illogic

     
       Illogic (Cake Theatre Productions)
       Playing from 13 to 15 June 2013
     

Someone said the universe must not be narrowed down to the limit of our understanding.

Illogic is a theatre performance in two acts.

Two actors move across a desert-like terrain. Encounters between them gradually bring forth a dramatic landscape capturing at once, a dream like state and the reality of their humanity.

Illogic asks questions it can’t answer and sets a path it won’t follow. 

Two actors. One moving terrain. Giving way to Illogic.

       

      I was intrigued by the synopsis given of the production. It had echoes of Waiting for Godot even if it was borderline pretentious.

      After watching the play, the truest thing that could be written about it are those very lines above. Illogic is a theatre performance in two acts... 

     I though the first half was a failure and the second half a success. But a production is a whole, isn't it? Were they mirror images of each other - the second one building and consolidating images, sounds and senses given in the first half of chaotic frenzied segments?

     And so it starts, I am writing a play... It does not follow the usual rise and fall, exposition, etc... It follows a theme... themes on love. What is love? The rise and fall of the first half - raising the question and offering no answers, except intermissions of songs, shortcuts to already filled depositories of emotions and memories. They rise and fall on the stage resembling a sketch by Escher - a resemblance they will never achieve, because the very essence of Escher is to be impossible. But these two chameleonic figures, both mind and flesh, both young and adult, both female and male, everything and nothing at the same time, were the audience's vicarious pathways to infinity.

    I want to be possessed by God. A woman will undress and become naked on stage. I'm going away - Stay. I'm going away - Stay. It needs two. To the breathtaking crescendo when the actor becomes director (as directed) and controls the stage light (god's thunder onstage), to the stripping of the actress with the stripping of the stage embalmed in light. The actress breaks the fourth wall in the last monologue, you will be ok. We will meet again. 

         "August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day, don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade. This intensity, this heat, sun like a disc-saw through your body. Is it because you come from Australia? 

          You didn't answer, just held my hot hand in your cool fingers and strode on easy in linen and silk. I felt ridiculous. I was wearing a pair of shorts with RECYCLE tattooed across one leg. I remembered vaguely that I had once had a girlfriend who thought it rude to wear shorts in front of public monuments. When we met I tethered my bike at Charing Cross and changed in the toilets before meeting her by Nelson's Column. 

'Why bother?' I said. 'He only had one eye.'  

   'I've got two,' she said and kissed me. Wrong to seal illogic with a kiss but I do it myself all the time."

   - Written on The Body, Jeanette Winterson