“Where the fuck am I?” is the first mystery of Mystery in a Blimp and the first words Hershall (Gabriel Partington) utters when he awakes in the Bluestone Church Arts Space. The answer is simple this time, but don’t settle down–you will be asking yourself “Where the fuck am I?” many times in the 80 minutes to come. We are in a blimp. Indeed, the chapel-cum-theatre is the perfect blimp interior. Its high, bowed ceiling, centre aisle and echoing acoustics displace the audience from Footscray up into the high skies. Casting off the constraints of a restricted stage space is just one way Mystery in a Blimp explodes convention, folding community structures into its production. It may be a rhetorical response to the Melbourne Theatre Company’s predilection for a proscenium stage, as the script bites several times at Melbourne’s conservative, inaccessible elite theatre scene. Although we are in a blimp, whose irritating engine the cast must shout over through the first scene, we are also in the writers’ room, in rehearsals–we are in the theatre. Don’t ask too many questions! Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the abyss of meta-theatrics that playwright Nathan Curnow unravels before you.

When Hershall wakes up in a blimp with four eclectic characters in monochrome ‘70s wear, he has no idea how he got there. The evasive, distracted responses from his co-commuters seem at first enigmatic but soon prove to be completely baseless. They know neither how they got to the blimp nor where they are going. They look out “windows” into glaring theatre lights and see only the darkness of night. Something is off here–the kernel of reason is missing, the narrator is unreliable. No one in the blimp is in control of their own characters–they are being penned by a playwright, Nathan (Lachlan Watts), with whom the actual playwright of Mystery in a Blimp has shared his name. Our ensemble in the blimp takes a tea-break while the action moves to this secondary, intertwined narrative as Nathan struggles for ideas to continue the story under the burden of artistic creation and a depleted arts sector. Such is the eddying structure of the play: mysteries proliferate further mysteries; the theatrical fourth wall degrades as dialogue dynamically crosses the space.

I won’t try to explain the plot any further. It thickens and spirals and much is never resolved, and that doesn’t matter because it’s made up. Anyway, I haven’t seen Flashdance so it’s possible I missed half the plot. Unmissable, however, is the active participation Mystery in a Blimp thrust upon the stands. The set of diner-red chairs conspicuously mirrors the seated audience, throwing up a psychological partition between the stage and spectators. This fourth wall (or fifth?) is secondary to the one unveiled in the early scenes between the blimp’s ensemble and their creator, Nathan. The characters composing Mystery in a Blimp regularly look, point at and directly address the audience. In some moments we are implicated as surveyors of those onstage, prurient and alien; at other times we are Nathan’s mum, familial and loved.

All theatre must question the permeability of these barriers. It is a constitutive requirement of live performance. Yet, its probing is often quiet, implicit and forgettable. This show literally asks “Do we have to push the script that far?”  When Nathan leaps into his “own” piece in the part of reformed-murderer Protestant priest with a drawling Southern accent, the overwhelming answer is yes. As Nathan, Lachlan Watts deftly springs between the two sides of his role, holding the play together like a hinge as he swings from the exterior to the interior of the play-within-a-play, from frustrated writer to gun-wielding maniac. 

Curnow doesn’t merely use theatrical tropes, he picks them up and hurls them at the audience. In the characters’ dialogue, in the staging of the performance, in the fundamental absurdity of the play. Through his commitment to collapsing the division between actor and character, writer and written, performer and audience, Mystery in a Blimp traverses cliché to reach the realms of hilarity, absurdity and originality. 

Just when you are sure that no denouement could ever live up to the preceding whirligig of metatheatrics and mystery, Curnow gives us the greatest finale theatre has to offer: the musical number. It is not to be missed. “Forget all your troubles”–but keep your wits about you with the fantastic cast of Mystery in a Blimp. 

Mystery is a Blimp is showing at the Bluestone Church Arts Space in Footscray until 2 April.

Written by Nathan Curnow

Directed by Kevin Hopkins

Produced by the Shift Theatre

Set Design: Greg Carroll

Publicity: Angela Buckingham

Stage Management: Claire Shepherd

Stage Management Intern: Nicholas Duke

Choreography: Sue-Ellen Shook

Cast

Richard: Brian Davison

Nanna: Helen Hopkins

Veronica: Mia Landgren

Lorinda: Claire Nicholls

Hersall: Gabriel Partington

Nathan: Lachlan Watts

Tori: Christian Wells