The Presentation of Findings from My Scientific Survey of the First 7500 Days of My Life, Done in the Interest of Showing You How to Live Better Lives
By Uther Dean
Produced for The Young and Hungry Arts Trust
Directed by Nisha Madhan
AV Design by Stephen Bain
Costume Design by Fraser Mildon
Set Design by Christine Urquhart
Lighting Design by Jack Dryden
Sound Design by Doug Grant and Nisha Madhan
The Basement Theatre
Saturday 10 October, 2015 to Saturday 24 October, 2015 at 8.30pm
Latecomers cannot be admitted
Published at http://www.theatreview.org.nz
The Young and Hungry Arts Trust has as its mission ‘empowering young people through mentoring to appreciate, create and participate in New Zealand Theatre.’ It’s a charitable organisation, founded in 1994, which arose ‘out of a need to provide young people, aged 15-25 years, with opportunities to gain hands-on theatre experience within a professional structure.’ The Young and Hungry Arts Trust also hosts an annual Festival of New Theatre which is made up of new scripts written specifically for young people by New Zealand writers and commissioned through the Playwrights’ Initiative and an Ambassadors’ Programme which introduces young people to a diverse range of live performing arts and provides students with the opportunity to find out what happens behind the scenes. Both ‘The 21st Narcissus’ and ‘The Presentation of Findings from the Scientific Survey of the First 7500 Days of My Life Done in the Interest of Showing You How to Live Better Lives’ are products of this excellent process and they play, one after another, at the Basement until 24 October, 2015.
Uther Dean
Playwright Uther Dean tells us that ‘some people collect stamps, some people play sports, and some people undertake in-depth scientific surveys for each day of their entire lives.’
Saraid Cameron
Yes, some people do, and if there’s a better example of why this isn’t necessarily a great idea it’s Deans’ own remarkable creation, Max Casey Addison (Saraid Cameron). There are astonishing examples in this production of the myriad ways in which playwrights can make life problematic for their actors – and their creatives – and it’s almost as though Dean has calculatedly gone out, found them all and crammed the whole kit and caboodle into one 80 minute (or so) script. The challenges for all concerned are immense and it gives me tremendous pleasure to say that this stellar cast is equal to all of them. Cameron’s performance is, in fact, by far and away the most complete piece of work I’ve seen this year – and possibly any other year – and that’s saying a lot. It’s probably easier to say what she doesn’t get to do in this inspired Nisha Madhan madhouse than to list what she does do so let’s just say she’s absolutely stunning and leave it at that.
Andrew Gunn
It’s essentially Max’s story but Max has the considerable advantage – and it’s an important one – of being surrounded and supported by six of the very best, the best at slapstick comedy, best at silences, best at playing farce, best at heart-rending emotion and, did I mention it before, the best at comedy. One is so sublimely good that she doesn’t even need a place in the programme.
Max’s brother Ash (Ravi Gurunathan) is unsibling-like in his seeming sycophancy, Rory Robin Rankin (Anthony Crum) is Max’s lifelong friend, the friend everyone wishes they had. Relationships come and go but when you’re in a relationship with Elliot Hempel (Arlo Gibson) you know you’re in it for better or for worse and so it is for Max. Everyone needs to have their life’s work accompanied by electronic keyboards, a siren and a song, and who better to provide this than the well-respected and seriously in-demand Jay Thornby (Doug Grant). Max’s production – I’m sorry, Presentation – needs technology and Bill Hyde (Andrew Gunn) is the seemingly savvy digital servant appointed to fulfil this somewhat thankless task.
Ravi Gurunathan
We enter after the interval – the two plays are stand-alone but most of the audience on opening night has chosen to partake of both – to find a major change has occurred. There’s a gently sloping, rough-hewn rostra centre stage with three chairs, a lighting console to the left and a vision of loveliness to the right in the form of two keyboards some percussion, and all in the hands of the ubiquitous Jay Thornby. In the hands of Doug Grant, Thornby is a riot. He’s a whizz on his instruments and his brand of comedy is perfect for this virtuoso role. He’s also wearing flashing rainbow goggles which helps.
Nisha Madhan
Andrew Gunn’s technician is busy with cables, boxes, crates and other techie paraphernalia as he puts the finishing touches to a pre-show set up which never actually ends. He’s your standard theatre maven – over-long shorts, cap, plaid shirt and knee pads, the stereotype to end them all.
Cameron arrives and introduces herself. She’s well on top of her presentation material which seems to have a lot to do with Dr Who and the many iterations of this enigmatic character. It’s a way, she tells us, to get the production – sorry, Presentation – underway. She describes for us the need to have musical (and other) distractions and Thornby is, as always, equal to the occasion. His song ‘General Guideleines’ is simply fantastic. We learn how unwise it is to wear sandals with socks, how we should battle our desire to kill our families and how vitally important it is to record everything that happens when you’re not in the room. Yes, all this obsessiveness borders on the paranoid but it stops just short of being totally weird. There are great theatre gags – ‘I don’t like to be in the spotlight’, ‘that’s a wash, not a spotlight’ – laced with some pretty profound stuff as well -‘you should only say sorry if you mean to change’ – and the action skips along almost fast enough for us to see Max’s presentation as impeccably normal behaviour. Most of us, after all, record what happens to us every day of our lives.
There are issues about running over time – a snappy altercation between Bill and Max which is covered by Ash telling a joke that is truly funny – and it’s clear that the Presentation has gone way off course. There are Chekhovian moments about trust and then Max jumps to the four categories of the Presentation which are ‘how to have friends’, ‘family’, ‘work’ and finally ‘love’. The friends section is truly touching in places but it’s pretty obvious that Max is losing all of his – and his family – and that work is awful and that there is simply no hope of love.
Doug Grant
I’m going to miss some stuff out here because it’s just too good to describe, suffice to say that, despite a further Musical Distraction after which Jay eats a bowl of food with chopsticks, Max is wise to tell us that ‘everything is falling apart’. It is too and I have to say I’ve not seen so much chaos and carnage on a stage in a very long time. Anarchy rules to such an extent that even the appearance of an upstanding cartoon penis on the whiteboard doesn’t surprise us one little bit. The stage is trashed, there are cables everywhere, people fall over, friendship are ruined and it’s all incredibly, incredibly funny. The writing is sublime, the direction likewise, and the acting is right out of the very top drawer. Max begins to recite an endless list of mistakes he’s made – a book full of them – and we’re reminded (as if we needed the reminder) that what Max is trying to do is very disturbing indeed. We’re reminded to simply ‘be’, that anything else is just ‘wasting time, wasting precious fucking time’, that we’re running out of time and suddenly the fragility of our collective mortality slaps us around the ears like a wet fish. ‘We’re all just cancers on our inner lives’ we’re told just before Max disappears under the keyboard stand. Rory leaves, and then Ash whose parting shot is ‘I’ve kept you safe’. Much happens in the final ten minutes that I simply can’t tell you about. You really must see this for yourself. We find out about forgiveness (Max doesn’t want that) and the process of falling in love: 1) become obsessed with someone, 2) let your obsession become a disruption and a distraction, 3) make contact, but don’t tell them that it’s all an experiment, 4) put your face on their face, 5) persevere and 6) take pleasure in it. ‘Love’ we’re told, ‘lets things in, and it hurts’.
Arlo Gibson
Then there’s a countdown to the end.
There’s so much more to this show – sorry, Presentation – than I’ve told you. There’s the craft that makes the turmoil seem unrehearsed, the secret I alluded to that’s too good to give away, the music, the sweetest of ensemble playing, the madness and the message and, at the centre of it all is Saraid Cameron whose performance is supremely good. Whether she’s berating her technician, monitoring the game, or burrowing halfway down the trapdoor in the stage, she is in total control – which is sort of the point really.
Anthony Crum
The slender beast of a programme gives little away but it does have some cogent quotes that illuminate the work, the key quote for me being from ‘Dr Who’ Season 27, episode 6 ‘The Dalek’: ‘This is not life. This is … sickness’. And so it is. And a sadness, and a wretched melancholy, but as with the plays of the great Anton Chekhov, through laughter we find our innate humanity – and so it is with this. So it is with this.
So, there you go, it’s a quite exceptional experience. It has everything including the longest full name of any play I’ve ever come across. If it doesn’t have you yet, you might want to change that tout de suite because this one is very special indeed. It even has two assistant directors Ash Jones and the splendid Crystelle L’Amie but about her, the least said the better.
*smile*
Crystelle L’amie
dykiegirl 