enveloping them throughout the show. The man plays an acoustic and electronic guitar at different stages. The acoustic guitar is exquisitely incorporated into the general sound design. Each strummed note floats away to join the more alien soundscape. It would be interesting to know if this is done live by adding delay via an effects pedal or if guitar noises were previously incorporated into the sound design. The electric guitar is played with a cloth and a ruler shaped instrument, like a father operating on his child. No guitars were harmed during the performance… I don’t think.

The show does give some insight into the man’s psychology by conveying the sense of dislocation he feels from the horrific events taking place. Perhaps this dislocation is his minds’ way of coping with and processing these events. At one point, the story is taken over by a series of video projected faces of all different nationalities. Are these events actually happening to someone else, perhaps to everyone, perhaps to no-one?

The Experiment is a rich immersive sensory experience if you can accept the fact that this show is more about technology in the form of striking video projections, and coldly mechanical synth driven soundscapes than it is about the man on stage. That being said, it seems a shame to see the main question of whether we should experiment on children for the greater good of humanity get lost in all the sights and sounds. This is surely a subject that would have kept audiences talking long into the night.


2015 Sydney Festival
The Experiment
By Mark Ravenhill and David Chisholm

Venue: Bay 20 | Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh NSW
Dates: 15 – 17 January 2015
Tickets: $49 – $44
Ticketmaster: 1300 723 038