Review by Kate Gaul
Trick of the Light company (NZ) has appeared at Sydney Festival with the acclaimed “The Bookbinder” which I missed so I was excited to catch this new work “Suitcase Show” at Ed Fringe. This is billed as an inventive and eclectic production comprising a boxset of short stories, each one told out of a suitcase.
For the last decade the company has toured their work around the world, from Aotearoa / New Zealand to Australia, Canada, UK, USA, South Africa, and China. “The show draws on the strange experience of travel, and the stories and surprises that might be found inside a suitcase,” says writer / performer Ralph McCubbin Howell. This includes the contents of their own bags – “I got some raised eyebrows when I put a cast of my dad’s severed head through an airport security scanner.”
The show itself has been built to travel, and this inspires some surprising staging. “Freighting forms the onstage design,” says director / designer Hannah Smith. “so lights and sound as well as stories emerge from the cases on stage.” A preshow challenge had audiences seeing how some of the show was set up – a rare glimpse behind the scenes was exciting and humanises the technical wizardry and what can be a mysterious theatrical process. The conceit is that a traveller is stopped at airport security and asked to open all his suitcases. The interplay between the 2 actors is superbly droll and the character of the security guard is one we could have heard more from. She also doubles as the technician on the show, placed on stage to one side. There are a lot of suitcases and so the story begins.
In “Suitcase Show” we literally have everything from acting, lo-fi shadow play to wireless projection, from dancing disembodied hands to narratives that crackle from a 70s stereo suitcase. Emerging from the suitcases, we have an entire village, gradually illuminating in the winter sun. We have a tiny train track, complete, of course, with train, encircling a mountain as a bear looms large in the forest. Technically it is a superb ballet of miniatures, equipment and imagination.
Tiny in scale, the show touches on many larger themes - climate change, love and death, travel, and secrets that we carry with us. An overthrown autocrat finds themselves on the run from their own shadow, an astronaut turns their telescope back on earth and back in time.
I enjoyed the puppetry and animation. I appreciated the way that the human dimension danced with the inanimate to create joy. But the story telling didn’t pay off for me and “The Suitcase Story” doesn’t emerge as a satisfying whole.
Image Supplied
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