A Beau­ti­ful Har­mony of Theatre, Music and So Mush Spore.  

I loved the nov­el format of storytelling that ‘Concept for a Film’ delivered. The scene opens with Max Bar­ton, sit­ting at a desk that faces the audi­ence, read­ing out the script for a film. These read­ings are inter­mit­tently dis­persed with many dis­rup­tions includ­ing phone calls from his Moth­er, audio record­ings of audi­ence scep­tic­al feed­back on the film and him shin­ing a torch on his face as he addresses us, the audi­ence.

The film script story begins in Pōneke. I appre­ci­ated how Max adap­ted the script to centre the story around Wel­ling­ton and demon­strate he had spent time research­ing the area’s his­tory and whakapapa.

The story is accom­pan­ied by a score com­posed by Jethro using an inter­act­ive mod­u­lar syn­thes­iser, that he builds through­out the per­form­ance. The white cables that swirl across the floor and con­nect with each piece of equip­ment resemble a myceli­al net­work and look beau­ti­ful as Jethro uses his hands, light and but­tons to build the sound­scape of the per­form­ance. Both the visu­al impres­sion and music cre­ated by this are very cool and a won­der­ful change from the use of tra­di­tion­al instru­ments for music­al accom­pani­ment. Intro­du­cing a mod­u­lar syn­thes­iser to this set­ting seems like a per­fect har­mony with per­form­ance art. Gear heads will drool over the set-up.

Between the rap­id-fire deliv­ery of each turn of the movie’s out­line, Max’s insec­ur­ity about each sec­tion, his determ­in­a­tion to rewrite, ques­tion and improve the script as we go and the bril­liant per­form­ance of Jethro’s live sound manip­u­la­tion. It can be a mind field to fol­low if you aren’t pay­ing atten­tion, but it works and the out­come is nov­el, fun and enga­ging. It is also a reflec­tion of how nature does not move in an inde­pend­ent lin­ear path, that we all affect each oth­er through our con­nec­tion with the earth.

Concept for a Film, is a show that will appeal to many types of people includ­ing music nerds, film buffs, envir­on­ment­al­ists, pun enthu­si­asts and people who love mush­rooms. Def­in­itely one of the high­lights of this years Fringe for me.