Small Metal Objects | Adelaide Festival 2021 review
The play is only one side of this spectacle. Passers-by stop to stare – not at the performers so much as the audience on a platform.
Adelaide Festival
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Small Metal Objects
Theatre / AUS
FESTIVAL
Moseley Square, Glenelg
Until March 8
Beneath the palm trees of Glenelg’s Moseley Square, amid the passing trams and pram-pushers and pigeons, a comic drama is unfolding.
It takes a moment to spot the protagonists among the general pandemonium of a busy beachside shopping and cafe district. Through headphones, over an almost ambient soundtrack, we begin to eavesdrop on an everyday and frequently funny conversation about domestic matters between two characters.
Steve wants a girlfriend. Gary is about to go into hospital for a knee operation. There’s an air of co-dependence evident in their friendship.
Things take a darker turn when Gary’s phone rings. Some sort of deal is going down. Innocent members of the public find themselves entwined in the action.
What makes this all the more remarkable is that Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre has a creative team which includes actors with intellectual disabilities.
Among them are Simon Laherty and Sonia Teuben, who not only co-devised Small Metal Objects but have played Steve and Gary since its inception in 2005.
Enter two more actors without disabilities, Jim Russell as a party organiser and Genevieve Picot as a “change management” psychologist – both of whom have their own issues.
Yet the play itself is only one side of the spectacle. Passers-by stop to stare – not at the performers so much as the audience seated on a raised platform, laughing at and reacting to sights unseen and sounds unheard by anyone else.
The work was mounted for producers and presenters at the Australian Performing Arts Market here more than a decade ago, and won such acclaim that it has toured the world ever since – but the Adelaide public never got to see it until now.
Aside from its highly original format, the success of Small Metal Objects lies in what its creators and performers have to say about living with a disability, from their personal experience and perspective.
Steve really just wants to be seen and heard, as “a full human being”.
It all ends with a killer punchline that leaves the audience in stitches – and onlookers in a bemused state of bewilderment.
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