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ROOM is a full length multiform Chaplinesque charade without the social pathos of Chaplin himself. His grandson, James Thierré, is the auteur creator, lead, composer, writer and director of the scintillating work that now features in the 2023 Sydney festival after a European tour. We can almost sense the patriarch of clowning on stage, which can be seen as a homage work, but one that also resembles any number of more recent figures. Monsieur Hulot, Groucho Marx, Rik Mayal, Prospero and the cast in Greenaway’s film, Fellini, even our own Tim Minchen’s singing. I’m sure there are many more. 

Does this make the Room a brilliant achievement, being able to embody and manifest so many styles, whether it does so consciously or not. The problem is, in morphing many styles, each manner, each scene, each act, each encounter, within the three walls of the room that Thierré, the architect, vainly tries to design and build, in the same space where Thierré, the stage director, seeks to mount a production – each part of this hectic effort at construction, is very fleeting. To make matters worse, or perhaps better, the whole can be understood less as an imaginary hybrid melding of ifs polyglot elements, but a factory where elements clash, contradict, fall apart and jar. Lyricism is constantly let in in order to be spoiled, and where, later in the piece, when sentimental singing is heard at length as the show ends, this seems out of place. 

The cast are all up to artistic speed – including Anne-Lise Binard (violin); Ching-Ying Chien; Mathias Durand (guitar); Samuel Dutertre (strongman); Hélène Escriva, (tumbling and dance), and Alessio Negro, with dancers doubling in song. But however brilliant in their skills the ‘crew’ of construction and performance might be, they are constantly at odds with their boss, and with each other, with their performance fragmenting throughout as a result.

ROOM  is at best an experimental toolkit of devices, energy, set construction, light, and acting, that in its scale and bravura sets a high bar for smaller ensemble production in a large stage. It is an absolutely unique and even historical show that deserves to be seen. It is on a post Brechtian road of anarchic alienation that has no signposts. It does things with lights, stage hands, stage machinery and the set with its towering mobile room panels, that could be the envy of a more traditional director. 

It looks fresh sprung from rehearsals because that it probably what it is –  a work in progress – with restless unresolved trajectories between characters. Music is all over the place – from rock to ballad to rap to opera. It promises a lot but ends up clashing in a pulsating sketch mode of composition – ‘leave that, we’ll come back later.’ It constantly takes freedoms that it does not fully use. It is is a manic assemblage of comic tricks, visual puns, broken ballet and clipped songs – ‘less is more’ I sometimes wanted to say – yet in their sheer unrelenting charm and  compelling force they are irresistible to watch. It is a bit of an asylum, but it is part of a long tradition of comedy for comedy’s sake, of the slapstick, that featured so much in the first decades of film that are the heritage of the show.  It is a play within a play, where backstage and main stage perform a literal revolving door of foregrounding. Much of what seems original is quite dated, potentially dross – the under rehearsed cast, off stage arguments, producer interjections. The quotidian self important world of amateur or youthful thespianism seems very close, and yet, anything familiar conversationally – argument, unanswered questions, over-answered questions, repetitions, outburst, non-sequiturs – are intensely played with, and stylised, until brilliantly fermented.

This really is a one joke show – the architect/director who cannot control his workers. The joke is repeated a great deal, but due to the finesse, audacity and delights of its many ramifications, along with countless in-jokes (the telephone, the yellow key, the violin that changes mass) it surprisingly does not wear thin. There is a charm about Thierrée’s persona and its many faces. The charm can be self ingratiating – the dialogue addresses (then dismisses) questions on the tip of the audience’s collective tongue. What is this about? Is it nonsense? What will we say when we leave the theatre? Is it all a failed musical? The work sets it own reflexive rules in mixed style, and also rebuffs attempts to take it too seriously. 

There was however, in myself at least, a feeling for grief to do with this performance. Grief for the even greater meaningful show that was promised and present in experimental, exciting style and set, but never delivered. Also grief for the abandonment, even death, of the structures of theatre – of sequence, narratives, character, coherence, themes and mood – that have been the mainstay of the tradition. Were we watching a drunken spectacle performance on the fallen body of the stage that cannot be resurrected? 

The latter at least would have been a worthwhile theme, and perhaps it was there, but the work seems even more anarchical and less organised than that. None of these reservations take away from the achievement of the cast on the night, especially the very special mime and comic faces and fluid body of Thierrée. The show was all bright, on point a countless myriad of times, dazzling in often beautiful effects, and congenial in reach. But it was also a teaser for a work, by this company or another, that can layer such confident comedy with tragedy, banter with meaning, and touch our hearts and minds as much as our senses.

Did the audience like the show? Yes. Does the show belong in the Festival? Indeed. What will the audience say when they leave the theatre? Good question.

ROOM is currently playing the Roslyn Packer Theatre.