1 day ago
7
THEATRE
1154 Days ★★★
Arts House, until May 31
How to render the worst 1154 days of your life, equivalent to three years and 55 days, into a play that attempts to make sense of that which is incomprehensible – punitive state surveillance and wrongful incarceration?
Catalogued in a 2025 memoir and documentary, the unfathomableness of Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei’s predicament is encapsulated in throwaway lines peppered throughout 1154 Days that would be unbelievable if they weren’t bald statements of fact.
That she was apprehended by Chinese government’s state security agents for sending an eight-word text to a foreign journalist peer seven minutes before a media embargo was lifted, one she didn’t know about. That she spent a mere 10 hours in the sun every year. That she didn’t hear her two children’s voices for years.
1154 Days is strongest when it allows the space for these injustices to fester in the minds of its audiences, extrapolating Lei’s fate to paint a stark picture of those inhumanely incarcerated without cause in prisons around the world.
Lei’s budding stand-up career comes to the fore in the opening beats of the play. She undresses on stage to a jaunty bop and moves from one outfit to the next, demarcating the different roles she assumes in her life – mother, journalist, friend, lover of karaoke. But the normality is short-lived.
Pacing the stage against a backdrop of grandiose floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtains before her life is upended, Lei’s liberty is curtailed when she’s put into solitary confinement, permanently flanked by two prison attendants in a psychological torture technique known as “residential surveillance at a designated location” (RSDL).
In a simulation that recreates the mundanity of prison life, we bear witness to repetitious cycles of Lei sitting motionless, using the toilet and sleeping – the latter two acts that are so private that to be surveyed doing them is an utmost intrusion on one’s inner sanctum.
The curious decision to use the same child actors, Chloe Ma and Carlos Wong Yu, as both Lei’s aggressors and her offspring is interesting in that it compels us to humanise Lei’s captors, but it blunts the impact of the surveillance and abrogates accountability. Hearing Yu’s diminutive voice whisper “permission accepted” whenever Lei asks to use the toilet is heartbreaking in its own distinct way, though not for the reasons intended.
Employing a combination of multi-camera projection and recorded footage, video designer Romanie Harper evokes the claustrophobia of constantly being monitored, implicating the audience as they’re made to assume Lei’s positionality in difficult moments of interrogation and self-reflection. In one particularly transcendent moment, we see a visual culmination of a covert bond Lei shares with another detainee.
For all the work’s strengths, transitions between scenes can be clumsy, and the gargantuan stage often envelops the minutiae of a play that feels overwhelmed by its staging. 1,154 Days is bilingual, but not consistently – Lei speaks in Mandarin to her children, but the play is otherwise largely in English, begetting the question for whom exactly this play is for in an age when surtitles are commonplace and supremely effective at bridging chasms in language.
It’s in the technical aspects where 1154 Days shines the most. Emma Lockhart-Wilson’s light design oscillates between warm and tender, like when it’s bathing Lei in a rare strand of sunshine, and desolate and monochrome in moments of deep psychic distress. Co-director Emma Valente’s sound design personifies a similar approach, ratcheting upwards in moments of inner turmoil and tending towards asynchronous, like when Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours devolves into a discordant nightmare.
Lei is a talented and moving interlocutor of her own experiences, but 1,154 Days flattens the complexity of her ordeal into something that can be digested in 100 minutes by opting for neat ciphers, trite oversimplifications and a pat ending that feels particularly at odds with the difficulty detainees face in transitioning to regular life after withstanding such trauma.
JAZZ
The Others ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, May 28
I was lucky enough to see The Others’ debut performance in 2017 at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival. The unlikely trio (teaming Spiderbait drummer Kram with jazz titans Paul Grabowsky and James Morrison) presented a free-spirited, fully improvised show that became an instant festival highlight.
Since then, The Others have performed only a handful of times, each outing a rare reunion. Last year a new chapter began when yidaki virtuoso William Barton joined the group. On Thursday night, this new iteration of The Others performed in Melbourne for the first time.
As Kram explained to the audience, once the trio had played with Barton, it was impossible to imagine the group without him. It wasn’t hard to understand why. Here was another musician equipped not only with prodigious technique, but also wide-open ears – and heart – and a willingness to dive into the unknown.
Like The Necks (another renowned improvising ensemble), The Others arrive on stage without a repertoire or an imagined outcome. They simply start playing. On this night, it was Kram’s rumbling toms that set the scene, creating a muted backdrop for Grabowsky’s graceful piano and Morrison’s hushed flugelhorn, as Barton’s yidaki thrummed quietly beneath them.
Over the next hour, many musical stories unfolded, each emerging organically from the last. There were passages of enchanting, folk-like lyricism in which melodic fragments emerged from the piano, trumpet or flugelhorn, adorned by Barton’s haunting, wordless vocals. There were outer-space escapades filled with trippy effects from Grabowsky’s keyboard and analogue synthesizer; detours into dark abstraction or deliciously earthy, gospel-tinged soul; and urgent late-night chases propelled by Kram’s polyrhythmic gallop and the bass-like pulsations of the yidaki.
In a second, shorter piece Morrison used a Tibetan singing bowl to produce ringing overtones, accompanied by barely there cymbals from Kram, before a relaxed pulse emerged. As Grabowsky uncovered a minimalist piano motif, Morrison switched to conch shell, its trombone-like timbre merging with the yidaki. Gradually the beat became more insistent, the mood more boisterous, before the storm subsided and melted into silence.
The audience leapt to its feet, cheering, and The Others looked equally thrilled, their spontaneous group hug mirroring our pleasure at having shared this enthralling journey.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas
Want more arts? We’ve got you
- Newsletter: The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
- Rising Festival: See all the latest news, interviews and reviews here
- Miles Franklin: New musical unleashes the woman behind My Brilliant Career
- Senate estimates: Antisemitism guidelines flagged for arts organisations and funding
