Over the course of his burgeoning career, Finegan Krukemeyer, still only 33, has been commissioned and written 70 works, across 5 continents and multiple languages. With many of those works designed to be watched and enjoyed by children. His latest production (this time for adults), the wonderfully and loquaciously titled Those Who Fall in Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor, last week celebrated it’s world premiere at Perth’s Blue Room Theatre.
Those Who Fall In Love… is comprised of four stories and twelve characters, charming vignettes cherry-picked from across time and the globe. The audience are transported from a watchmakers shop front in Paris, to a submerged cold war submarine off the coast of the US, to Appalachian forests, and back to inner city Australia. The one thing linking all these different stories, characters and places together? Love! Or perhaps more accurately the act of falling in love, in some cases at first sight.
With the aid of some ingenious set designing, the audience flit and shift quickly and easily between these four stories throughout the play’s 75 minutes, learning more about these different characters and their relationships and loves. Each of the characters are brought wonderfully to life by the three actors, Ben Mortley, Renee Newman-Storen and Jo Morris. All three of them did a remarkable job in not only making these characters seem real but also transitioning so quickly and faultlessly between characters and accents.
In the wrong hands a production with a premise like Those Who Fall In Love… could have the potential to be terribly mawkish and sentimental, to fall into the trap of being a simple rom-com. Yet whilst it is at times very funny (the bad date scene in particular), Krukemeyer’s script is also wonderfully poetic and philosophical, and as you would expect from someone who writes for children so often it is also whimsical and full of imagination.
Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor is a fantastic production and one well worth buying tickets to before it sells out. It’s the perfect combination of a beautifully poetic script and faultless acting. A bittersweet end to The Blue Room’s year.
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Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon the Ocean Floor is in performances at the Blue Room Theatre until the 29th of November. Tickets and details can be found here: http://blueroom.org.au/events/those-who-fall-in-love-like-anchors-droppe…
The reviewer attended the performance on 14th November 2014.
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