KEY POINTS:
Max Black is a true festival show in that it is unlike anything Auckland audiences are likely to have seen before.
Devised by acclaimed German director and composer Heiner Goebbels, Max Black is accurately described as contemporary experimental theatre which blurs the boundaries between text, music, lighting and effects.
The action starts from the moment you enter the Maidment.
The stage has been stripped back to its bones and transformed into an unusual laboratory with old office furniture, strange machines, a bicycle, a piano and various other curiosities including a stuffed bird in a glass box.
A grey-haired scientist/explorer sits behind his desk and talks directly to the audience in French about everything to do with the body, the spirit and the world including philosophy, science, mathematics and even coffee.
As he talks he makes music with the office furniture and other objects in his laboratory. English subtitles keep us up to speed with his monologue and the action is punctuated with lovely lighting effects and bursts of real fire works.
Of German/Swiss extraction and created by Theatre Vidy-Lausanne E.T.E, Max Black is an avant-garde production likely to polarise audiences and provoke a love or hate response.
One person's deep is another person's pretentious - you will either be caught up in its combination of literary and philosophical references, special effects, sampled music and technical virtuosity or you will find it all rather incomprehensible.
Even if you take it at face value only, it is a crazy kind of night out with unforgettable dream-like images set to an equally hallucinogenic sound track of electronic beeps, beats and samples that filter into the memory banks and linger on.
My favourite moments included a wooden trunk that blew smoke rings, desk furniture that came alive to make its own music and a bicycle wheel that also became an instrument to be plucked and struck.
I won't pretend to understand everything that happened, but overall I was impressed.
A little mystery in art is a good thing.
Review
* What: Max Black, AK07
* Where: Maidment Theatre, ends tonight 7.30pm
* Reviewer: Shannon Huse
