ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN / SOMETHING MUST HAPPEN by Young & W!LD

“Anything can happen, and edutainment did”

Reviewer: Cordelia Lee
Performance: 7 July 2019

Wild Rice’s youth division, Young & Wild, returns for a fifth iteration.

Part lecture-performance and part experimental Shakespeare, Anything Can Happen, Something Must Happen stitches a mix of performance genres and forms onto the bard’s Macbeth.

The work plays with the delivery of its canonised source text in imaginative ways, from an interactive camp segment to table-top puppetry involving edible cookies. Every so often, it breaks production concepts down into their nuts and bolts before unabashedly thrusting them into its audience’s faces.

Admittedly, this sounds like a brutal ride. But hear me out.

A pleasant surprise awaits if – and only if – you forswear the impenetrability of the fourth wall, forget about coherent narratives, and ground your disbelief. In doing so, you’ll discover the true value of this work and may begin to appreciate it for what it inherently is – edutainment.

“This is how it sounds like when the actress speaks to the actor,” a disembodied voice resounds.

The actress on stage obediently opens her mouth. Out comes her lines, and when they are done, she freezes.

The voice returns, now making a point on the quality of lighting. The scene resumes in accordance with this new direction, playing out for a few seconds before pausing for subsequent instructions.

More stage elements are isolated and tweaked, their effects made conspicuous. It’s as though we’re in a director’s head as she creates, toying with options and watching each one materialise on stage.

Granted, this is nothing novel for theatre students and practitioners. But for the general audience who too often consumes a polished product, this delightful dissection of stage elements renders them privy to the workings of theatrical magic.

There’s more.

The production devotes part of itself to making the discourse on theatre in academia tangible and relatively accessible for its audience. Theatre luminary Peter Brook’s definition of theatre, for example, is heard in the opening scene:

“A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

At this precise moment cast members traverse the performance area; the audience’s gaze follows them, held by this mundane act. They have validated Brook’s claims, whether or not they realise it. For those who have, the often-overlooked act of watching and being watched in the theatre is now made evident.

But more than that, the act of watching is made meaningful. It reveals the audience-performer relationship that exists within the performance space as an integral and valuable part of the theatre performance, one without which an act of theatre ceases to exist.

This production, unlike some others, is devoid of sensational storylines and glossy sets that coerce you into believing you’ve got your money’s worth.

Instead, it humbly offers something else of undeniable value: an opportunity to learn about theatre, through theatre. Not the most conventional mode of sharing knowledge perhaps, but an engaging one nonetheless.

And therein lies the production’s unmistakable charm.