Our poet chronicler for the night, Alexander Wright, enters the stage, a yurt with bamboo rafters secured with rows of neat red ribbon bows. A laptop atop a stool and collection of filament bulb lamps are the only set. Spinning round quickly to make eye contact with all of us, Wright has that wild eyed glint, a prophet’s confidence and projection, and giddy off his own prose he begins speaking in heady cycles of building and waning momentum that carry the audience effortlessly. The musical score written by Grainger was effective in contributing to setting the tone and maintaining momentum. Wright speaks with the syncopation and heightened intonation characteristic of spoken word, but his script feels more like an elaborate, lyrical modern fable. Carefully crafted, the tale circles back on itself in nice big well-foreshadowed loops, packed with imagistic detail, jumping between third and first person to give us both neurotic stream of consciousness and broader scene setting.
Helios, brought back for a second year at Adelaide Fringe by Yorkshire-based theatre duo WRIGHT & GRAINGER, is a modern-retelling of the Greek myth of, you guessed it, Helios.
The primal appeal of theatre like Helios is its imagined continuity with the oldest human tradition of oral storytelling. We can imagine that many before us (except they did not have to pay and scan QR codes to enter a yurt) gathered dimly lit in the round. WRIGHT & GRAINGER have many clever tricks to bring story into the modern age whilst still making the audience feel that we are part of that continuum of stories. The use of audience participation, asking different members (many of whom were very promising actors!) to read for guest characters in the story was an effective and much more entertaining alternative to the voiceover so often seen in one-person shows. The same can be said for all the auditory cues and scenery which Wright spoke into existence and left us to imagine. Each time Wright spoke of the sunrise he would extend a long bare arm and point over and over toward the exit door. Eventually at even the suggestion of that gesture I could imagine a sinking sun shining through it. Good stuff. A voiceover or set, I know, lives on after the show has ended, ready to be repeated in tomorrow’s matinee. Instead, all of this craft added to the feeling that the show existed just amongst us, analogue and ephemeral in that yurt.
GRAINGER & WRIGHT’s tale is of Phaeton, a young boy growing up in a tiny village in northern England, his father an absent airline pilot, their carriage a golden ford that sits unused in the garage. An ancient story retold to feature the invisible micro histories of a village. No plaque, no blood stain, no monument… Wright muses. Unless of course someone makes art about them and performs it in fringe festivals across the world!
Art, of course, is how stories survive. WRIGHT & GRAINGER join this tradition, imbuing the historic significance of myth into the goings on of rural northern England; boyish bravado, long bike rides, Walkman cassettes, and just so much drink driving.
Overall Helios is spellbinding, if perhaps a little bit too neat. But Greek myth is not known for its subtlety. WRIGHT & Grainger have transformed the catharsis, the drama, the historical significance of myth into the micro, the regional, the queer, the boyish. Go see it!