Theatre: Atishoo

DNA

Directed by Rachel Riggs

Performed by Anne Marie Biagioni and Adam Bennett

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

Until March 3

The great “Muse of Fire” speech that begins Shakespeare’s Henry V – on our minds because of Propeller’s mighty production at The Maj – is an exhortation to the imagination of its audience: “Think, when we talk of horses/That you see them printing their proud hoofs in the receiving earth.”

That extension of the imagination is the great promise of the theatre, perhaps the primary reason it continues to beguile us in the face of film and other media far better able to represent reality. It’s more than simply the “willing suspension of disbelief”; it’s the positive benefit of the work our minds do to imagine a world complete from the poor scraps put before us on the stage.

That power, and the benefit it brings, was never clearer to me than at a moment in DNA’s wonderful little Atishoo. A tiny girl near me was watching the show’s performer, Anne Marie Biagioni, and puppeteer, Adam Bennett, waving sheets on the floor and above an outsize tissue box while they swayed back and forth. She turned to her mum and asked, “Is that the sea?” There was a few seconds’ silence, and then she exclaimed, triumphantly, “It IS the sea!” What marvels had happened to her in those few seconds when she, maybe for the first time in her life, realised that something could be something else, if you imagined it. I later found out she was all of two and a half years old.