A bleak portrayal of loneliness and optimism which falls shy of magic.
A young boy in a mock-fighter pilot costume darts about assembling a junk-modelled animatron while asking probing questions about how to fix broken souls and codify pain. While this might sound like a strange mixture of the playful and the metaphysical, this process of affixing and binding objects and concepts to make them anew, lies at the heart of The King of Broken Things.
Written and directed by Michael Taylor-Broderick and performed single-handedly by Cara Roberts, The King of Broken Things is an intimate play about a young boy ostracised by his peers, who retreats partly into his imagination and partly into a workshop full of the broken objects he fixes and repurposes. Through this inventive, stig-of-the-dump world, the boy attempts to make sense of his own emotions, the weight of words, and the symbolic power of objects.
The play runs as one long scene, as Roberts never leaves the stage and the single location of the workshop never changes. Instead, the boy takes the audience on an imaginative journey through ancient mythology, Japanese traditions – the practice of kintsugi recurs as a metaphor throughout – and his absent father’s relentlessly optimistic aphorisms.
Roberts’ performance is exuberant as she leaps and twirls across the stage, presenting a sorrowful yet comic picture of a lonely child. Equal parts bashful and overexcited, Roberts excels in portraying the child’s desperation to please, a desire which is transferred to the audience in lieu of his absent parents. We are shown inventions, asked questions, and even asked for assistance. The audience was not very responsive to Roberts’ pleas, which underscored the child’s abject loneliness. This, combined with a lack of change in set, lighting, or sound, creates frequent silences and moments of utter stillness, in which the child’s isolation on stage was stark.
The theme of broken objects served as a broad, overt metaphor for human hearts and relationships, with persistent message that broken things are fixable and of no less worth. But the loneliness and tone of disappointment that pervaded the play suggested a fundamental disbelief in its own core message. The play seems to admit that perhaps healing and rehabilitation are not possible after all, a bleak thought for a play which advertises itself as a family show.
The set, designed by Bryan Hiles, Darren Peens, and Taylor-Broderick, was a highlight of the production. A fantastic collection of repurposed junk, each object had both a charming and mechanical purpose and symbolic meaning. The use of voiceover, music, and lighting changes was minimal, with most of the play a continuous scene. However, when deployed to full effect – all too rare – the design elements combined to produce poignant, dazzling wonder.
The King of Broken Things suffered from a lack of clear target audience, coherent message, and not enough of the theatrical magic the designers were clearly capable of producing and which both the imaginative, youthful protagonist and audience would have welcomed. With no pacing or tonal shifts, the play at times felt like a 55-minute exposition of densely packed metaphors for philosophical concepts. Though offering intelligent insights into grief, waste, luck, and love, it is perhaps something of a conceptual endurance test for children, and an overly optimistic simplification of ideas for cynical adults.