Rising like a phoenix almost a decade after its first production, ATLANTIS makes a welcome, albeit brief, return to the Sydney stage.
Like the mythical city it takes its title from, Paul Gilchrist’s ATLANTIS is about sinking ideals and submerged truths, the manipulation of myth, the power and danger of stories.
Sarah and Tom are on the lam. Sarah, an aspiring actress whose career is spiralling out of existence has lost her job in a cafe and Tom, her charming but inherently charlatan drug dealing partner, has fallen foul of his suppliers.
They seek sanctuary with Sarah’s estranged aunt, Zelda, a New Age entrepreneur in her secluded mountain retreat.
Sarah is not best pleased that she has to fall on family favours as a fixative for her and her boyfriend’s failures.
Sarah’s issues with Zelda stem from having been on tour and missing her mother’s funeral as well as a fundamental scepticism of Zelda’s woo woo philosophy. In trying to remember the name of Zelda’s company, Sarah tells Tom “It’s Atlantis or Aquarius… but it might as well be Avarice.”
Zelda, born Mandy, has reinvented herself as a financially savvy free spirit, cashing in on the lucrative market of crystals, dream catchers and prayer wheels. Her I Ching is more attuned to Ker-ching!
Gilchrist’s script is full of zingers, some of the most killing about the practice of acting, where practitioners “spend their time searching for truth and then pretend to be someone else.”
But he also directs his intellectual blowtorch to the Western appropriation of indigenous art and culture, and the subversion of spirituality by dogma and cant.
Veronica Clavijo is beautifully poised and centred in her realisation of Sarah, and she creates a tremendous, palpable chemistry with Jimmy Hazelwood’s himbo Tom.
Stepping in for an understudy’s unscheduled unavailability, producer Daniela Giorgi, even with book in hand, conveyed a convincing and endearing characterisation of Zelda, the pragmatic providore of supernatural and spiritual accoutrements.
Directed by the author, ATALANTIS is a no frills, pure storytelling event, simple and evocative with an inescapable soundscape of redolent wind chimes.
