Goodbye, Lindita is confronting art, both visual and visionary in its depiction of grief
Presented by: Adelaide Festival
Reviewed: 1 March 2024
Grief is a well-mined emotion in theatre, too often with one character shouting at another until finally they stop and fall in defeat, wrapping their arms around one another and sobbing, the audience sobbing, too. At the opening of Goodbye, Lindita, the audience was too bowled over to have any sort of appropriate, communal response. They didn’t know what to make of the play immediately, but I’m betting they thought about it all the way home, and while trying to get to sleep, and while drinking their morning coffee. Just as grief persists, so does good representation of it.
Grief may sound like many things – the shouts and the sobs – but it feels so personal as to be nonverbal; what words can possibly express the death of a loved one? And that’s where this play finds its strength. One could call Albanian-born, Athens-based up-and-coming director Mario Banushi the scriptwriter as well, but there are no words in Goodbye, Lindita, so rather he ‘conceived’ it, demanding we sit with the silence, the stillness and the mundanity of grief, that we sit with the bodily pain of those left behind, and with their pleas for spiritual guidance, their grasps at ritual. It’s discomfiting. It’s immaterial.
Emmanouel Rovithis’ complex, spectral musical composition and Tasos Palaioroutas’ warm, domestic lighting bleeding in yellow from a hallway or from the streetlights through the window, add enormously to the mood of this conceptual play, which is emotionally profound but never overwhelming. Perhaps reaching toward full nudity from nearly every actor on stage to express a primal yield might be visually overwhelming, and maybe that accounts for the audience’s near-stunned reaction at the curtain’s close, but we can forgive a director in his mid-twenties for trying so hard. I’d rather back him than balk because I can’t imagine what he’ll be doing in twenty or thirty years, when he’s at the height of his talent. I hope I’m witness to it.
Goodbye, Lindita is the second part of a trilogy. The first part, RAGADA – his theatre directorial debut – was about birth and, as the director says, ‘coming’, while this one focuses on death and leaving. The third production will be about absence. Clearly Banushi is an all-out director in both vision and motif.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson
Photo credit: Russell Millard
Venue: Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
Season: Sun 03 Mar at 4:00pm
Duration: 1 hour 10 minutes, no interval
Tickets: $40 – $99
Bookings: https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/events/goodbye-lindita/
