By Darby Turnbull
Briony Dunn’s adaptation and production of E.M Forster’s The Machine Stops, currently playing at Theatreworks opens with a sly play for the audience’s attention. For many, many minutes we watch lead actress Mary Helen Sassman shuffle minutely from the back of the stage to the lip. The design team work together beautifully in the unnervingly subtle establishment of tone. Darrin Verhagen’s sound design adroitly gets under the skin; lulling with faint hums and assaulting with piercing discord whilst Niklas Pajanti’s lighting moves from warm to sickening.
The opportunity for the audience to sit, observe and reflect on their own experiences of stillness as part of the play’s dramaturgy is cunning. To my shame I found myself compelled to check my emails and even felt my fingers twitching at Sassman’s own fingers began to mime operation of the ‘machine’. I reflected on inertia and passivity as I waited and yearned for the production to stimulate me out of it. Well played. The 80-minute run time is as compact as Forster’s novella (only 12000 words) but it can be a punishing experience which works on a thematic level when exploring the alienating lethargy of a dystopia rapidly disintegrating but as an audience member, I felt the time could have been used to explore more once the tone had been established. This is a mostly faithful recreation of Forster’s work but it’s missing his droll wit which helps the reader/audience engage with the mordant irony.
Forster’s 1909 story and Dunn’s adaptation portray a dead society; human connection, spirituality, culture, individualism have all been surrendered to a society completely run by a ‘machine’ that’s become a God. Civilization has been driven underground as the world has become uninhabitable. They all live in self-contained pods (very cleverly represented by Pajanti through isolated spots of light) where all their ‘needs’ are supplied through the machine; friends, food, music, education’. They’ve freely given up their liberty in exchange for their basic needs being met and the consequences of sedition are ‘homelessness’. Such is the fate that awaits our protagonist’s child, Konos (Patrick Livesey) when they commit the cardinal sin of daring to expose themselves to the outside world against protocol and getting a taste of the alternatives to the propaganda they’ve been fed.
A recurring theme of Forster’s work is the conflict between an individual opening themselves up to a higher, nobler part of themselves; sex, art, culture, nature and conforming to a rigid, conformist existence within a predetermined system. As a gay man living and writing in Edwardian England, Forster was uniquely placed to chronicle that struggle. The Machine stops came out between A room with a view and Howard’s End and 4 years before he would begin writing Maurice; his tender and erotic gay novel that wouldn’t be published until the 1970’s because of his fear of being outed. Machine may be an early example of speculative science fiction but the themes are resonant throughout his other works.
Much has been made of the overwhelming prescience of this work and urgency of the parable as climate catastrophe is accelerated due to unregulated over reliance on technology and the benign willingness to exchange civil liberties for creature comforts.
This production has been delayed several times and finally making it to the Theatreworks stage is cause for celebration but despite the handsomeness of the craft it has a tendency to get somewhat stifled by the importance of its subject matter.
Dunn does a very good job of evoking the numbing of the senses that results from a dystopian milieu but as the plot begins to escalate and the machine’s deterioration hastens calamity the narrative threads lose their precision and impact. Kunos’ ideological disruption doesn’t push through with enough force. Patrick Livesey gives a very earnest, measured performance and offers some lovely revelations in the tentative elation of Kunos’ perspective opening and finding the words to talk about it. The introduction of the cerebral to the rigid excavation of critical thought has its power in the current presentation but I couldn’t help but yearn for more of the sense of its transformative power and the danger of it that makes Sassman’s character reject it with such vehemence.
The dimensions Sassman brings to her character are stupendous in the depths they contain. If there’s anything in this production that really sells the human cost of the machine it’s her performance. Chillingly guileless, with an intentional glaze over her face she can be smug in her delivery of compact ‘lectures’ on basic topics from the ‘before’ time to utter dissolution and wretched vulnerability at being robbed of the essential human resources to self actualise.
Since theatrical adaptations of 20th century Western literature seem to be the rage these days; Talented Mr Ripley and Rebecca are on the horizon The Machine Stops is a worthy addition to those who may want to introduce themselves or revisit the material with a very straightforward presentation. There is a version where there’s a more cutting, audacious exploration into the themes Forster posits but then again, 116 years later they’re still dire enough to cause consternation.
Image: Hannah Jennings
