NOTE: This review will contain spoilers
Blindsides are a social art.
As humans, we like to engineer order. We like things lined up and according to plan. We love a surprise, yes, but only if it fits within the order we’re comfortable with. We sit down, have a drink, and expect to watch 50 minutes of local madman Ralph Hilaga doing solo improv. Then he hits us with everything the show isn’t.
Solovivor presents itself as an homage to 24 years worth of Survivor, in which Hilaga plays every character from the three remaining contestants to the man himself, Jeff Probst. After a solid introduction to all the characters, the game of Survivor commences, including challenges, social dynamics and blatant favouritism.
For a while, it’s the usual bonkers chaos that we’ve come to expect from both Survivor and Hilaga; absurd characters are played wonderfully, each with their own distinct styles, the smell of raw squid and durian fills the room as the eating challenges ramp up. Hilaga is a known master of torture and he delights in not only extending that to the audience, but to himself.
At first, you’d be forgiven for thinking the mess is peaking too quickly. How much further can we really go than digging blended chicken feet out of a raw egg smoothie? It feels like there’s little place left on the trajectory.
That’s when the blindside hits.
The show is a complete lie, as it turns out. This entire time, we’ve thought that we’d be heading to a final tribal council. That was the promise. We’ve been led down this path of absurd certainty, a road of chaos confined to the rails of order that we all accepted at the start of the show. And suddenly, the show changes. The stage morphs. Hilaga‘s personality shifts. And the show becomes a biting commentary on how dreams can fail and how promises get broken. This is the point of the show.
There is no disappointment more profound than when you prepare for something that you want so badly, and scream your attempt into the void, hoping it’ll answer back, and it doesn’t. The promise is broken, even though, when you think about it, nobody actually made that promise to you. We were never promised a tribal council with all the characters Hilaga had invented. We expected it, sure, but it wasn’t guaranteed. Likewise, nobody promised Hilaga a slot on the 2016 season of Survivor New Zealand. But it’s disappointing to not get it nonetheless.
There’s a feeling of lament in the air, of dreams that probably won’t ever be fulfilled. Broken promises that were never made, unfulfilled expectations that were never set. It’s hard to believe that all the character work was for nothing, that all of Hilaga‘s practice for appearing on Survivor was for nothing.
And then you look around. The audience is smiling, laughing and fawning over the man.
This show isn’t meant for a browser through the Fringe Festival catalogue, nor is it meant for the Survivor fan who wants to see a parodied version of it on-stage. It’s not even for the dozens of audience members who’ve come to watch Hilaga retch into a bucket at the taste of milky chicken hearts. This one’s for Ralph.
All that practice, all that character work, this is what it was for. While Ralph didn’t make it onto Survivor, he’s made it here, surrounded by his closest supporters and dearest friends. Like the show itself, he expected one thing, got blindsided, only to discover something better.
Solovivor is an intensely personal journey into the core of disappointment and subversion of expectations. It’s about making the most of a blindside and turning it into something new, something better. This is the most Ralph Hilaga show to ever Ralph Hilaga.
And he’s so much more than a DJ with gout.
Disclosure: As a somewhat active member of the Wellington performing arts community, I may be quite familiar with a number of the performers in this show.Having said that, I am not a liar, and there is zero bias in my reviews, shut up.
Also, tickets were provided to me for free by the production. Literally changes nothing, though.