Sonder - Old Fitz

SONDER

Old Fitz Theatre |Berlage & Co

Let's start where we have to: the set. Slowly moving shards of mirror hang and descend around a lone figure on a reflective circular black floor, catching light, multiplying it, throwing it back in fragments. As a visual language for a show about shattered identity and the terror of being truly seen, it's close to perfect and it announces itself as the show begins. Berlage has designed for this stage before, but this might be his finest room. Technically, it's a wow from go to go.

The directing matches it. There's a maturity here that's genuinely exciting. Berlage has learnt, or deepened his understanding of, something more valuable than spectacle: restraint. He knows when to hold his performer still, when to let silence do the heavy lifting. Those pauses land. Not every director acquires that instinct, and here it's doing an enormous amount of work.

The material is heartfelt, important, and worthy - do I really need to say more? Romeo is a gay Māori man navigating the intersecting damages of a violent home, cultural dislocation, and a love affair in Berlin that undoes him.

Riki Lindsey, who wrote the book and lyrics and performs the whole thing, brings genuine conviction and a voice that can carry the room. Mitchell Sloan's electronic score moves capably between nightclub euphoria and aching hollowness, and the incorporation of Mau Rākau and ancestral chant gives the piece a ritual weight that lifts it above the merely confessional.

And yet. The writing sometimes announces itself where it might instead reveal itself. We're told what Romeo feels at roughly the same moment Romeo feels it, which keeps us in the position of sympathetic observer rather than someone truly implicated in his story. The score has the same tendency: driving hard toward intensity without quite burrowing under the skin. You admire it more than you're undone by it.

None of which diminishes what Sonder genuinely is: a significant and necessary new piece of Australian music theatre: queer, Indigenous, formally restless, and unapologetically personal. The production surrounding the material is extraordinary. The material itself is still finding its sharpest edges.

Review by Kate Gaul

Image by Jessie Obialor