Belgium-based, internationally-acclaimed theatre collective Ontroerend Goed has caused a ruckus in Sydney with two astounding shows in recent years, Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen and The Smile Off Your Face. Well, they’re back, in a co-collaboration with the Sydney Theatre Company, developed with three STC residents who also star in the show: Cameron Goodall, Zindzi Okenyo and Tahki Saul.
A History of Everything opens with a story of reversal (actually ‘Reversal’) from David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. In the story, the expansion of the universe slows down, stops and begins to contract: “Everything that happened on the way out will happen again, but backward.”
And there’s the conceit of A History of Everything. We begin with a recap of the news and events of the day, in this case Sunday 15 January 2012. We’re read an obituary from the day’s paper, informed about the ongoing temporary closure of the Harbour Bridge, the Australian cricket team beating India at the WACA, the Russian space probe due to crash into the Pacific, the current foreign exchange rates.
Then we’re reminded, in reverse-chronological order, of events that happened yesterday, last week, last year. Goodall, Okenyo, Saul and Ontroerend Goed’s Karolien De Bleser, Charlotte De Bruyne, Joeri Smet and Nathalie Verbeke, clothed in black, pace around a map of the world that makes all human affairs look like the goings-on in a
real-time strategy computer game. The performers simulate natural disasters, honour the deceased and distribute ‘WAR’ signs to the appropriate regions. With startling efficiency, they report or act out the events of 2011: the death of Steve Jobs (5 October), the Occupy Wall Street protests (17 September), the London riots (6–10 August), the killing of Osama Bin Laden (1 May), the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (29 April), the Japanese tsunami (11 March) and the launch of the Nintendo 3DS (26 Feb).
With blink-and-you’ll-miss-it momentum, we revisit the Queensland floods (December 2010–January 2011), the launch of the iPad (3 April 2010), the Isner-Mahut Wimbledon match (22–24 June 2010), the death of Michael Jackson (25 June 2009) and the respective elections of Barack Obama (4 November 2008) and Pope Benedict XVI (19 April 2005). Before we know it, over ten years have passed, it’s September 2001 and two of the onstage actors are wielding a couple of tiny aircraft.
Things only pick up more speed: Y2K (2000), Dolly the sheep (1996), the end of the Cold War (1989), Watergate (1972–1974), the Apollo Moon landing (1969), the assassination of JFK (1963), the appearance of another aircraft on the horizon in 1945. Pretty soon the Industrial Revolution, the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment, the writings of Shakespeare, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the life of Christ – oh yeah, and the invention of Coca Cola – have come and gone. The stage gets darker and darker and we plummet further into the past.
What begins as a zany refresher course in the last decade (very
Animaniacs) changes shape as your own lifetime whizzes by and the show gets stuck into the last century. We witness the farce of recent history repeating itself: the endless bickering of nations and the redeployment of those ‘WAR’ signs. But the story changes shape again and again as we rewind through millennia. In one moment, it is the story of the conquest of new lands and people (Columbus’s world-altering quest is nicely done). In the next, it is the story of humanity’s pursuit of science and art and learning (Botticelli’s
The Birth of Venus, beautiful), which itself turns into the story of the spread of human civilisation (the unlearning of maths and writing, again, beautiful). The shifts in tone are handled masterfully.
Then, still racing back in time, A History of Everything becomes the story of the evolution of all things, then the story of the planet, then the story of the universe and time itself. Director Alexander Devriendt and cast find astonishing pathos and beauty in these late sequences, with Tahki Saul energetically illustrating millions of years’ worth of evolution (here the devolution) of our human ancestry, and two cast members embodying the process (Goodall does an especially good Ediacaran biota).
The final cosmic business of the show doesn’t quite have the elegance of the moments that lead up to it, and some of the monologuing over-explains rather than illuminates what’s unfolding in front of us. But A History of Everything earns its extraordinary title. Like the intro to a Bill Bryson’s (less ambitiously titled) A Short History of Nearly Everything, it’s a moving reminder of the miracle, for want of a better word, of being here at all. An awesome, powerful, inspiring work. But then, it’s a real ripping story to work with.
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