Live review: Instructions for an Imaginary Man

Various People Inc
Adelaide Gaol
March 10

This brooding, semi-staged song cycle is more art installation than theatre piece, relying on the reaction of the audience reaction to the performance space for its impact. The Adelaide-based collective Various People, who present multi-disciplinary works in unusual formats, has chosen the uneasy intimacy of a dank room in the Old Adelaide Gaol as the evocative setting of Richard Chew’s music to poetry by the unjustly incarcerated and prisoners of conscience.

I walked past the A-Wing, where seven executed men were buried between 1920 and 1946, and through a small Amnesty International exhibition about asylum seekers, before being invited to get cosy on the concrete floor with only a square of hessian as padding. The discomfort of the seating arrangements – threadbare rugs and sagging mattresses – is intended as a visceral part of the overall experience: all the austere furnishings were made and used by the prisoners. And the slight sensation of pins and needles in my toes didn’t seem like much to complain about by the end of this thought-provoking show.

Designer Bec Francis’s ghostly layers of gauze allow viewers to observe the goings-on inside...