POV: You’re an eleven-year-old girl named Bub—you love documentaries and just got your first camera as a birthday present. You set out to create a documentary about your mother’s pottery exhibition, but things start to fall apart amidst growing family troubles. That’s the pitch for RISING festival’s POV, already pretty intense, but the production goes one step further. The only person on stage who’s seen the script is Bub, played alternate nights by Mabelle Rose and Edith Whitehead, while her parents are unrehearsed and unseen, thrown straight into the narrative. They perform alongside a live camera, numerous screens surrounding the stage, and the underlying pressure of child safety guidelines. RE:GROUP’s production is ambitious, exciting, experimental and superbly executed.

Meta-theatre is a complicated genre to pull off. Go too far and it becomes pretentious, impossible to understand if you’re not in the extreme nexus of theatre-making, or just doesn’t make any sense at all. POV managed to play with the eccentricity of a performance that knows it’s a performance in an engaging way, enveloping us in the story world even though we know it’s not real. I was impressed by the production’s playfulness, with witty references to child safety, stage management and the literal presence of the script amongst others. It felt as if the A7 Mk III was a character in itself. The world was constructed with both live footage and pre-prepared media, sometimes going so far as to experiment with pre-prepared subtitles over live footage. The show’s audiovisual design managed to direct its characters in an intriguing reversal of common theatre dynamics, and despite all the risk of improvisation things were executed almost perfectly. Predetermined decisions thus allowed the improvisation to shine less in the action, but the core emotions of the show, making it fresh and overtly authentic. Even a familiarity or background in theatre didn’t break the play’s illusions but rather made its improvised world all the more impressive.

The production I attended was helmed by Edith Whitehead, and the young actress is superb. It’s a little strange, a child holding all the power on stage, but I didn’t doubt her for a second. Confident, charming and spunky, Whitehead has an undeniable charisma. She was particularly strong towards the beginning POV, capturing the naivety and light-hearted nature of childhood. I was quite taken by her recurring admiration for German Filmmaker Werner Herzog. It was Whitehead’s on-stage chemistry and shared emotion with Mum (Geraldine Hakewill at my performance) and Dad (Bert La Bonté) that gave the show real heart—they took me on a journey, both humorous and gut-wrenching. Hakewill and La Bonté threw themselves into their performances wholeheartedly. We meet them at the start as Geraldine and Bert, simply playing Mum and Dad, but as the performance progresses the lines between actor and character blur. Each came into the show with nothing but a small amount of research on mental health, or a pre-prepared German-filmmaker impression respectively. As they began, they were instructed “Be open, be sensitive to other performers, be unafraid,” and this idea truly was the production’s throughline. Hakewill and La Bonté’s fresh interpretations gave way to raw, intrinsic emotional responses, and it was impossible not to be moved.

There’s a special element of temporariness in this style of performance. Each experience is a collage, unrepeatable. Each actor’s improvisation is entirely new,  entangling with eachother’s performances and the live, unprepared technology surrounding them to create a performance like nothing I’ve ever seen—or, likely, will ever see again. POV sounds like an impossible production to pull off. Somehow, in its intricate design and emotional journey, taking you from laughter to laying in front of train tracks, it all works in the most compelling way. I cannot say I left the theatre without a few tears.

POV was presented as part of Rising Festival 2024, 4-8 June. The production featured again on 2-5 July as part of Heartland Festival in Parramatta, and 10-12 July at Bondi Festival.