Mr Red Light

Bruce Gordon Theatre, IPAC, Wollongong, 4 July 2025

A production by New Zealand’s Nightsong theatre company, Mr Red Light is billed as “wild slapstick”, which seems to me to both under-estimate and over-estimate what I’d call a quite poignant piece of absurdist theatre.

To be fair, there were definitely people in the audience who laughed uproariously – but not very many.

The set-up is that the piece opens in a pie shop called Joker’s, where the young male attendant is quietly reading until an elderly lady comes in, followed by a feisty young woman.

The older woman is not quite a bag lady but she’s certainly unhappy, while it appears the two younger characters have had some incidental contact previously.

The real action starts when a man with a red net mask over his head fleeing a bungled bank robbery bursts in waving a gun.

As unseen police gather outside, he laments his terrible luck and tells the shop’s cowering occupants that they’re now his hostages.

The rest of the 90-odd minutes of the show are his attempts to figure out what to do and reflect on his life, while his three hostages become increasingly uncooperative, not least because their captor seems pretty hopeless, even as he frantically threatens to shoot them.

Things get strange, as our main protagonist muses manically on his misfortunes, with diversions into the recollections of an Italian soldier, a monologue by a human-sized ant, and regular vocal interventions by an equally hopeless unseen police negotiator.

Mr Red Light is the name the captor adopts to convey his bad luck – as in never getting a green light, only red – but the attendant claims that’s his nickname, too. And he seems to know unusually personal things about his hostages’ lives.

The “wild slapstick” is based on several set pieces of physical theatre around fighting for control of the gun, and some silly jokes like using a broom to barricade the door in a completely ineffectual way.

I guess it also comes from how Mr Red Light talks and behaves, which is highly erratic, barely controlled and manic in the extreme.

Personally, I thought the attempts at physical madcap comedy were not very successful, that is, not very funny.

What was far more impressive was the writing, which went much deeper than “wild slapstick” to explore how people forced together in an unnatural and threatening situation start to open up about themslves and toward each other.

This is where Mr Red Light really moves into the Theatre of the Absurd arena of Beckett and Stoppard. Frankly, if the “wild slapstick” was toned down or even removed, we’d be left with a deeply poignant reflection on loneliness, quiet desperation and people’s fundamental need to connect, the exploration of which requires a catalyst like a hostage situation to dig into. “Dog Day Afternoon”, anyone?

In terms of performance, it was the quiet moments in which the attendant and the two women deliver some moving self-reflections that had the biggest impact on me.

Their captor may have had some similar moments but they were hidden by his manic carrying-on (I’m not blaming the actor, I assume he was directed that way, and the director was also the writer and performed in the minor supporting roles, so …).

I think it would have been braver to play this pretty straight and let the humour come out of the desperation and absurdity of the situation, rather than over-literalising with, for example, a giant gun barrel on the stage.

This would also have made better use of a beautifully and cleverly designed set. The lighting and sound design was also exemplary, making the Bruce Gordon Theatre stage seem bigger than it is. The subtle lighting changes of the “Joker’s” sign were much cleverer than the phsyical theatre.

I’m glad I saw it, I just think it could have been better without the “wild slapstick”.