Park Theatre, finished

⭐⭐⭐

Translated play has an odd tone but sticks the emotional landings.

I saw Our Cosmic Dust last week at the brilliant Park Theatre, which you might call ‘my local’ given how close it is to home (and how often I frequent it). In fact, as it was such a beautiful evening I opted for the first time to walk the hour-or-so journey home. I was glad to have a bit of headspace to process what I’d seen, as I felt a bit conflicted – did I like Our Cosmic Dust, or not? Adapted from the original Japanese text written by Michinira Ozawa, the mixed form play (incorporating elements of theatre, puppetry and multimedia) poses plenty of big questions and offers a lot of food for thought. I think by the very nature of its confronting subject matter, audiences will have very different responses to Our Cosmic Dust, depending on their personal experiences, and others might connect to it much more than I did. All I can do is put to paper my general reflections on the way it’s put together, and what hit home for me (and what didn’t).

Our Cosmic Dust is a play explicitly about death – both generally and specifically. Young boy Shotoro is fascinated by space, an obsession he has inherited from his beloved father. In the opening scenes we see him plotting how he might travel to the stars, for which we soon learn there is a tragic ulterior motive. Shotoro’s father has died and his mother Usami, unsure how to explain the loss to her small son, has claimed he has become a star in the sky. A logical and scientifically-minded child, Shotoro doesn’t understand this to be some whimsical platitude but a literal description of where he can find his father. He runs away from home in search of answers, with Usami in hot pursuit. Along the way Shotoro and Usami collect a strange cast of friends, each of whom shares their own story of loss and their own thoughts on what happens to us when we die.

Let’s start with the positive – or rather, end with it. The play really hits its stride in the third act, during a climactic scene in which all the characters devise their own constellations at a planetarium. This is when the story has the most tension and drama, with Usami’s fears for Shotoro boiling over and the young boy vainly struggling to make some sense of his father’s loss. You’d have to be pretty heartless not to be at least a little bit moved by Shotoro’s attempts to create some meaning out of death – something all of us have to grapple with at some time or another, but hopefully not quite so early in our lives.

Perhaps what helps make Shotoro so endearing is his life-size puppeted form. Mikayla Teodoro’s design is beautiful, gently rendered in felt with soft hair and wide eyes. The choice to make Shotoro a puppet (alone amongst the characters) may seem odd but it’s really quite clever. Firstly because it allows the heavy dramatic themes to be acted out not by a real child but an adult performer – in this case the talented Hiroki Berrecloth, who voices Shotoro and deftly does most of the puppetry. Secondly, it helps to emphasise the gulf between Shotoro’s non-communicative exterior (Usami explains that he’s mostly stopped speaking since his father’s death) and his inquisitive, imaginative inner self.

Up until the powerful last act though, I got a bit lost in the tone of Our Cosmic Dust. It doesn’t seem to quite know who its audience is meant to be. It’s incredibly childlike and whimsical in many ways – from the animated children’s drawings to the simple, folk-like costumes to the way the story plays out much like a fable, complete with a wise and eccentric sage. But then there are also quite a few jarringly adult moments – such as several comically dropped f-bombs and even some suggested romantic entanglements – which take us out of the whimsy. Perhaps there’s something appealing about viewing something as complicated as death through the eyes of a child – reminding us all how small we are and how little we know when faced with the mysteries of life and the universe. But the downside is that for adult viewers, the effect is somewhat infantilising – as though we’re not trusted to deal with the complexity of this topic without having it boiled down to child-friendly musings.

I did also find it interesting that the play’s philosophy of death seems to be (to my reading, at least) very atheistic. It seems to be broadly accepted that death is the end of consciousness and the corporeal form altogether; the play explores how we find meaning in death with that being a given. In fact, the whole play really hinges on an atheistic view of death, because if Shotoro could believe in an afterlife (if Usami was comfortable presenting that as a reality) his crisis and search for meaning wouldn’t really exist. I’m not religious myself, nor do I think that religious views need to be reflected in any kind of literature as a necessity. But it just stuck out to me as a bit of a missing element – that in a play explicitly about how humans make sense of death, there wasn’t any overt reference to the role of faith.

Pivoting from deep philosophical themes and back to the mundane practical elements of the play, I wasn’t a massive fan of the multimedia aspect of this production. Mainly this takes the form of a giant screen that dominates the back of the stage (overbearing in the small Park200 space). I’m a bit skeptical about the use of videos or projections in theatre (see my review of Shanghai Dolls); I tend to think it’s a bit of a gimmick in an art form where dialogue and character should be paramount. The purpose of the screen becomes clear in the third act, when it provides the planetarium show, and it’s admittedly very effective. But for the rest of the play it feels wasted, just featuring some basic animations. I think it would’ve been better to leave the screen entirely until the third act, making it even more mesmerising when it appears.

I spent the first two thirds of Our Cosmic Dust uncertain about how I felt about it, erring on the side of ‘not for me’. But I have to admit, it really got me in the third act. It’s enough for me to give it a three-star review, but I think whether or not you like this play will really come down to how well you connect with the quite personal themes being explored.