The surreal, imaginative landscape of Chris Harrison's Last Night Things Happened is a journey to the implausible, back-flipping through the nonsensical, spiraling into the whimsical but arriving at a very definite place; the wonders of the mind.This engaging and fun panto-like story, a kind of twisted Paddington bear with a continental absurdist furriness, will have you smiling with it's wonderful unique characters despite its dark themes.A young lad, 'Boy' (Frederick Anners) lies on the ground with dashed lines drawn on his body, marking him up for the chop by two bloody aproned butchers approaching him with knives. In a Jacob's Ladder sequence, he embarks on an adventure just before dismemberment. He meets a number of fantastical characters on his journey home to 6 Mornington Crescent (where metaphors, apparently, have been banned), and to find his pants which have gone missing. He seeks help from a variety of fun odd balls such as the couple cemented to each other by lightning or possibly a kiss (we get two stories), an enormous fat man, a criminal mime and a shadow catcher. But none of them seem to really help. In fact, the little boy's innocent world view offers basic common sense to these adults whose own appear to be severely wanting.The six actors remain on stage most of the time, and those that do, dexterously switch from character to character with great fluidity. When not engaged in the action, each maintains a certain presence adding to the scene in play. Beth Cannon's fat man and criminal mime are terrific as is Same Caseley's confident and useless CEO , No.1. Mr. Anners gives Boy a perfect guileless, wide eyed innocence and fills him with a searching temperament. I briefly spoke to him after the show and he said that he developed the character from watching his own eight year old brother at home. Though helpless, Boy does offer something to each of the strangers. His plain questions disturb their raison d'etre if only for a moment. One gets the feeling that this is the first time that he has had any real input in real life.But Boy is the lost child, eager to please, wandering about in a world where the rules of normality are reversed. Much like how a child would observe adult dysfunction, such as the behaviour of an alcoholic father, for example. In fact, he mentions his father as having been 'replaced' by someone else. All this backstory of the boy is occluded with little hints dropped along the way. Though the characters satirize relationships, business and consumerism through twisted exaggeration to great effect, the sequencing of it lends itself to episodic storytelling. The McGuffin (Will Boy find his way home/ will he get chopped up?) provides only light tension in the story as we have very little knowledge of whats at stake given the bizarre opening. But the play works. In the same way that Jack and the Beanstalk is about small children's fear of the grown ups towering around them, this play is about how children deal with adult dysfunction using the wonders of the mind. This is a real fairy tale with the usual symbol set discarded in favour of original, touching and beautiful motifs.
