Sometimes actions speak louder than words.
Icarus, a piece about refugee stowaways and their flight from the violence of their beloved countries exudes devastation. Through a careful blend of soundscape, contemporary movement, mime, with the tiniest touch of heartbreaking clowning,
Icarus manages to draw the audience in to start to understand the struggle and fear of this 'any person' story.
The Blue Room Theatre's stages can be noisy. Everyone chatting in excitement and anticipation and then clomping up the stairs, plonking in their seats, a sold-out mini-crowd of theatregoers and the hum that happens before the lights going dim.
But from the moment
Christopher Samuel Carroll steps on stage, I don't think I've ever been in an audience as quiet as the one that night.
His character/s grow on you until you're invested and, if you have any passion for change, you walk out feeling both drained and enraged.
The show is captivating and emotional for a story that's so full of terror and violence with sweet spots scattered through – the decisions made about what to do with a beloved pet particularly movin
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Not one part of
Icarus had a single word spoken yet so much language was used and stories uncovered. The feeling in the journey that Icarus took the audience on was deep and confronting it raised questions on why refugees are falling from planes and how terrifying the place they're running from must be to push them to flee.
"In clown, we often see stories of survivors, characters whose infinite capacity for hope and wonder gets them through the most desperate situations," Carroll says. "And apart from the freedom that it allows me as a performer to leap between different worlds in an instant, the magic of mime invites an audience to bring
their imagination to the table, to be co-creators in the journey - and hopefully empathise with characters going through the most incredible experiences."
A one-man show, it's cleverly structured to show many different views of the situation.
Statistics like as of 2016 Australia has accepted 17,555 out of 68.5 million refugees is one thing. What Icarus does is show us the human face of many refugees, in one performer. It allows us a glimpse of the struggle and pain of that one, but many, people trying just to live.
