Erin Harrington reviews Helios, created by Wright&Grainger, and 0resented in New Zealand by A Mulled Whine Productions, at Little Andromeda, Friday 12 April 2024.
Helios is the latest in a series of award-winning multidisciplinary adaptations of Greek myths from UK-based production company Wright&Grainger. Performed solo by master storyteller Alexander Wright, but with help from the audience, this stunning and emotional show adapts the story of the fall of Phaeton, the mortal son of sun god Helios. Phaeton secured a promise that he could drive his father’s chariot for a day, drawing the sun across the sky east to west, in part to prove his paternity to others. He was unable to control the horses and left carnage in his wake, destroying portions of the earth and gouging the Milky Way across the sky, before meeting his death.
Wright, in his civvies, welcomes us as we enter the space. He begins with an account of Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens’ painting “The Fall of Phaeton”, which dramatizes, perhaps freezes, this moment of catastrophe. Our story, though, is set in a small town in Yorkshire, where Phaeton lives with his mum Rhoda, near a famous hill. He tells his classmates stories about his dad Helios, a commercial pilot whose plane seems to drag the son over the horizon each morning, and who has promised to let him fly the plane – one day.
But dad isn’t there – although his bright gold Ford Mercury still sits in the garage – and neither is his older brother Actis. His music-obsessed mum has mothballed the stereo. We don’t yet know what’s happened. What we do have is Michael Dale, the sort of kid everyone knows – part antagonist, part goof, all agent of chaos. He is voiced by audience members, who are offered portions of script, and becomes an unexpectedly important figure in Phaeton’s life. There are also high school science classes, and parties, and birthdays, and the sorts of small-town teenage escapades that come to be, themselves, legendary. And above everything there’s the sun. Perhaps the universe is indifferent, and the sun’s nurturing warmth just a matter of physics; perhaps we are the ones who make meaning of the world.
Production design is simple, yet evocative, using circularity, and the interplay between dark and light, to create a sense of intense focus. We sit in the round (or as close as, given Little Andromeda’s layout). In the centre, a tall free-standing lamp with a large, round Edison bulb: the storytime-campfire, the sun, the focal point, the axis around which everything rotates. It is flanked by smaller versions of the same; they are like an electric take on votive candles for each of our characters. Stacks of orange and white cue cards, some of which the audience will use to give voice to Michael Dale, are arranged carefully around the edge of the performance space. They are beams of sunlight, or the spokes of a chariot wheel, or demarcations on a clock or stopwatch that’s counting down to something. Responsive soundscapes designed by musician Phil Grainger, some of which allude to Rhoda’s legendary mixtapes, texture the space and enrich the work’s emotional registers, spurring the story on to the end.
In the middle stands (roams, spins) Wright, whose assured delivery tilts between a naturalistic mode and the rhythmic, yearning cadence of slam poetry. He holds us in a space of emotional tension between the domestic and the epic, the quotidian and the cosmic. He captures, with utter specificity, the feeling of being six and in awe of your brother and dad, or fourteen and capacious with adolescence, or eighteen and in love with the possibilities of the world. I love such big-small stories, and I feel I am feeling too much, my heart overflowing. You can see the audience leaning in, holding their breath, going please tell me, don’t tell me – what’s next?
Helios is a deeply affecting, funny, and heartbreaking account of devotion, all laced through with hope and grief. We start with Rubens’ expression of catastrophe, and end with another moment of intensity held in amber – although audiences will need to experience that indelible moment of story for themselves.
Helios is touring a variety of centres in New Zealand until Sunday 28 April – see here for dates.
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