Despite its serious theme, this has a sitcom structure and depth.
Jamie (Ariyan Sharma) was born in Sri Lanka and was adopted by a white Australian couple. Now, prompted by his girlfriend, he wonders whether he was stolen rather than saved.
The play works on some very clear dichotomies: young versus old; global majority versus white. However, there are unities: everyone’s comfortably middle class, and everyone’s subject to the same mercilessly shallow characterisation.
Writer Chenturan Aran has thrown the cast an extraordinary challenge – which they gleefully accept.
Let me consider two examples.
Noel Hodda plays Jeff, Jamie’s adopted uncle. Jeff’s the sort of jovial middle-aged man who is casually racist and who invariably bores or offends by riding hard his hobby horse that political correctness has gone too far. To find a watchable humanity in this character is quite an achievement.
Kelsey Jeanell plays Zahra, Jamie’s girlfriend. Zahra has a podcast called Decolonialise (?) and studies Critical Race Theory (CRT). She offers a wildly misleading definition of CRT – race is a social construct that deliberately perpetuates oppression. This assertion about the plague of racism is undeniably correct, but the form of CRT that Zahra acts out left me feeling it was, in fact, the disease it purports to diagnose. Zahra constantly tells everyone else that what they say and do is wrong. It’s breathtakingly self-righteous. (Perhaps I’m just pretending it’s parody – but it’s such a tragically impoverished vision of an ethical life that I can’t help myself.) It’s a feat to keep an audience onboard with a character like this and Jeanell is to be commended.
The play hinges on the question Who am I? It’s a question that currently predominates in our theatres. (I’m guessing the question What is to be done? has been made redundant by the superhuman apolitical certainty of characters like Zahra.)
In some ways, there’s an intriguing conservativism about the whole thing. It focuses on an origin story and it’s deeply conscious of the past. But, as Zahra reminds us, one reason we can’t be oblivious to the past is that trauma is handed down through the generations. And dismissals of history are appropriately given short shrift. Jamie’s adoption mother (played with a terrific unsettling ethereal facileness by Susie Lindeman) says You can’t change the past – and it’s a statement which impresses with both its obvious truth and its disturbing glibness. Similarly, her spiritual practice of radical presence (presentness?) is little more than an euphemism for moral irresponsibility.
The script could do with a trim. However, as an invitation to consider how we might build a better world, it’s wonderfully provocative.
Paul Gilchrist
Cut Chilli by Chenturan Aran
at Old Fitzroy until 27 July
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 
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