Review: HIBERNATION at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Wednesday 18th August 2021.

Irish-born Finegan Kruckemeyer has called Australia, Tasmania and, more accurately, South Australia, home since he was eight. He is a prolific playwright, with a major focus on plays for and about young people. Hibernation is his hundredth play. He certainly knows how to tell a story, put it into words, and put those words at the disposal of actors and directors.

Billionaires race each other to be the first to push their pointy nose cones into space. Nations spend even more on plans to reach Mars. All the while, there's another planet, much closer to home, where that money, and science, and imagination could be of so much greater good. There's an old Spanish proverb that the sleep of reason brings forth monsters. This gripping, timely vision of our future is engrossing and scary. All those memes and Facebook posts telling us there is no Planet B will come to mind. The Day of the Triffids, Will Smith in I am Legend, all our fears will be realised.

As I write, wildfires are ravaging Turkey. Sicily suffers temperatures of 49C. The whole world is in a state of chaos, and Kruckemeyer brings it home to our doorstep.

An epic should be long. It should deal with universal themes and challenges as experienced by heroic individuals, or by ordinary people whose struggles render them heroic. Usually, the Gods will intervene or interfere. A simple description of the story will feed the paranoia of so many people: antivaxxers, climate change deniers. Here goes.

Scientist, Emily Metcalfe, played by Ansuya Nathan, has a plan to save the world. She passes it to her colleague Damian Accuardi, played by Chris Asimos, who hands it over to the Minister for Science, Warwick Joyce, played by Mark Saturno, as the archetypal Canberra politician. Quite simply, the human population of the world will be drugged into hibernation for a year.

They will wake, without the kiss of a handsome prince, to a world where natural forces will have had a chance to re-establish some sort of balance with the environment controlled by humans. The drug 501E will suspend life down to developing foetuses.

The narrative is taken up by Alex Hall, played by, Rosalba Clemente. Is she Australia's Prime Minister, the USA's first female president, an Anglo Merkel? Pete, played by, James Smith, the man in the street, husband, father of a young daughter, explains to the audience how the hibernation will proceed. People will put their dogs and cats outside. They will close their homes up, windows curtained, doors barred and they will climb into bed and sleep. Dormitories will be established for the homeless; you'll be pleased to know they have not been left out. The story has a beginning and an end, played out against a wide curved wall, its white expanse framing a circular screen. It's 2030, by the way.

Between the beginning and the end is the middle. Pete is awake. He's a hunter, armed with guns stolen from a police station. Maggie, played by, Elizabeth Hay, is awake. She's a thief, her apartment stuffed with stolen goods, including chandeliers; the eternal lure of shiny things. They both function with lab-grown lungs, and the 501E has had no effect on them. Kruckemeyer's vision of hibernation in Adelaide is enthralling, drawing on the deep roots of our culture, and tying us in to the story through our shared geography.

Maggie's vision of the sleeping houses, might be Tennyson, and Pete takes her to the Adelaide Oval. The grass, unmown, is high, and flowers have sprung from seeds dropped by birds. It's a biodome, she says, but it is more than that. This is the Garden of Eden as Milton recalled it, and they, awake in a sleeping world, are an Adam and Eve who have arrived already conscious of original sin. There has been a tragedy. An explosion on South Terrace has incinerated an apartment block, home to, among others, Warwick Joyce's elderly mother. Maggie braved the flames and smoke to rescue some sleepers but, as they lay in the pavement, they were food for the wild dogs, the hyenas. The story unfolds and truths surface; responsibilities are owned.

The world begins to waken, and cast members, shrouded in quilts and blankets through the long scene, begin to stir.

In the third act, there are questions, there are answers, and it becomes clear that deep personal motives have pushed the hibernation agenda. Pete and Maggie are on the run. He's left his wife and child for her, and they have a daughter between them. Two ten-year-old Adelaide girls, Poppy Kelly and Eva Hinde, play the daughters.

Kruckemeyer amplifies the impact of hibernation by bringing in two other communities. Ernesto Flores, Ezra Juanta, his husband, Luis, and his mother Cassandra, characterised by Rosalba Clemente in Bogota, and Rashidi Edward and Kialea-Nadine Willams as Azabuike and Chidera Okoye of Lagos, Nigeria. Their stories aren't tokenistic. It's a reminder that global disaster affects all of us globally, rich nation or poor. The rich nations, of course, find it easier to recover from the damage they have committed.

The play was conceived before the COVID 19 pandemic, a different sort of global challenge, and Mitchell Butel encouraged and supported the creation of 'Hibernation', with all the resources available to the State Theatre Company. It looks superb but it's the acting that will stay with you, articulate and intelligent. Butel has a superb cast of familiar and unfamiliar faces, drawn from Australia and the UK. Ezra Juanta's family is from the Philippines, Rashidi Edward is Congolese. Congo and the UK.

Yes, it's a bit long. The first act is ninety minutes, though the night I saw it, a problem occurred which brought the curtain down for ten minutes or so during the first act. I suspect a scene change challenge as the sterile first act becomes a room full of junk lit by a stove. As I came into the foyer at the interval, there were three playgoers debating as to whether or not they'd go back into the theatre. You must stay to the end.

Mitchell Butel, in his director's program note, comments that imagination can activate a part of our brain that data cannot. It is a function of theatre that it holds a mirror up to nature and can show us ourselves, warts and all. Will this play change the world? I doubt it. Is it an articulate comment in theatrical form of the challenges ahead? Most certainly.

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