Sorry, Apologies, My Bad… There are myriad ways to express regret when one has stuffed up. These are some of the expressions I pondered as an audience member of Bondi Festival’s show Sincere Apologies. Billed as an interactive experience, I will admit I felt a small degree of trepidation in attending; however, curiosity got the better of me and I found myself perched on a fold out chair on a very chilly July evening in the Seagull Room at Bondi Pavilion. The circular arrangement of chairs around strategically placed microphones created an Alcoholics Anonymous-esque atmosphere, as if we were all there to lay bare our deepest regrets.
After a delayed start, the essence of the show started to make sense. Like children at a birthday party, a brown envelope was passed around from chair to chair. When the music stopped, an audience member read aloud instructions to everyone present. Fifty envelopes were to be distributed among the audience. Unfortunately on the night I attended, the audience was quite small. This meant we doubled (or tripled) up on envelopes. This is a show that definitely works more effectively with a full audience.
Based on an original concept by Roslyn Oades and David Williams, the show’s writers Dan Koop, Jamie Lewis and David Williams, have created what proves to be an incredibly reflective and enriching experience. Within each envelope was an apology ranging from the very famous (does anyone remember Kanye West’s social media apology to Taylor Swift after his MTV awards rant?) through to the very personal (an excerpt from an email to Dan Koop’s mother apologising for his decision not to have children). Within the three envelopes I was assigned was an official apology from Eddie McGuire to Adam Goodes in 2013 when he compared the AFL player to ‘King Kong’; another featured part of the apology of a Japanese son apologising to Chinese people for his father’s war crimes. There were even stage directions to bow (deeply) after I recited the apology.
Themes of racism, environmental degradation and social justice run strongly throughout the apologies curated by Koop, Lewis and Williams for Sincere Apologies. At a time when deadly flash floods and heat waves seem to be fast becoming the norm, re-hearing apologies such as the one offered by the Exxon Valdez captain after the infamous 1989 oil spill was a reminder of how little we seem to have learnt from the past and perhaps, how little apologies mean when they are not made sincerely.
The culmination of the hour-long show proved to be quite moving; indeed, I would say even, disturbing. We are invited, through imaginary apologies, to speculate on the state of the world in fifty or even one hundred years time; a state that is pretty dystopian if we continue to live as negligently as we do now. I truly felt a sense of regret as I returned into the cold night, walking past the now dark Bondi Beach, that those imagined future scenarios may very well come true.
Sincere Apologies is a timely reminder that apologies matter and we must make them sincerely and genuinely, whether to those we love or to whole generations of people whose lives will never be the same. It is only when we are truly sorry that we can change the future.
To book tickets to Sincere Apologies, please visit https://www.bondifestival.com.au/event/sincere-apologies/.
Photographer: Mark Gambino
