Hub Fest was devised by Lachlan Houen for ACT Hub
The Bestiary - An Interlude by Hannah Tonks
The Forsaken by Oliver Kuskie
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Feb 16
The two plays in this first Hub Fest are interesting, having in common serious criticisms of today’s social culture presented in short-form theatre. The Bestiary is an Orwellian satire in 30 minutes of the world’s shifting towards authoritarianism at government level. The Forsaken shows the breakdown of social norms at the personal level.
In theatrical terms, The Bestiary’s half-hour is more successful than The Forsaken’s 70 minutes.
In both plays characters make a series of polemical statements which slow down the drama.
In The Bestiary, the statements made by the rebellious terrorist artists serve to increase the dramatic tension about what they will do with the focus character: the hypocritical woman Minister for Aesthetics. Their punishment – making her create a work of art – then results in her execution because she has broken the very law she is responsible for. Just as she had had Wolf executed. The shame is that Wolf’s partner, in bringing the Minister to justice, is herself shot by the firing squad as well.
In The Forsaken, the social issue about the isolation of the elderly and the impossibility of this old man’s ever being able to do anything practical about the family violence (on one side of his thin walled flat) or about the poverty-driven drug-driven theft and profiteering by the flat-sharing young (on the other side) is as powerful a theme as the issue of the need for government support of creative artistic freedom in The Bestiary.
But sitting listening to the old man’s recording of his frustrations, though very well performed, and faithful to my own feelings (like him I am in my 80s), started to feel a bit interminable. The breaking away to the short scenes in the other flats – in the foreground on stage – took the dramatic action away from that central character. We saw what was happening and understood his frustration and even fears, but there needed to be much more emotional interaction beyond just the peripatetic popping-in by the wild-haired young man from the share flat, before the effective scene with the wife from the family side.
Perhaps, as The Bestiary showed, maybe 40 minutes of intense interactions could have got the message through more strongly.
In the end, of course, the value of ACT Hub’s Hub Fest is exactly this – that for a small price you can make such comparisons and appreciate the creativity of the theatre arts, without being executed!
See https://www.acthub.com.au/production/hub-fest-play-festival
