It seems an age since Canberra first saw the likes of Boho Interactive. This July, almost ten years after their first forays into the theatre, they bring their latest show, True Logic of the Future, to the Belconnen Theatre stage before a season installed at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. It seems appropriate, in order to understand Boho’s Future, to take a trip into their past.
Way back at the dawn of the millennium Mick Bailey, David Finnigan, Nick Johnson and Jack Lloyd, precocious youngsters fresh from the upper-middle-class high school gauntlet, launched themselves on the scene as Bohemian Productions. Touting themselves as “Canberra’s least professional theatre company”, Bohemian brought to the stage a mix of classics (Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) and new work by local playwrights, most often Finnigan himself. Their shows were branded with the raffish, backalley humour that fuelled their dual aims:
1. Make Plays. 2. Don’t Go Broke.
Fast forward several years, skirting around degrees, jobs, funding grants and curated performance seasons, and the company has reformed with new interests and new ideas.
“In 2006, when Mick and Jack and I and Muttley [David Shaw] ‘reformed’ as an ensemble after a long time working on separate projects, we each brought an element we wanted to focus on,” Finnigan relates. “I wanted us to use science as a focus, Mick wanted to produce live music, Mutt wanted to include hi/lo-fi media devices, and Jack was interested in pursuing interactivity.”
Supported by the 2007 Multicultural Fringe, Boho produced the first of their interactive science-theatre performances, A Prisoner’s Dilemma. Combining interactive theatre, lo-fi electronics and live music performance from trombonist Bailey, the play – based around Game Theory and the show’s eponymous thought experiment – was impressive, compelling, engrossing.
And though interactivity can be a thorny (and irritating) element in theatre, Boho seem to have made it work for them, partly because of their shared understanding of it. “We all had a very clear shared aesthetic about how interactivity onstage should work - what is and is not cool,” says Finnigan.
Since A Prisoner’s Dilemma, the group has performed their cross-artform work at festivals, theatres, science conferences and schools around the country, from local theatres to bigger forums including the Brisbane Under The Radar Festival, the Asia-Pacific Complex Systems Conference, and the Adelaide Fringe. The nose-thumbing sensibility of the original Bohemian seems to have been absorbed into a more responsible approach to the job of theatre making (which makes the company sound like douches wearing lab coats – most definitely not the case).
In 2009 they held a residency at Manning Clark House, producing the interactive installation performance Food for the Great Hungers, which used “techniques from Complex Systems science to create a simulated re-imagining of Australian history since 1901 under the audience’s control.” The show was hauntingly compelling, once again proving what can be achieved with great brains, thoughtful use of space, a healthy enjoyment of the absurd, and a clear-eyed sense of humans in the world.
This year, the group - now minus Shaw – has taken that understanding of the mutability of human history explored in Food for the Great Hungers and the variety of human reactions prompted in A Prisoner’s Dilemma and, as part of National Science Week, dressed it in “nineteenth century period costume” in True Logic of the Future.
The show, developed in partnership with the Powerhouse Museum and in collaboration with director barb barnett, designer Gillian Schwab, and performer Cathy Petocz, takes on the interdisciplinary ideas of nineteenth century scientist-economist-musician-logician William Stanley Jevons “without ever actually mentioning him” in order to create a political thriller that integrates science theory, strong narrative, and meaningful audience interaction, explains Bailey.
Drawing upon Jevons’s experiences in Sydney, the play is set, says Bailey, in a “pseudo-Australian city state” in a not-too-distant, steampunk future. Beset by the several catastrophes of climate change and population increase – flood, drought, famine, and housing crisis – the city is, says Finnigan, “starting to give way”. Humanity has reached the point of a “last-ditch attempt” to stop the world from “going completely off the rails.”
Enter three unlikely characters: ethically questionable journalist Jen Howe (Petocz), statistician Alex Moore (Lloyd) and assayer at the mint, Will Sands (Finnigan). Within the confines of a computer simulation, Sands, Howe, and Moore “must activate an array of bizarre artifacts” in order to “determine the future of their society”.
These bizarre artifacts include interactive replicas of Jevons’s inventions – such as the cloud chamber and the logic piano – constructed by the Powerhouse and controlled, in the show, by the audience.
“The city [in the play] is facing runaway problems […] that aren’t wildly different from the problems facing the whole world”. Informed by “modeling of global change and economic flows”, Finngian explains, the show explores the possibilities of what those problems are going to look like when they hit our shores.
Like the dystopic sci-fi classics the play is inspired by – Blade Runner, Cube (and a little bit of the humour of Red Dwarf) True Logic of the Future asks difficult questions of the human world in the twenty-first century: how much would you sacrifice for the greater good? What is expendable? And, when faced with the possible collapse of the planet, are the things that Western society holds dear – personal freedom, individual rights – as important as we suppose?
It seems a long journey from Bohemian’s skuzzy beginnings to the lofty themes of True Logic of the Future, but the group have, in one definitive sense, fulfilled their aims: they’ve made some splendid plays. And not, apparently, gone broke.
True Logic of the Future plays at Belconnen Arts Centre from Tuesday 13 – Saturday 17 July at 8pm & Sunday 18 July at 6pm before moving to the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Tickets $25 / $18, bookings and enquiries 6173 3300.
