Canberra Reviews

Helios is really just one person telling us a story.

And I mean that as a compliment.

This wasn’t my first encounter with the work. I first saw Helios three or four years ago in the Dionysus office in Canberra – one of those strange and wonderful situations where performance appears in an unexpected room and completely transforms it. David Caffery (founder of Dionysus) had encountered Alex Wright while travelling internationally researching contemporary performance and brought the work back to Canberra.

I loved it then.

I loved it again now.

And there was something quietly thrilling about seeing this work move from an office in Canberra to the Canberra Theatre Centre Courtyard Studio stage. CTC embracing contemporary performance and forms that sit outside traditional theatrical structures feels brave and important. Theatre doesn’t only need to mean sets, spectacle and distance. Work like this expands what audiences imagine performance can be.

Created by Wright & Grainger – writer and performer Alex Wright with music by Phil Grainger – Helios begins with the ancient Greek myth of Phaeton and gently pulls it into something recognisably human: school buses, mixtapes, teenage dares, grief, fathers, first kisses and one bright gold car.

In this iteration, Jamie Wood shines as a beautiful storyteller.

Warm, funny, relaxed and deeply watchable, he trusts the audience and trusts the material. He never pushes for emotion. Instead, he allows the story to unfold at its own pace, moving effortlessly between myth, memory and conversation. The audience interaction feels genuine rather than obligatory. He holds the room lightly, and completely.

What stayed with me most was the show’s understanding of memory.

Not official history.

Not plaques and monuments.

The private kind.

A line in the road no one else can see.
A bus stop.
A city square.
A hedge.

Places that become sacred because of what happened there.

And I kept thinking: I wish this kind of storytelling was happening in lounge rooms everywhere.

People putting down their phones and saying, wait, let me tell you what happened.

Stories handed from person to person.

And if they aren’t happening there, then thank goodness they are happening in theatres.

A few lamps. A mug of tea. Music. Words. And a casual stance.

While I appreciated the confidence to trust that language, rhythm and imagination, I couldn’t help but want for more theatricality. It IS in a theatre after all. 

I remember Alex holding that tiny office room completely in the palm of his hand all those years ago, and there is something beautiful about that kind of theatre – theatre that doesn’t need to prove itself through scale. Jamie captured that same generosity and intimacy in a very different room.

That isn’t to say I don’t still long for theatrical transformation in theatre. I do.

But Helios makes a compelling case that transformation can happen somewhere else entirely – in the audience.

Simple.

Deeply human.

And a reminder that stories, told well, are enough.