"Boho Interactive’s theatre challenges and provokes."

How to unravel the riddle? That is the puzzle. What has brought an assayer, a data processor and a journalist together in a 19th century study? Why are they obviously modern day characters and yet are dressed in Victorian clothes? Why do they appear disoriented, confused, scrambled and bewildered by recurrent loops in their dialogue, interfacing with voice overs of their real persona’s existing in an outside world? Trapped within the virtual reality of a computer construct, the mystery slowly unravels, revealing the reason for their existence, their relationship to each other and their mission to serve a robot government in order to solve the major social, political and economic problems of their world at a time in the not too distant future.

Stoppard meets Beckett in an Orwellian world in Boho Interactive’s science fiction thriller, True Logic of the Future. Canberra’s science theatre collective has already established an enviable reputation for incisive, conceptual exploration of scientific and technological experimentation in previous productions, such as the highly acclaimed A Prisoner’s Dilemma, based on Game Theory probability; and Food for Hunger, which examined the notion of historical consequence, performed as an interactive journey through the Canberra home of late historian, Manning Clark .

True Logic of the Future, although appearing complex in its dramatic structure, is deceptively simple and strikingly relevant. Society faces a complex, scrambled and incoherent network of natural, humanitarian and political problems. What logical paradigm needs to be employed to construct rational and affirmative solutions?

True Logic of the Future seeks to offer no didactically driven solutions. But it does strive to empower the audience through interactive participation or intellectual confrontation to construct informed answers to the essential premise. How can we solve this problem?

Which brings us to the fourth character in this tantalizingly thought-provoking production. His name is never mentioned. He never appears. And yet the life and work of William Stanley Jevons, assayer at the Sydney Mint from 1855-1859; inaugural professor of economics at University College, London; inventor of the Logic Piano, a prototype of the modern computer; inventor of the Cloud Chamber; musician; philosopher; 3D photographer and meteorologist, inspires every facet of Boho Interactive’s production. As the audience enters the space, they are invited to explore the artifacts from Jevons’s time and interact with Gillian Schwab’s faithful design and authentic objects on loan from the Powerhouse Museum.

Jevons’s ideals are embedded in the need to be flexible, open and logical. Finningan’s script slowly reveals the inherent logic of the principles of Jevons’s teaching, while leaving the audience in a state of unresolved awareness. This is punctuated by the long uncertain silence at the end of the show, following Sands’s expounding of Jevons’s principles, before following Alex Moore (Jack Lloyd) and Jen Howell (Cathy Petocz) into their real universe.

Director, Barb Barnett skilfully avoids the risk of confusion, maintaining a tightly directed unfolding of the story with assured performances from Lloyd, Petocz and Finnigan. As a result of their locked existence in virtual reality, subject to the control of an authoritative power beyond the computer construct, Lloyd and Petocz’s characters appear functional and automated, controlled by a nineteenth century formality and an unrevealed agent.

Throughout the performance, the action is interspersed with digital on-screen instructions, operated by Michael Bailey who also provides a sonorous trombone accompaniment to the characters’ search for reason in an apparently illogical environment. At intervals, the audience is asked to break the incoherent loops of simultaneous or overlapping dialogue by stamping their feet; determining a sequence of scenes; or plunging into chaos as they urgently attempt to keep an increasing number of balloons afloat while Sands exhorts them to imagine they are a government, charged to solve problems such as the refugee crisis, the erosion of the soil, tidal surges that destroy coastal communities, the creation of social problems leading to the employment of martial law, which in turn leads to the destruction of social order and the emergence of uncontrollable anarchy. The dialogue is barely comprehensible and any hope of solution discarded as the audience frantically strives to keep the balloons afloat, until Sands’ final instruction: “Let Go”.

Boho Interactive’s theatre challenges and provokes. It demands rational explanation of irrational logic, and compels audiences to understand responsible commitment to direct action. Theatrically, True Logic of the Future is compelling, confronting and intellectually challenging in its relentless analysis of human complexity. It is a theatre of ideas, intriguing in its construct, imaginative in its staging, and prophetic in its pronouncement of the global and national issues that will determine the future prosperity and security of the nation.

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