Review - After Life

After Life

Michel van der Aa (Netherlands)

Composer, Stage Director, Video Script and Direction – Michel van der Aa

Performers:  Roderick Williams, Richard Suart, Marijje van Stralen, Margriet van Reisen,Yannick-Muriel Noah and Helena Rasker

Conductor - Wouter Padberg

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Technical Production Development – Frank van der Weij

Costume Designer – Robby Duiveman

Melbourne International Festival

Regent Theatre

11-13 October 7.30pm

As a semi-staged contemporary opera, about the gravitas we as individuals place on what we deem to be significant memories at the unraveling end of corporal inhabitation, After Life is an uncomfortable, yet gratifyingly challenging, offering.  It is an individual journey that although not without humor and lyricism requires patience and a contemplative approach to be satisfyingly engaging and inspiring.  

The story is of what happens to three people in the three or so days after their deaths, when they are accommodated in a state of limbo in the care of staff, Sarah (Marijje van Stralen) and Aiden (Roderick Williams), at a way station.   And there they are required to choose a memory to have with them to be able to move forward.   Whilst performers are grappling with these individual characters journeys; projected on two rear screens are various groupings of objects and furniture like those in an auction rooms from deceased estates and, at times throughout, the very genuine faces of actual people telling the stories of their own most significant memories.  These non-actors bring a beautiful heightened sincerity to the work.

The musical composition is heavily influenced by modern masters such as Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Schoenberg to bring to the ear what it sounds like.  The score though lyrical at times has an atonal not fully completed quality about it and the libretto is often startlingly simple, almost simplistic - adding another dimension of sparseness.  Thus – ‘space’ is ideally left to ponder the pivotal question of which single memory from ones life would one want to be able to access when dead - bringing to the fore what has been most important to us, as individuals, in our especially individualistic contemporary lives.

Well surely this type of challenging fare is what Arts Festivals are all about!

Note:  Do read the synopsis in the program before the work commences or you could seriously flounder and loose the will to persevere.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)