The Nameless, Faceless Victim In A Parable Of Our Times

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday February 8, 2002

Reviewed by Stephen Dunne

THE LAST SENTENCE, BEFORE EXECUTION, Sydney Art Theatre, February 6

He has no name, and his life is to be terminated for a series of crimes supposedly committed against unnamed persons. He is allowed a last statement before his state-sanctioned murder, but for reasons of national security the statement is to be read by an actor and, furthermore, is subject to censorship.

And in one of the bleaker bits of icing on Bogdan Koca's unsettling dystopic cake, he isn't real at all the criminal/victim is a stuffed dummy with a Nolan Kelly-helmet head, sitting in a chair as his last testament is read out.

This work is a striking exercise in theatrical minimalism, containing no lines spoken live. Instead we have voices on tape a poetic, scene-setting female (Dimity Raftos) and a bureaucratic, rules-obsessed male (Patrick Dickson).

After these respective set-ups (the emotional terrain of this play and the stifling rituals of state death), the actor who is playing the prisoner (Koca) finally speaks, again on tape.

The recorded voices are a formal exercise in the mediation of experience and the distancing effects of technological modes of such experience. This idea is reflected through both the form (darkness, recorded sound) and the content (actor playing condemned man, audible censorship) of this framed fiction.

The title is literal the victim has one sentence to speak before the sentence of death is enacted. Naturally wanting to postpone the end, the victim has written a run-on sentence of Molly Bloom-esque proportions, where death does come as a full stop.

The work has little movement (Koca skulks in the darkness intermittently) yet the static body and chair tableau is given wonderful lighting and projected effects, including oddly distanced natural objects and childhood toys. There are also some strikingly beautiful, moving-light projections, which seem to use a motif of eclipse, appropriate in a piece about the last moments before the eclipse of an individual.

Its effects are striking and profound, an elegiac and quite frightening meditation on control and punishment that is extremely appropriate to these bleak times. One does not have to search far to find current examples of information suppressed for our supposed wellbeing, of shifting dis-courses where opposition to gov-ernment policy is equated with treason, of the state making those it doesn't like literally faceless, where if you're not one of ``us" you're the enemy ``them".

As the condemned writes: ``... the fact that it's me is really irrelevant because it could be anybody else, it could be you, any of you who happened to be active, who have chosen a personal life-path that's attractive for you but not necessarily for the authorities of the day .. ."

Koca and his Sydney Art Theatre have come up with an extraordinary and vital piece that is meditative and relevant. It's a performance work that provides some welcome artistic context to our present and very recent past, and its dark vision and searing imagery linger in the imagination long after the nameless, faceless victim is deleted.

Until February 23