Journey into childhood memory takes surreal and dystopian turn

THEATRE
World Problems ★★★
Emma Mary Hall, Melbourne Theatre Company, until May 22

How does knowledge of the global – including catastrophes from nuclear war to climate change – affect our experience at a personal level? How might the smallest corners of our lives be connected, through some butterfly effect, to outcomes much bigger than ourselves?

World Problems invites the audience to consider such questions, in an hour-long monologue featuring historical disasters and speculative futures, all nestled within the ephemera of childhood memory.

A lone woman (Carly Sheppard) scrambles through what looks like a wrecked fuselage to take the stage. Concrete fragments of recollection build a vivid, culturally precise portrait of growing up as a Gen X queer girl in the Adelaide suburbs, but the dramatic structure is quite poetic and abstract and free-associative, with a universalising impulse.

It reminded me, oddly enough, of the text in Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s Life and Times – a masterpiece of avant-garde verbatim theatre that used recordings of a woman recalling her childhood in pedestrian detail, complete with “ums” and “ahs” – and it shares the same creative leaps, lacunae, and unbidden thoughts of a person compelled to relate memories in real time.

Sheppard wrestles the chaos of experience into narrative (or the suggestion of it) with wry wit and a coiled presence that embodies the struggle posed by self-reflection. Observations on gender and sexuality are especially sharp, but Sheppard also shows how the character’s personal and social identity are shaped by cultural trends and world events, including all the touchstones of the last generation to grow up without the internet.

As the woman remembers her young adulthood, middle age, and begins to approach her present, a twist replaces memory with futuristic intimations: apocalyptic dystopias where birds fall out of the sky, or transhuman ones where technology transforms social norms, and people start marrying their own fridges or what have you.

These speculative incursions feel underdeveloped on their own terms. They will seem more so to theatregoers who saw Sheppard’s previous one-woman show, Chase, about the last First Nations woman left alive on a ruined planet, where a similar, more elaborate dystopian technique was deployed with great success.