Theatre: The Hypotheticals

Created and performed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Sarah Reuben
The Last Great Hunt
Director Adam Mitchell
Choreographer Laura Boynes
Composer and sound designer Louis Frere-Harvey
Visual designer Matthew McVeigh
Lighting designer Peter Young
STC Studio
July 27 – August 5

In 2022, the population of Japan fell by 800,000, a demographic implosion four times as devastating as the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If this is a glimpse of the future, perhaps our family photos are destined to have the kids photo-shopped out, our family holidays spent in adult-only resorts.
Perhaps our destiny is to be alone, with our machines.      
Perhaps all humanity deserves the final Darwin Award; perhaps the species most at existential risk from our carelessness and greed is our own.
In times like these, and with a zeitgeist like this, how is anyone going to even contemplate having a child?

These questions are the playground of Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Sarah Reuben’s snappy, crackling The Hypotheticals, but the game they play is at once not as deep as it might have been, but even deeper than you might expect.

Which are both good things, but hardly surprising. Over the past decade Fowler, it’s fair to say, has been Perth theatre’s most exposed artist as writer, director, performer and core artist with its leading company The Last Great Hunt.

We know him, and the games he plays, well.

He’s also a great collaborator, notably with fellow Hunter Chris Isaacs (Fag/Stag, Bali) and now with the Darwin-based Reuben, with whom he shares a long friendship and theatrical vision (their first collaboration, I’ll Tell You in Person, was a 2021 Perth Festival hit).

Both these partnerships have been based on a dialogue between alternative realities that requires great skill in both writing and performance to succeed convincingly.

In The Hypotheticals, what if Fowler was himself, a partnered gay man and Reuben was herself, a straight single woman, both in their mid/late thirties? What if all kinds of clocks were ticking, and, to the beat of that rhythm, what if she asked him if, maybe, they could have a kid together?

And if they did, what would happen then? To him? To her? To them? To “it”?

Sarah and Jeffrey examine themselves and each other, running the gamut of hope and fear, of what they expect of themselves, each other and others.

It’s very often riotously funny (their attempts at insemination by syringe, a catastrophic Passover with Sarah’s family), sometimes sad and perplexing.

They are open with each other, they talk things through, but each is on a journey neither can explain because they don’t yet know where it leads to themselves.

All of which leads to an unexpected and surprising denouement – a whatif as sly and astute as the best whodunnit.

Fowler’s previous collaborations have had the simplest imaginable staging and performance – with Isaacs just the two actors talking, perched on stools; with Reuben only their voices through headphones, but The Hypotheticals is audaciously staged, with movement and dances accentuating the characters’ internal monologues and dialogue.

Neither Reuben or Fowler are dancers, but the precision of their unversed physical work is extraordinarily impressive. The director Adam Mitchell and his choreographer Laura Boynes have schooled their performers in the minutest detail, and the result is consistent in its clarity of purpose and often thrilling in its execution.

Louis Frere-Harvey’s soundscape and Peter Young’s lighting of Matthew McVeigh’s stark cuboid set (visual design is a more apt description) are as much dancerly as theatrical, and the expressiveness of both performers owes as much to the dance as the drama.

Fairly or unfairly I’ve sometimes taken issue with Fowler’s ability to find and take the straightest path from cup to lip in his work (an impressive skill that should be avoided at all cost).

In The Hypotheticals, though, Reuben and Fowler discover and explore all kinds of slips, surprising byways and hidden places, and the result is up with his best work.

And that’s about as good as it gets.

 

Don’t delay. The short season of The Hypotheticals ends August 5.