Bringing back the low-tech magic and ‘child logic’ of an old Patch favourite
Sixteen years after it first premiered, Patch Theatre’s Me & My Shadow returns to the stage this month – with co-creator Geoff Cobham and many of the original gang reuniting to entertain a new generation of young audiences.
When Patch Theatre’s Me & My Shadow first premiered in 2010, the creators had no idea if the show was any good.
“The show’s a bit weird,” says Geoff Cobham, who was the set and lighting designer at the time, alongside a team of co-creators that included original cast Nathan O’Keefe and Astrid Pill, composer Zoë Barry, then-Patch artistic director Dave Brown, Bob Weatherly and Cobham’s late wife, the dancer and choreographer Roz Hervey.
“I remember on the opening day the audience came out and they were all like, ‘Well, that’s a classic,’ and we were like, ‘Really?’”
More than 15 years later, Cobham is now Patch Theatre’s artistic director, and has decided to bring the award-winning classic back to Adelaide’s Space Theatre, along with O’Keefe and Pill reprising their original roles.
While Me & My Shadow has evolved over that time, at its heart it’s remained the same: a series of vignettes arranged to tell a story about friendship and self-discovery.
“I think the relationship between Nathan and Astrid, who are very different people but also they’re two of the funniest people I have ever met, is central to this,” says Cobham.
“They’re so funny and silly.”
The show not only highlights the joy of friendship, but also the trauma that can come with it.
“It’s about loss, because there’s a point in the show, which is sort of the emotional climax, where they’ve been playing together and their playing gets a bit out of hand.
“The girl [Pill] tells the shadow character [O’Keefe] to go away and rejects him and there’s that loss of friendship, and then she tries to play without him and isn’t able to.”
Cobham was overseas when he decided to bring Me & My Shadow back to Australian audiences; he’d been watching a children’s theatre show created predominately with torches and was reminded how powerful analogue technology can be in storytelling, and how deeply audiences connect with its simplicity.
“The beginning of projection would have been in a cave with a fire and people would have created shadows on the wall – it’s a very primitive thing,” he says.
“I could see there was a very universal and primitive response to shadow – and you know I’m all about lighting.
“I was like, ‘Wow, why don’t we bring that back,’ because it has such an amazing connection with our audience”.
Patch Theatre is known for creating visual poems which explore how children see the world, and its audience – predominantly primary school aged kids – is its guiding light.
“There’s a lot of child logic in the show,” Cobham says, who also notes that the actors in the show don’t have stage names, but are just themselves, playing like children.
“Seeing adults play is very charming to children, they love that, but them [adults] pretending to be who they aren’t is really confusing to children.
“Our performers are grown-ups, but they’re playful grown- ups, and they play like children, but they’re still themselves.”
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Part of the charm and success of productions like Me & My Shadow lies in bringing analogue theatre tricks back to audiences, particularly in a world where children are often technologically literate before they even leave primary school.
“Kids have got phones, so we don’t do projection much anymore because they’re not impressed by it,” says Cobham.
“There’s magic in our shows – a lot of magic – but it’s very low-tech, like in this show it’s shadows and paper bags and scissors and cutting things out and it’s all stuff kids can do at home.”
No matter how low tech it is, audiences are always in awe of what Patch Theatre is able to create.
“You can’t even hear the actors sometimes because of the joy in the audience, and it’s just from watching the performers play with bits of paper.”
Me & My Shadow has minimal dialogue, and the physicality of the show is something Cobham compares to dance.
“We’re like, ‘Oh, finally we found the audience for dance theatre: they’re five-year-olds’,” Cobham says. “They’re not going, ‘Oh, who’s that person? What’s the time connection between them? Why are they doing that?’ They’re not picking it apart like that.
“They’re all making their own version of the show up and they don’t care about linear narrative.
“We tell an emotional narrative and we work very hard at the arc of the show, but it’s not a narrative arc or a hero’s journey or anything like that.”
Cobham believes that adults could learn a lot from how kids approach Me & My Shadow, and art more broadly, as children bring curiosity, rather than insecurity, to creativity.
“Everyone’s scared! You know, ‘What does it mean if I get it wrong, if I miss the point of it?’
“Five-year-olds, they’re the people who get art, because they’re all born artists, and we slowly train them out of it, which is a quote from Picasso,” Cobham reflects.
“I’ve finally found my people: they’re five-year-olds.”
Me & My Shadow continues at Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, until August 29
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