Theatre / Helios, written and preformed by Alexander Wright. At Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, March 23. Reviewed by ALANNA MACLEAN.

Helios swept in for two performances fresh from the Adelaide Fringe and proved to be a fascinating interconnected tale that manages to link a boy growing up in rural Yorkshire with the fall of Phaeton from his father the sun god’s chariot.

Hubris, gods, chance and the mundane tangle wonderfully.

It’s scriptwriter Alexander Wright  performing and he settles the audience in deftly for an evening of being more than an audience. There are the occasional invitations to comment and quite a few volunteers end up reading parts.

Phaeton, the Yorkshire boy, has a distant father who flies planes and a mother who becomes more distant after the death of his brother on a city skating rink.  A school-bus bully develops into a lifelong friend but the yearning for his father’s trajectories across the skies, linked to the sun, is what drives and ultimately destroys the prophetically named Phaeton.

There’s not much on the stage except the laptop driving composer Phil Wright’s score, a circle of cards with the script on and a circle of lights surrounding a central larger one. There are occasional dives into astronomy and physics and landscape but it’s Phaeton’s story and how we know it must end (because we have been reminded of the myth) that dominates.

The sense of the Yorkshire countryside, the cityscapes and the car that Phaeton steals and drives to his destruction are all clearly pictured in this spare but gorgeous one-man show.

Two performances only and it wheeled off into time and space. Like the sun in Yorkshire it would be welcome back.

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