Next Wave & Helium: SEEThrough

SEEThrough grasps some truths about the awkward bond of heterosexual men and was created with passion and honesty, but it isn’t ready for the stage.

And with significant development support from Next Wave, Ilbijerri, the Performance Space and Malthouse, it should have been more ready.

Performed and devised by Colin Kinchela and Gavin Walters, it’s about the bond between an Aboriginal man and a white man who grew up in a small town. It looks at sacred male spaces and the intimate rituals of male bonding, but doesn’t move beyond the known and obvious.

There are attention-grabbing moments in the script, but the meaning of a work isn’t just its words. It’s what you say in every other element of a production that lets words live and connect or dribble away unnoticed. With awkward staging that bounced around the wide and empty black space like a tennis match and performances that didn’t feel safe or open, the text wasn’t supported.

But I hope that SEEThrough isn’t shelved and dismissed after this production because not ready isn’t the same as not good.