Goodbye, Lindita @ Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide 4/3/2024
Every great Festival needs a challenging play like Goodbye, Lindita.
Goodbye, Lindita is a wordless work from Albanian born and Greek based theatre-maker, the twenty four year-old Mario Banushi.
He gives us a challenging, unnerving and discomforting experience as he guides the audience through the complexities of grief – of saying Goodbye. This is a wordless play because ostensibly one way of coping with grief is in silence, busying yourself with mundane household chores and locking yourself inside your own emotions. Soft understated lighting hues by Tasos Palaioroutas allow these emotional states to swirl.
But inside your own emotional mendacity, convincing yourself that nothing has happened is a burning cauldron of emotional pain. And it is this powerful dissonance that Banushi explores – from mindless vacuuming to convulsive writhing.
Ritualized movement is pivotal to this performance and Banushi has a rich Balkan heritage to draw on as we witness the preparations for the afterlife. The naked corpse is present in the room and the presence of death is powerfully tangible. The spiritual realm also looms pervasively as an Orthodox Christian Black Madonna is a looming presence.
This provides a comforting, shared and generational grief, but Banushi avoids using this as a cliché as the icon becomes transformative, and is removed from the wall to become a portal to the other world. Banushi uses transformational techniques cleverly, and often. The set designed by Sotiris Melanos is extraordinary. A chest of drawers becomes a funeral bed; a bed becomes a bath for ritualized cleansing. The naked corpse becomes a pivotal personage in the ritualized transformation.
The ritualized movements and physical theatre give the dancers in the cast the opportunity to writhe in grotesque naked convulsions then transform into a ritualistic dance reminiscent of Euripides The Bacchae. A soundscape by Emmanouel Rovithis that draws on the mundane and then soulful Balkan beats provides the heartbeat to this performance.
Stillness is equally important – and Banushi bravely takes the audience to the edge of still and silent discomfort. Stillness becomes tableaux and the use of a camera flash suggests that Banushi wants us to consider the filmic technique of mise en-scene. Everything on stage is carefully framed creating a sense of comfort and predictably that will ultimately be shattered by the loss of a loved one.
In the programme notes, Banushi says, “Is it possible for a performance that has as a starting point the death of two most beloved ones to reach rebirth and peace beyond the darkness of the final farewell? This is what I have tried.”
This is a very clever performance that lingers with you long after the final curtain call. The dead are ever present in the room and a final bow is reserved for the two empty chairs that the director places flowers on.
Adelaide Festival Review By Bob Becker