A Work to Experience Rather Than Interpret

Martyn Roberts is one of New Zealand’s most sought after lighting designers, with extensive experience at Bats Theatre, Wellington, and other institutions. In 2001 he formed Afterburner, involving musicians Steve Gallagher, Sebastian Morgan-Lynch and others in initial productions.

Afterburner’s stated aim was to develop performance works owing as much to installation and related sculptural, visual, sonic or acoustic approaches, as to drama per se. Since assuming the position of Theatre Manager at Allen Hall within the University of Otago in 2007, Roberts has continued to develop these interests. Hubble is his latest effort.

Hubble is best described as a riff on Roberts’ previous projects Man on the Moon (2001), The Telescope (2002; 2004), The Singularity (2008), and Apollo Redux (2008). Most of the same themes recur: an isolated ham radio enthusiast, an apparently fatal car-crash, the possibility that what we are seeing are replayed events from before the crash, as well as musings about interstellar phenomena and scientific ideas.

Indeed, the unnamed male protagonist of Hubble—played with gentle affection by Richard Huber—bears a more than passing resemblance to the sociopathic astronomer Peter Rutherford depicted in Telescope. 

I was not fortunate enough to attend these earlier works, but reviews (including our those by our illustrious editor John Smythe, which he kindly provided me with) indicate that Roberts has moved if anything further away from the dominant narrative and dramatic formula of mainstream theatre for this latest incarnation.

Roberts dangles the possibility that this all might be some kind of post-accident flashback. Approximately half of the scenes are played with Huber and his lover (Nayda Shaw-Bennett) at the apex of the rhomboid space which the audience faces onto from two sides, standing in a warm embrace as they exchange at times playful and at other times disjointed, cross-purposed, call-and-response style dialogue.

Huber soon relates an incident where he thought his car came off the road and spun in a wide, disconnected orbit, as though he had entered a new, violently estranged world. But he quickly adds that at least he would have, if this had happened. Was this a dream? Was it perhaps his vision of her crash, a final moment of intimacy where he experienced the very event which severed his link with her?

Answers are never proffered, and attempts to chose between one or other of these possible narrative arcs is to miss the point of Hubble. 

The alliterative potential of the title provides a pointer to the interpretation of this deeply poetic work. Suggesting both hubris and a bubble, Hubble offers a series of environments, spaces, dramatic moments, images and emotive conditions which perpetually lie between things. Rather than events going backwards, or even repeating, time has here been slowed down and nearly stopped within this theatrical space.

For all their intimacies and jokes (in a reworking of one of Futurama‘s favourite gags, Shaw-Bennett quizzes Huber on how he would cope if, after an accident, she existed only as a head in a jar), the pair remain in a place from which they cannot move on, constantly exchanging words which serve to highlight their isolation and their union at one and the same time.

As in Telescope, Roberts wants his audience to share his characters’ sense of extended temporality. Huber sits contentedly reading while Shaw-Bennett makes tea on stage, and one is encouraged to sit with them and listen to the kettle boil, to feel the presence of the performers, and to enjoy experiencing with them a suspended fragment of time passing. Temporality itself here becomes part of the sculptural, experiential matter which is being moulded before us, and not any other dramatic meaning which might be encased within this experience of time.

Hubble is therefore very much a piece for those schooled in John Cage (who famously asked his audience to listen to silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds), rather than for those seeking the detective-style interpretation of emotional or narrative minutiae which has been the hallmark of Naturalist theatre since the 1880s.

If the audience allows itself to succumb to the ambiguous, cottony, extruded glow of this piece, the gentle way that ideas about the number of atoms in a slice of pie burble along, and the bittersweet emotional tenor of a pair of figures who cannot agree on whether the stars seem close or infinitely far away, Hubble is a piece of rare beauty.

If one is to critique it—and I feel no great need to; its simple pleasures are sufficient—one could argue that perhaps, underneath this cloudy, vaporous dramaturgy, the placement of a few more hard, planar steps might have helped provide a clearer path though the mists of this experience.

Huber is such a charismatic performer that Hubble‘s slightly undifferentiated dramatic tenor is no real drawback. Even so, interludes in which we see him alone, bent over his radio, listening to a wonderful score of static sourced by Roberts from astrological recordings, could have acted as more forceful punctuations to the rhythms of the piece. In another recurrent image, Shaw-Bennet appears carrying a suitcase, poised—like the entire dramaturgical structure of the work—between coming and going, between leaving him and staying, between moving on and remaining behind. As percussive accents within the production though, these seem relatively lightly struck, the uncertain but relaxed physical aura of the performers here being broadly the same as in their sustained, friendly exchanges together.

Earlier Afterburner works used the environments which this relaxed dramaturgy provided as a vehicle within which to house live music or, in Roberts’ installation pieces, audiovisual projections. One suspects that the richness of Hubble would be enhanced by the use of such material here too.

Indeed, Australian postmodernist composer David Chesworth produced a not dissimilar, large scale music theatre work for the 2004 Melbourne Festival dealing with the estranged connection between a female radio enthusiast and a male Soviet cosmonaut stranded in orbit high above the earth whilst his home country underwent a seismic shift in political ideology (see http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue64/7699).

Chesworth’s Cosmonaut used audio samples, orchestral elements and live projection as the perfect media for a series of musings on connections over distance, as signs of both presence and absence, and many of the other themes Roberts explores. Another related work for me is Richard Murphet’s Slow Love (http://www.realtimearts.net/article.php?id=6815), which depicted compromised emotional connections between anonymous individuals through a series of short, silently enacted scenes performed to a complex, electroacoustic score.

Roberts himself has compared his dramaturgy to that of Gus Van Sant and David Lynch, both of whose films are all but unimaginable without the music of Arvo Pärt (Gerry), Beethoven et al (Elephant), or Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway).

Hubble is a more modest piece, and one suspects Roberts chose to move outside of his comfort zones in lighting, design and projection, to work in more detail on the text and direction here. Whilst Roberts’ intermittently sharp dialogue and sense of miscommunication-in-communication recalls the acerbic hammers of Harold Pinter’s writing, Hubble is altogether more woollen, alluring, and so less menacing or redolent of deep, perpetually repressed tensions. The sheer invitingness of Roberts’ theatrical dramaturgy means that it is perhaps best employed as a container for other forms and devices, rather than standing entirely on its own.

Roberts has been in discussion with Playmarket. One hopes that an opportunity to further develop this work, with or without additional collaborators and stylistic elements, will yet present itself.

Disclaimer: After moving from Australian in 2009, Dr Jonathan W. Marshall taught with Martyn Roberts in a subject on theatrical design at the University of Otago, where both are currently employed. 

Other sources:
http://www.critic.co.nz/about/reviews/593?page=2&review_type_id=3; http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU0405/S00148.htm
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