This is a playful puzzle of a piece.
Written by Charlie Falkner, it works a few standard tropes: begin with a death that draws together some unlikely characters, then add some sort of natural phenomena (flood, avalanche, snowstorm, or the like) that prevents these characters escaping each other. Here it’s Renata and Flicks’ mother who has died, and so the dissimilar sisters meet for the very first time. The imprisoning setting is Darwin, and more particularity the daggy Palms Motel, where the guests are trapped by marauding crocodiles.
Director Samantha Young elicits suitably wacky performances from the terrific comic cast. Ainslie McGlynn is wonderful as Renata, the self-obsessed American self-help author (self-help reductio ad absurdum.) Mathew Lee as John, her goofy devotee, delivers a beautiful study of naivete, awkwardness and fixation. Danny Ball as Declan, Renata’s partner, is a giggle-inducing self-important hypocrite. Running the motel is Flick, in Zoe Jensen’s delightful portrait of the parochial local. Aiding her is Leilani Lau’s Bobbi, a kindly kook who provides plenty of laughs with Lau’s perfect delivery of Falkner’s malapropisms.
I call the piece a puzzle because I had difficulty seeing the connection between the different strands. (Of course, being a writer of theatre criticism, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.) I’m not sure why Declan was Irish (though I am familiar with the stereotype informing the decision to make the other two interlopers American.) I also didn’t understand the meaning of the motif that Declan could smell blood (that is, to the degree usually attributed to sharks, rather than their distant cousins, the Irish.) Similarly, what actually had happened to the sisters’ mother began as a mystery and, for me, remained one to the end. I’m not sure why Bobbi kept a wild rat in a cage (though it might’ve been a substitute for her missing husband, who was a despicable love rat.) I don’t know why Flick suffered from something akin to narcolepsy.
Perhaps the last of these puzzles hints at the solution to the rest: faced with climate catastrophe (the sort that drives crocodiles out of their natural habitats and to the streets) these quirky characters are all asleep – and so the whole thing functions as a crazy, oddball satire on myopia.
Paul Gilchrist
Darwin’s Reptilia by Charlie Falkner
at Downstairs Belvoir (as part of 25A) until 26 November
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 
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