Black Mirror in a box: Brisbane Festival’s Volcano is an all-dancing space oddity

Volcano ★★★½
Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse, until September 14

It would not be an arts festival if there was not at least one show that was challenging and a little bewildering. In Brisbane Festival 2024, that show is Volcano, a theatre-dance hybrid from Irish director and choreographer Luke Murphy that shows a lot of the influence of that nation’s great purveyor of darkly funny existential despair, Samuel Beckett.

Beckett’s Godot famously never arrived, but in Volcano, a spaceman eventually does, crawling out of the speaker of an old-time radio into a decrepit lounge room. It’s as if the astronaut at the end of the film 2001 found himself the guest of a fleabag motel instead of a palatial suite.

It’s in this room, fenced from the audience by a wall of glass, that Murphy and co-star Briton Alistair (Ali) Goldsmith act and dance a series of seemingly random scenes. As the program notes explain, the story is “presented to the audience as a riddle to solve”.

Clips on TV screens offer clues as to what’s going on – something to do with “The Amber Project” and a malfunction of “Pod 261”. There are references to lighthouse keepers, diving bells and time capsules. The show is in four 45-minute episodes separated by two five-minute breaks and a half-hour interval. It all plays out like a four-part Black Mirror story, with dancing.

Murphy and Goldsmith are versatile actors and sure-footed, muscular movers, whether wrestling on the floor, getting funky, or tripping the light fantastic. At times, they’re like a pair of ballet stars; at others, like two party animals off their faces, dancing furiously after everyone else has gone home.

There is some off-kilter comedy, such as a wedding speech gone awry, and a rendition of Elton John’s Rocket Man in the spoken-word style of William Shatner (yes, really).

Unlike Beckett’s work, the show does have payoffs and twists – albeit well telegraphed ones. Deeper rewards can be found in the dance moves, where evocations about memory and humanity’s precious moments can be found.

The lighting, sound and music form a complex and seamless tapestry. Murphy has an uncompromising vision and incredible stamina. I would, however, question the need for four episodes when two or three could have done it. When a show’s cast is trapped inside a glass box, it’s not ideal that the audience should start to empathise too strongly.