Sydney Reviews

Porquoi? Parce que!

That seems the simple raison d’etre for ROOM, a show of shambolic disciplines and controlled chaotic choreography.

Chaplinesque and Felliniesque, ROOM is a surreal realisation of the creative process, the creation of a show from concept to writing to auditioning to staging, a kaleidoscope of tumult, turmoil, bedlam and breakthrough.

It’s a journey from blueprint to blackout, of the struggle from page to stage, conceiving the idea, gestating the possibilities, and birthing the reality. It’s a celebration of the abstract becoming concrete, with all the conflict and confusion, the clash and collision of vision and ego.

If these walls had ears, they say, if these walls could talk. In ROOM, the walls walk and whirl, creating formations, phalanx, and fortifications while actors, acrobats, singers and musicians contend with sliding floors, secret doors, floating ceilings, and multi functional furniture.

Circus skills from clowning to aerial work are part of the sinew and bone of this muscular show that is brash in its crash test staging. Flesh and blood humans morph into mannequins, musical instruments transform into biological entity.

James Thierrée’s latest work of surreal theatrical imagination, ROOM is the most ambitious production yet from the Swiss-born auteur and his Compagnie du Hanneton. Breaking the fourth wall, a concept that really doesn't exist in this production anyway, James informs the audience that this production defies description. And so it goes.

ROOM is an experience in absurdity, silliness in all seriousness, a crazy maze of clever incongruity, where stage hands are just as much the stars as the performers.

Production design of distressed furnishings, dilapidated lamps and a sofa couched in disrepair and summarily abused is eyesore become visual delight, indivisible from the formidable lighting design intrinsic to the narrative. 

ROOM is pandemonium at play, a holy mess of hellzapoppin glory.