THEATRE
Presented by Summer Nights, lucidity suitcase intercontinental & PICA
PICA Performance Space
Review by Anika Landy
The PICA performance space darkens and fills with smoke; a sole spotlight illuminates a middle-aged man standing in front of a desk with a lamp allowing us to just make out a world map in front of him. Abruptly he begins a booming monologue, his voice whipping through the theatre. “Let him depart; his passport shall be made,” he bellows. The sole actor is reciting a Shakespearean speech from Henry V.
Theatre director, designer, actor and performing extraordinaire Thaddeus Phillips engagingly recreates 17 remarkable global border crossings in this visual, sensory, intellectual and witty theatrical show. After his urgent spiel on the invention of the passport dating back to the 1600s, Phillips engages the audience in a figurative hypnosis to begin our journey around the world with our own ‘American passport’.
With the use of minimal props, lighting and sounds, Phillips manages to single-handedly take each and every audience member around the world in his high energy and personable minute-by-minute recounts. Featuring a cast of lurid characters, all played by Phillips, the show explores wildly different experiences of various international borders of the world. Each border brilliantly encompasses a small skit using a single table and chair to create the holding cell, airport terminal, Mediterranean beach or Austrian chairlift you found yourself in or on.
Tremendous as it was, the show felt too long. After almost an hour and a half of border crossings and hearing Phillips impressively ramble off more than ten different languages, the scenes felt repetitive. As though the story arc peaked too quickly, the audience became less engaged at the 40 minute mark, shifting in their seats. Jumping from place to place with non-chronological years thrown in between, created a chaotic urgency to this show, such that it felt too slow and too fast at different points in the night.
From Hungary to Serbia, Amsterdam to France, Singapore to Bali, Colombia to Morocco, Phillips not only took the audience on a journey around the world; he plunged you into an experience like no other. His comedy style personas received a great audience reaction throughout the night until the show dribbled on for longer than what felt comfortable. All in all an extraordinary display of talent and energy-fueled acting made the show a standout in its own way, if over-extended in its session time.
17 Border Crossings runs until the 6th of February at the PICA Performance Space, Northbridge. Tickets are available here.
