Trick of the Light, a collaboration between Hannah Smith and Ralph McCubbin Howell, presented their original play Suitcase Show to a sold-out crowd, at the Suter Theatre on 29 October 2024, 8pm. This fusion of theatre technology, soundscape, stories, and excellent acting techniques are performed as part of the Nelson Arts Festival.  

The pre-set is one of despondency. We see a pile of stacked suitcases (of different sizes) centre stage. A woman (played by Hannah Smith) sits down stage left at a tech desk, with her back to the audience. She has a microphone and a large monitor. Downstage right, we see a 1970s turntable with a wee figure on it. As the houselights dim, a column of light directs us to a door upstage right, where a man (Ralph McCubbin Howell) stands dressed in vintage film noir attire: brimmed hat and long trench coat.

The woman speaks in her microphone in a dead pan manner: “Do you have something to declare?”. She is clearly a border clerk at an airport somewhere. The cryptic man holds his boarding pass. “The luggage isn’t mine, and it isn’t lost,” he promises her. “This is the luggage of the lost.” The woman insists that all the bags be opened, and their contents revealed. The man obliges her, and as he opens each bag, different stories are told or created using brilliant sound design and composition by Tane Upjohn Beatson and videography by Dean Hewison.

The first suitcase opened reveals a tiny town at night, all lit up and covered in snow. A hidden mini projector illuminates mini people interacting in one small village hall. The man narrates while adding crunch sounds in the snow – this adds to our imagination and draws us in.

A crowd favourite is told through the man’s hands and is a reference to “hand luggage”. Adorable. Howell proves to be a brilliant actor here, as his two hands go through the stages of a relationship from meeting, falling in love, having a child, growing elderly to life’s end. Very little text is used; convincing hand movements and actor generated soundscape keep us laughing, oohing, and aweing.

Another story requires hand shadow puppetry where the hand and its shadow respond and react to each other. A tiny model train is featured in another story and in another, a 1980s overhead projector is unpacked to project charming cartoon images of rocket time-travel from 6024 back to 2024.

All the while, these stories of love, climate change, obsession and death engage the audience. The border clerk woman is indifferent to the tales. She switches between channels on her monitor to show her two colleagues (played by Richard Falkner and Anya Tate-Manning), waiting in a special attention room, playing cards. Eventually, the man goes into that room for a surprise ending that does not disappoint.

Overall, Suitcase Show is more enchanting than the talking rug and candlestick in Beauty and the Beast. The show’s magic is more than amazing technology – Howell and Smith commit to the vintage props and classic projectors which work on our nostalgia for what has been lost through progress. Howell’s acting talent is a notable reason for the play’s superpower.

Suitcase Show is a wonderful hour of exciting theatre.

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Trick of the Light are back with another super clever show, packing out Te Auaha Theatre as part of a NZ mini tour. The audience is overtly well-versed in the unique nature of TOTL’s highly visual and intricate offerings. This is a one-hour show and it is a tasty outing from a group that has long ago made its theatrical bones and paid its artistic dues worldwide.

When I first heard of the basic idea – that suitcases presented to customs at an airport will disgorge their unsettling contents – I grabbed at pre-conceived images of, say, a rubber life raft self-inflating from its tight packaging and taking over the world. That has it totally the wrong way round.

As the mountain of bags are unlatched, the contents, as such, don’t come at you. They invite you inside to luxuriate with meticulously crafted models and video clips that tell unsettling stories falling under the general admonition that “There’s always a catch”. The catches are both real and relevant in today’s lonely and angst-ridden world – right down to the visceral ache of endless pandemics and climate change.  

So, think less about projections and more about your being sucked into tiny worlds of horror or, at the very least, sobering surprises. A microcosm world where a visual plane no bigger than a briefcase lid allows you to engage with audaciously grand ideas in deliciously tiny packages: a miniaturised piece of Walkman-like kit bursting with semi satanic themes.

The staging pretext is that a super confident but eerily odd traveller (Ralph McGubbin Howell) confronts customs/aviation security (Hannah Smith) after they’ve hauled his massive accumulation of luggage from the airport carousel. He flings open the door and – this is hugely important – steps into the dark.  Along with the ‘big into little’, this inversion of ‘light into dark’ further forces the viewer into the images emanating from the bags.

There is a backwards and forwards interrogation of the traveller in a darkened Customs room, a place normally flooded with light, where the fluent and commanding traveller oddly holds court. Yet another inversion of perception to skew the view. On the soundtrack brutally loud recorded airport noises overwhelm us, softening us up for some rather hellish messages and insights. (I recall one British commentator some years ago opining that his personal vision of Hell was an infinite series of airport concourses).

The traveller is no bowler hatted eccentric blown in off the street. He emerges as a literary someone it would be indelicate for a reviewer to identify upfront. Suffice it to say that his vicelike grip on both the narrative and the proceedings is robustly conceived and determinative of the plot.

The emerging pre-packed tales never end well. They start with a model village dusted with a sudden snowstorm and pock marked with cloven footed tracks. The combination of model and narrative are beguiling; I would have sworn I could see the individual glistening snowflakes from my back row seat. This precious vision of beauty (the showing) is sharply dissonant with the traveller’s bloodless narrative (the telling). It’s a Grimm’s fairy story gone wrong. Even the little Match Girl cops it. As I said, there is always a catch.

Then there is a story that would truly merit the tag “something completely different”. An important defrocked somebody from the Eastern bloc (we suppose) is shown on a small screen running away via train from his own shadow and a very persistent small bear. I immediately think of Shakespeare’s “Exit pursued by a bear” [The Winter’s Tale]. It’s the sort of thing we associate with VistaVision and the bold excesses of Albert Hitchcock. But the same effect is miraculously conveyed with some real impact in a minute shadow box version. The running man is cornered and dealt to. The audience hopes it was Putin.

Surprises keep coming, like channelling of the Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts after looking back at their Earth but in an Australasian context alongside the dire physical discomfort that will come from inundation through sea level rise.

The audience favourite is clearly some nifty traveller handwork that encapsulates the experience of a couple determined to have intimate relations in the business lounge of the airport. By the actor merely clipping on red lights like a wristwatch on each hand and using tiny spotlighting/blackouts, we see the near instant creation of two marvellous skin-puppet characters. They assume a giddy array of full body postures from the entire Kama Sutra range and then some. A visual knockout worth the admission charge times two.

There is a breakout monitor screen that shows us more of the bag inspection team and some amazing goings on that lead to the final plot resolution. It’s as if some clever cabaret act suddenly reveals the meaning of life.

The audience leaves fully satisfied, having had its senses well tricked and inventively strummed. TOTL is getting highly practised at turning out imaginative/satirical views of our ho-hum lives allied with social messages that resonate with a succinct truth. This version is not from their absolute top shelf but it is way ahead of the pack.  Grab what’s on offer while it’s there.

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The foyer of the Gryphon Theatre – currently designated FatG (Fringe at the Gryphon) – is packed with an eclectic range of Trick of the Light fans, eager to see their next offering. Doubtless they’ve seen all or some of Ralph McCubbin Howell and Hannah Smith’s previous shows: The Road that Wasn’t There (2013-20), The Bookbinder (2014-19), Beards, Beards, Beards (2015-16), The Devil’s Half-Acre (2016), Troll (2017-20), The Griegol (2021-22). Most are award-winning shows at home and abroad so the anticipation is palpable.

The production details supplied to Theatreview describe Suitcase Show as “an eclectic box set of short stories. Dark, spiky and comic, each one is told out of a suitcase. … Tiny in scale, but expansive in story, the work has been built through a series of showings in unusual spaces, from a pub to a photography darkroom. This Fringe season will be its full-length premiere.”

I take this as meaning the work is fully developed but following a 15 minute delay in starting (a peril of having a show with a complex tech setup sandwiched between two other shows with only 30 minute turnarounds between them?) there is a hold-up midway, to fix an audio-mixing problem. Subsequent sound is still not perfect so some of Tane Upjohn-Beatson’s otherwise evocative sound design and some mic’d dialogue remain indistinct. And at the end of the show McCubbin says they are still in development and he asks for feedback, at the bar, via a QR code or via their website. Since a review has been requested, I’ll offer my feedback this way.

In the pre-set gloom we discern a collection of different sized suitcases, redolent of an unclaimed baggage depot. Director and operator Hannah Smith sits at a tech-desk downstage left, facing upstage. As the houselights fade we realise a shadow of a tiny person is rotating on the lid of a small suitcase and discover there is a figurine on a turntable (in a 1970s portable stereo). Cute.

The portentous appearance and entrance of a back-lit Man wearing a long coat and broad-brimmed hat is a classic film noir trope. Actually the use of suitcases in stage shows has also become a well-used trope over the past couple of decades. A person with a suitcase implies an arrival or departure and instantly raises who, why and where questions. In this case – or should I say these cases – the enigmatic man (McCubbin Howell) is at a boarder of some kind facing questions about the contents of the cases from a seated woman (Smith). The heavy echo effect on her mic renders most of her words unintelligible (a device they also used in The Devil’s Half-Acre so I assume it’s intended).

Her insistence on wanting bags opened provokes gentle word-play and the comment that this is not lost luggage but the luggage of the lost. As each case is opened, a story plays out that justifies that claim.

The tale of a Little Match Girl for whom an unseasonable fall of snow is more than a match, plays out on a tiny town-scape. Two creatures made of hands with bright coloured eyes perform what turns out to be a mating dance. Another story involves hand shadow puppetry where the shadow behaves differently from the hand – a cleverly created effect where the medium (for me) transcends any message. And from where I sit, a hand gets in the way of its shadow.

A tiny model train features in another story. There is a telescope in space that looks back at our blue planet through time, in millennial leaps from 6024 to 2024. Climate change becomes the focus and its refugees – or are they displaced victims of war – become the carriers of suitcases, evoked through an extraordinary blend of OHP, animated projection and shadows.

Throughout, the enigmatic Man warns the Boarder Guard the contents of the cases may reveal more than we wish to know and that all the stories end the same way. Meanwhile the Boarder Guard has screen contact with two colleagues (Richard Falkner and Anya Tate-Manning) who play cards and drink while waiting to be sent someone who needs special attention.

Inevitably the Man is sent there … and I find what happens there problematic in ways I can’t discuss fully without spoilers. Put it this way: while The Grim Reaper is a harbinger-cum-personification of Death, s/he is not a murderer. As I understand it, s/he harvests souls. But what we see in the climactic scene is a display of visual trickery that, for my money, cheapens what we’ve been drawn into. Or is the jokey ending intended – like the jig at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, or a Satyr Play after a festival of Greek Tragedies?

Obviously there will be technical improvements tonight and tomorrow. But overall I feel the component parts still need to coalesce in a way that becomes more than the sum of the parts. A critique of the human condition, perhaps, wherein the fatal flaws that are exposed lead to the inevitable downfall of humanity. 

Meanwhile it’s worth spending 50 minutes enjoying the trademark Trick of the Light creativity.  

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