POV
Text by Mark Rogers Directed by
Solomon Thomas Performers: Grace Tione. Actors for this performance Ashton
Malcolm and Stephen Tongan. Creative
Team: Malcolm Whittaker Steve Wilson-Alexander Carly
Young Sound Designer Ashley Bundang Creative Producer Malcolm Whittaker
Administration Intimate Spectacle Images Taylah Chapman. Re: group performance
collective. Space Theatre. Adelaide Festival Centre. Adelaide Festival
Wednesday March 4 – Sunday March 8 2026
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
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| Photo by Andrew Beveridge of an earlier performance |
Two actors sit on chairs at the rear of the stage. In front of them is a video camera on a track. The actors smile and wave at the schoolchildren who are attending the school matinee with the general public. Grace Tione enters to introduce herself as eleven year old Bub from Gadigal land. She introduces Ashton Malcolm and Stephen Tongan, actors performing on Kaurna country. Each night two different actors will play Bub’s Mum and Dad. Bub is an aspiring documentary film maker, who is making a film about her family and specifically her mother’s upcoming ceramics exhibition. Bub is director of the film, guiding the unrehearsed actors through their parts by feeding them their lines, giving them scripts to read or pointing them to the text on screens. The two actors respond instantly playing out their adult roles as Bub films them in a variety of short sequences, urging them to respond immediately to the text. Tione’s performance is confident and immensely appealing. Her commands are assured and controlled. Her authority struck a funny note for the school audience who responded enthusiastically to a young child in control. Tongan and Malcolm played out their parental roles with a keen appreciation of Mark Gordon’s naturalistic text.
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| Ashton Malcolm plays Mum in the school matinee of POV |
As the true purpose of the piece
begins to emerge, it becomes obvious that the onstage filmmaking experiment
played out by the three actors reveals a more serious situation. The camera
track becomes a railway line where Bub will goto deal with her problems and
insecurities. It becomes a metaphor for the parents’ inability to understand
the child or deal with the circumstances of her inability to find solutions to
her problems. To seek out answers she turns to her mentor Werner Herzog and his
documentaries. The carer, seated on the side of the theatre announces a six minute
break during which Tione invites the audience to google Werner Herzog quotes
and read them aloud. Audience members are
quick to respond. “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean
of chaos and darkness”
The tone of the work takes a darker turn as Bub’s mother sinks into a depression that Bub does not fully understand. The filming stops while Bub initiates a role reversal in order to reveal the cause of the mother’s confinement to her bed. The scene is repetitive and the lines keep being said over and over by the three actors in their different roles. It would have been more revealing if each reversal of role introduced a different perspective to reach for a solution to the condition. Ultimately however Bub discovers the answer through Herzog and the support of her parents. The carer announces that as many as one in five families will face a mental health illness within the family. It is a sober statistic that makes re: group performance collective’s production all the more important.
Gordon’s text and Solomon
Thomas’s direction reveal an irony that theatre can fulfil its role to create
change with more visceral impact than film in a digital age. POV’s use of
onstage filming and spontaneous performance gives this production an immediacy
and a vitality that is at times bursting with humour and at other times moving in
its pathos. The company avoids the didactic, rather conveying its message in
such a way as to fully engage an audience. We laugh and we cry and as Bub
reveals the answer that she has sought we too are able to understand. That is
the power of POV.
The photos in this review are from an earlier performance and are not of Grace Tione, Ashton Malcom or Stephen Tongan. Photos are taken by Andrew Beveridge.
