You enter a set up with tiered cinema/theatre seating with the stage under an archway. Five monitors and one mic stand are set up. “The best things in life are free” plays on a loop with videos playing on each of the monitors: jellyfish, clocks ticking backwards, waterfalls, amusement rides. These are motifs of time, water, pouring, and spinning motions which repeat throughout the narrative as our story takes on a non-linear timeline as memories trigger and collide.

Caceroleo explores the notion of ‘safe space’ in a rehearsal room when ‘authenticity’ and trauma collide. Writer and performer Rhys Hastings plays a young actor takes us through his first stage combat scene where he is being asked to choke another student, a woman. This leads us down a spiral of memories culminating in coming home from prom to find his mum has been strangled by his dad. Hastings takes us on this journey with incredible energy. It’s frantic and chaotic and disturbing at times. The story is punctuated with humour, and you’re never quite sure what to feel at any given moment.

The narrative of this hybrid one-man show is presented in a spoken word/slam poetry style with videos from a ‘safe space’ rehearsal room in which safety is spoken and yet never realised. Visuals sometimes take over all five monitors, other times they take up two or three at time, or there are five separate videos. It’s all beautifully-timed along with music and lighting cues to support the chaos of the narrative, the pauses, and the breaks where the audience sits with what has just been said as Hastings stands and watches.

It was moving and at times really uncomfortable to sit through. It felt a little too long for me, but I can also see how that might have been intentionally linked to the discomfort/relentlessness of experiencing and re-living memories of domestic violence.

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

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