Both extra polished and experimental than your common VAULT Festival, Rhys Hastings’ Caceroleo makes for a bracing watch
“Is it a play? Is it a film?”
Right from the off, you’ll be able to see that Caceroleo isn’t your common VAULT present. The high quality of the a number of video screens and the content material thereon (projection design by Al Orange) is a step up from what we’ve come to count on in these Waterloo tunnels. And as an prolonged video introduction of a rehearsal course of broaching notions of protected areas bleeds right into a multi-layered monologue tackling home violence, that ambition is on full present.
Writer/performer Rhys Hastings has rather a lot to say. He’s processing the trauma of rising up with a father abusive to each him and his mom, he’s providing up a rallying name to males to wrestle with the epidemic of male violence in the direction of girls, he’s probing into the obligations the humanities have when simulating this, he’s additionally taking part in with how far he can push this theatrical experiment.
Director Nastazja Domaradzka is a well-matched accomplice in crime on this, very a lot thinking about disrupting conference and presenting audiences with a puzzle-box of a manufacturing. Video sequences are spliced all through, Jovana Backovic’s sound design intervenes with function, tales and buildings are questioned, timelines rewind, spoken phrase takes over at some factors with haunting impression.
The cumulative impact is one which is regularly exhilarating and typically verging on the exhausting – at 90 minutes, it’s considerably longer than most VAULT reveals. And a vital second of questioning the reliability of our narrator has one thing of a destablising impact on our engagement – does the message of the present change if it isn’t truly autobiographical? It’s one thing we’re left wrestling with, at the same time as we’re agog on the audacity of Hastings’ work.