Man has indeed become slave of machines. We seem to ignore the beautiful world around us. We don’t even realize the temporality of time and the growing up that happens in a jiffy. This is how, I would like to summarize, ‘Johnny’s Midnight Goggles.’
Matthew Sharp, the solo performer in the play, enthralled the audience with his performance at Natrani in Darpana Academy Ahmedabad as a part of his British Council supported three city India tours that would culminate in Trivandrum. Despite the strength of the performance, a few questions lingered in my mind. As a live performer, the actor’s dependency on pre-recorded sounds and dialogues and occasional lip sync was a little jarring.
As an audience of a live performance, one always expects to hear the actor’s voice without any artificial amplification .And therein theatre especially intimate theatre (like the space in Darpana) scores over the illusion of cinema. If watching something technologically larger than life would have been the intention, I would have rather gone to 3 idiots in a multiplex. On the whole, the production looked more like a musical treatment with a dash of theatre rather than the published review that said: ‘Witty, nail-biting and entrancing music theater. A One man Operatic Thriller.’
Having said all this, one was still moved by the sharpness of the piece. Mathew turned his cello into his co-actor. Using the instrument among other things as; a train compartment, a horrible machine monster and also a wild beast. What I liked the most about this solo performance was the way he turned a technical error into an independent mini scene. He walked up to the technical guy, narrated his intention and muttered some details (which I hardly followed) and got his microphone device fixed!
The play was a visual delight helped by the lights that filled in for props and a background score which was enchanting and occasionally witty one liners ranging from Arnold’s biceps to Sarah Palin. However, it would have been interesting to see how a vernacular audience especially a Bhavai artist would have reacted to the show. Most likely, it would have failed, because it could not dissolve the barriers of language and turn the gestures into an independent narrative.
Great evening but still could have been better.
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