Melbourne Fringe 2016: FALLING APPLES
The concept of Lene Therese Teigan’s Falling Apples is vast and intimate – a Chekhovian-inspired world where the characters’ lives collide in uncertain times.
Image by Tommy Holt of T6 Photography
As a fan of Chekhov’s work and Peta Hanrahan’s wonderful direction of A Room of One’s Own earlier this year, I had high hopes for this production presented by La Mama and Verve studios as part of the 2016 Melbourne Fringe Festival, but it was ultimately a cacophony of words, ideas and vibrations.
The Kensington Town Hall is undoubtedly a beautiful place to perform a production. The echo within the large chamber provided a beautiful and haunting introduction as the voices of the performers hummed a suitably melancholy sound – this is Chekhovian terrain after all.
The echo, however, did not bode well for the performers and their interactions. Unless the audience was seated directly opposite the vignette, much of the dialogue was lost within the space. Due to the length of the performance space, the audience was seated along some distance, exacerbating this issue. This had the unfortunate affect of alienating the stories before us. I expect a better choice of space or seating arrangement would have prevented this.
I appreciated the concept of the characters constantly moving within the space as one scene was explored. Undoubtedly the message is clear – we cross paths with other histories every day, and occasionally collide. On this occasion it was further distracting from the already difficult-to-follow dialogue of the active scene within the work.
There were silver linings of strong performances from some members of the cast, particularly Elizabeth Huey-Williams as the troubled sister, and Marissa O’Reilly as the foreign lover. Huey-Williams and O’Reilly gave a lovely depth to their performancesthat managed to pierce through the chaos surrounding them. Unfortunately, some of the performances were unconvincing and I do not doubt that staging issues contributed.
Ultimately this premiere work was conceptually strong, but weak in execution.