Tag Archives: Seymour Centre

A Case for the Existence of God

2 May

This is a magnificent piece of theatre.

However, I suspect the title might put off an Australian audience.

Australians like to believe we’re less literal than our American cousins. Case in point: we often joke that they don’t get irony. But, ironically, when it comes to religious language, we’re the ones reluctant to use it in any way other than literally. In many other cultures, writers comfortably evoke God without fear that it automatically commits them to the theological tenets of some religion. Religious language is employed to suggest or symbolise the grand, the awe inspiring, the universal. Sometimes, it can feel like the only discourse big enough for these things. An honorary American, Albert Einstein, was famous for using religious language in this way. His oft quoted comment, expressing his objection to quantum theory, that God does not play dice, was simply an assertion that mere chance could not be fundamental to the fabric of the universe. He was saying nothing that we unsophisticated Australians would interpret as religious.

The title of Samuel D. Hunter’s play uses religious language in a similarly evocative way. In this superbly crafted two hander, no one says a word about religion. Not a word. The two male characters discuss money, work and most of all, their children. They build an unlikely friendship. The title simply implies hope, that despite problems, things might work out OK. (I know I’m getting awfully close to spoiler territory here, but the final scene, which is a theatrical surprise and an utter delight, reminds me of the conclusion of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, only more secular. Wilder himself borrowed the idea from Dante, that towering poet who spoke of the human heart via religious language – because only it had the grandeur to do justice to his topic.)

Director Craig Baldwin’s production is wisely pared back so that the focus is on the two splendid performances by Elijah Williams and Anthony Gooley.

Keith is an educated musicologist, working as a mortgage broker. As a single gay man, his dream of adoption is proving difficult, so he fosters a new born in the hope that the relationship might be allowed to become more permanent. Surviving a divorce, working class Ryan seeks a mortgage to help give his baby daughter a real home. Out of a similar sadness, the friendship between the men grows.

Williams’ Keith is brilliant: prickly, vulnerable, articulate and lightning fast. Gooley’s Ryan is marvellous: slow, awkward and inarticulate. Both characters are beautifully generous-hearted. It was pure pleasure to spend ninety minutes in their company.  

A case for the existence of God? Amongst other things, it’s their friendship that suggests the possibility. (See above. God is love is not marketing hyperbole; it will reward deep reflection in a way that Coke is It cannot.)

In a play jam-packed with scorchingly truthful moments, one of my favourites is when the two men, sharing a bottle of scotch, begin to discuss the history of Western music (as you do.) Keith mentions the invention of polyphony, a term which is, of course, meaningless to Ryan. And then the penny drops: harmony! Ryan can’t believe there was a time before harmony. The symbolism is not overplayed, the scene does what drama excels at: concrete moments played so honestly they intimate something universal.

Paul Gilchrist

A Case for the Existence of God by Samuel D. Hunter

At Seymour Centre until 4 May

www.seymourcentre.com/event/a-case-for-the-existence-of-god/

Image by Phil Erbacher

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Pride in Prejudice: the Wharf Revue

13 Nov

Satire has street cred. It sticks it to the Man.

Written by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott, and performed by Mandy Bishop, David Whitney, Andrew Warboys, Biggins and Forsythe, what gives this production countless giggles is its clever caricatures of well-known people. Standouts are mischievous portraits of Anthony Albanese, Jacqui Lambie, Caroline Kennedy, Joe Biden and Peter Dutton.  

It’s a satire aimed at the famous and the supposedly powerful (though I don’t believe any of the above mentioned people were in the audience on opening night. It must be admitted, however, I do avoid all chit chat in the foyer.)

Satire always faces one huge dilemma: directly address your audience, make their lives your target, and you offend them. And, alas, the offended stop listening, and what’s worse, they don’t tell their offendable friends to buy tickets. So satire, despite good intentions, is often reduced to little more than the shadows in Plato’s cave; something that distracts us from reality, or secures us in our illusions.

One such illusion is that people who act on a political level are flawed. But isn’t that the Truth? Indubitably, but a lot of things are true that no one delights in repeating. This particular truism has the advantage that it justifies political passivity: I care, but engagement entails compromise at best, or corruption at worse, so I’ll merely watch. And, if this is my choice, then being informed must be valorised, and the consumption of media products must be conflated with genuine political engagement.  

Two skits seem to me to particularly suggest this disdain for authentic engagement. One is a series of video projections of Lidia Thorpe. I don’t admire Thorpe’s politics, and the sight of her in a “No” t-shirt filled me, once again, with dismay – but an attack on her that consisted of merely a rhyming ditty left me with a previously unexperienced empathy for the woman. Similarly, a skit in which three French people are lampooned for rioting for seemingly trivial political objectives left me reflecting that at least they weren’t sitting comfortably on their couches watching the ABC.

Another way satire gains street cred is by its flirtation with bad taste. This show has its share of such naughtiness: an animation of the Titanic mini-sub accident; an operatic assassination of Putin; and a passing reference to the current horrors in Gaza with the suggestion the problems are perennial. I’m not certain if this type of naughtiness is a challenge to conventions or a suspension of empathy.  

Subject matter aside, there are also challenges of a creative nature in a work like this. Video projection, though facilitating costume changes, might leave an audience wondering why they left home (especially an audience that it seems to be assumed watches a whole lot of TV.) Sung ditties, which made up a fair percentage of the evening, can be an inefficient and ineffectual way of making a satirical point; their critique being more rhyme than reason. And, if you perform a well loved song with altered, satirical lyrics, the prime victim is often the song.

And finally, a structural point: satire can be sharp like a scalpel, or detailed like the T & C’s for online banking, and anywhere in between risks losing either the bite or the complexity. The concluding skit, a terrific appropriation of South Pacific that explores Australian, American and Chinese diplomatic relations, gets the mix hilariously right.

Paul Gilchrist

The Wharf Revue: Pride in Prejudice by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott

At Seymour Centre until Dec 17

www.seymourcentre.com

Image by Vishal Pandey

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Venus and Adonis

6 Oct

Written and directed by Damien Ryan, this is big, bold, and delightfully ambitious. It’s also very entertaining (but more on that later.)

It is not a dramatization of Shakespeare’s poem but rather follows a growing tradition of fictionalising aspects of the poet’s life.

It’s not a surprising tradition; Shakespeare’s influence on the language and theatre is overarching (and I will admit somewhere in the first act, for just a moment, I understood why some people call for the total erasure of everything to do with the Bard so we could all just start again.)

Several Elizabethan stories are layered together here: the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet; the possibility that poet Aemilia Lanier was the Dark Lady of the sonnets; the performance by Shakespeare’s company of Venus and Adonis before the monarch herself (which I guess is completely fictional??)

The play is a musing on love, and love may be a many splendored thing, but it’s certainly a thing of enormous semantic diversity. Sparked by the poem Venus and Adonis we are offered love as desire, but the play also explores sexual love beyond physicality, and friendship and familial love. In one provoking moment, lust is juxtaposed with grief, the little death lying side by side with its stronger sibling.

Though moving and provocative, the production forefronts entertainment. There’s excellent physical humour aplenty, theatre jokes abound, and there are constant allusions to Shakespeare’s work (which might be either diverting or distracting, depending on whether you buy into the theory Shakespeare was less a creator of enormous vitality and more of a sponge absorbing nutrients from the ocean of language in which he swam.)

Performances are magical. Anthony Gooley as Will is both poignant in his pain and funny in his frustrations, a very human take on a man we have diminished by raising to an icon. Aemilia Lanier is Will’s lover and one of the earliest published female poets, and possibly the first explicitly feminist one. Adele Querol is glorious in the role: fire and strength; at one moment a lightning bolt falling mercilessly on the earthly patriarchy, and at the next, that even more miraculous phenomena, a bolt shot back heavenwards, lighting the way to a brighter future. Jerome Meyer as Nathaniel Field, who plays Adonis to Amelia’s Venus, is brilliantly comic as he navigates some truly teasing tensions: in Shakespeare’s company he plays the women, but before the Queen he is asked to play a man, a gorgeous man, who as the target of Venus’ unrelenting desire might feel somewhat reduced to passivity…. like that projected on women by the male gaze. Belinda Giblin as Queen Elizabeth is magnificent, perfectly regal and (as the script demands) unexpectedly sage. Perhaps the character operates as a coda. Certainly she is a deus ex machina, arriving from the beyond and offering …. But perhaps all fictional histories function as such, offering a solution, of a certain type, to our problems: assuring us they are eternal.

Paul Gilchrist

Venus and Adonis by Damien Ryan

at Seymour Centre until 21st October

www.seymourcentre.com/event/venus-and-adonis/

Image by Kate Williams

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The Turn of the Screw

29 Jul

Ghost stories are not about ghosts; they’re about fear. They ask what makes us frightened and what type of safety we crave. They also ask when is fear natural and beneficial, and when is it irrational and dangerous.

Richard Hilliar’s adaptation of Henry James’ classic novella is funny, fascinating, frightening, and entirely engaging.

Ostensibly, it’s a ghost story and, as director, Hilliar works multiple theatrical elements to create a deeply creepy atmosphere. Set, sound, lighting, costume and performance all combine together brilliantly to establish this mood. (Set designer Hamish Eliot deserves special mention: the creation of the late 19th century house and its surrounds is extraordinarily rich.)

Adaptation is a tricky business. The audience will always slot into two distinct categories: those familiar with the original text and those who are not. Though there have been dramatizations before, I would think James’ novella stubbornly resists the form, being so dependent on the subjective psychological experience of the protagonist. The original novella is in first person and the protagonist is the archetypal unreliable narrator. (Here she is played by Lucy Lock with affecting horrified bewilderment.) The achievement of the original text relies on silences, both deliberate and contextually determined. James’ narrator doesn’t tell us certain things, either out of self-interest or from lack of self-knowledge. And James himself, working at the end of the Victorian era, was presumably reluctant to spell out the more confronting possibilities latent in his tale. Hilliar’s version is much more explicit.

It could be argued that James’ novella is the culmination of the gothic, a tale in which the external supernatural and the internal psychological collapse into one. After The Turn of the Screw, modern horror developed because the genre had nowhere else to go.

But Hilliar creates a play and a production that engages in a fascinating conversation with the original, as well as being a deeply intriguing work in its own right.

Paul Gilchrist

The Turn of the Screw by Richard Hilliar (after Henry James)

presented by Tooth and Sinew and Seymour Centre

at Seymour Centre until Aug 12

www.seymourcentre.com/event/the-turn-of-the-screw/

Image by Phil Erbacher

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Consent

10 Jun

This is a marvellous play presented by an extraordinary team.

As the title suggests, it’s based on crimes of sexuality, both what is illegal and what is too little or too large for legislation. (The law is a net we drag through the ocean of reality; the small slips through the mesh, the large tears it asunder.)

Nina Raine’s Consent is built on serious conflict. Not the type of conflict where two characters fight for the same thing, whatever that random thing is: the farm, the man, or dominance. No, it’s conflict born of those unfathomable fissures in the human condition. Sometimes, when we’re particularly brave or clear-eyed, we acknowledge that our deepest held values might be at odds with each other; that it might not all fit together. (It’s sort of the Gödel’s Theorem of values.) It’s what Hegel expressed in the line “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” In its reference to the great Greek tragedies, Consent makes explicit this type of tension.

But this is a contemporary play set in modern London. It contrasts the need for a legal system with the unavoidable limitations of a legal system. And, in asking which way justice, the play presents the battle between empathy and logic.

It interrogates empathy’s disturbing whole-heartedness. Sure, we must listen to the victim, but as is said in the play (I paraphrase) If you’re hurt enough, you become stupid.

Also explored is the troubling relationship between the valorisation of empathy and the desire to make others suffer the same pain we have felt. Empathy and revenge are perhaps closer cousins than one might imagine.

But rationality won’t necessarily save us either. The conflict between the letter of the law and its spirit is age-old, and legal logic can be especially pedantic. As one character points out, if you were to come across that sort of pedantry outside a courtroom, you’d naturally assume the speaker was disingenuous.   

The play also asks us to consider the difference between I’m sorry and I apologise, and to compare repentance with forgiveness. This isn’t semantics, it’s a genuine gift for the soul.

The play’s construction emphasises the inevitability of conflicting perspectives, with the stage sometimes split into two parallel and contrasting scenes. Likewise, the characterisation asserts complexity. Characters we initially despise will shine with unexpected goodness, and vice versa.

And under Craig Baldwin’s direction, the absolutely terrific ensemble present beautifully rich performances. Anna Samson’s Kitty is magnificent, offering both real heart and a glimpse into its darkest chambers. Nic English, playing her husband Edward, gives a superb portrait of cold intellectual arrogance and the emotional confusion it hides. Jeremy Waters’ Jake is wonderfully narcissistic, until he is gloriously, and so truthfully, not. Jennifer Rani, playing his wife Rachel, portrays magnificently that type of justified resentment that arrests moral growth. Anna Skellern’s Zara positively floats with exuberance until it’s punctured by betrayal. Sam O’Sullivan’s Tim is an eminently watchable combination of uncertainty and strength, a performance that captures the physicality of doubt and the verbal virtuosity of conviction. Jessica Bell as Gayle is a splendid working class counterpoint to all these privileged professionals, But Gayle is also a victim of rape, and Bell encapsulates perfectly both her incandescent rage and aching vulnerability.

Life is hard. Life is complex. Maybe we can’t make it all fit together. But we’re in it together. Consent is a deeply humane play, brilliantly presented.

Paul Gilchrist

Consent by Nina Raine

At Seymour Centre until 24 June

presented by Outhouse Theater Co

seymourcentre.com

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On a Clear Day You Can See Forever

23 Mar

Reincarnation is an alluring belief, and may even be true.

The depth of our emotions, especially for others, can lead us to feel that one life is not enough. Perhaps, somehow, there will be other lives in which our love can continue.

The problem – for those of us with a modern sensibility – is proof.

But none is needed. A belief (or faith or hope) in reincarnation requires no verification; its value is expressive. One might as well ask for proof that my favourite colour is blue.

In Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane’s musical, Dr Mark Bruckner hypnotises Daisy Gamble, in an attempt to understand her apparent Extra Sensory Perception. Exploring her memories, he discovers Melinda Wells, an English woman who passed over a century ago.

Perhaps my philosophical pretensions make the subject matter sound heavy, or just plain weird, but it’s not – it’s light, breezy, and beautiful; a glorious expression of our dearest desires.

The play has a history of revisions, and Jay James-Moody (who also directs and performs) has adapted and updated the original story. In this version, following a 2011 Broadway revision, Daisy is a gay man, David, and as Mark falls for Melinda, he must ask what are his feelings for the man in whom she resides. It’s all about…. fluidity.

James-Moody’s production is visually delightful, musically superb, and very funny. As David, James-Moody is both movingly vulnerable and deliciously comic. His timing is spot on. Melinda is played by Madeleine Jones with a mesmerizing pizazz. Blake Bowden’s Mark wonderfully captures both the psychologist’s obsessive drive for knowledge and the man’s desperate need for love.

The vocal performances are terrific, with highlights including “When we are 65” sung by James Haxby and James-Moody, “Don’t Tamper With My Sister” sung by Jones, “Come Back to Me” sung by Bowden, and the title song, performed by James-Moody, Jones and the company. Natalya Aynsley’s orchestra is brilliant. Choreography by Leslie Bell is cheeky and playful, perfectly suiting the gorgeously non-conventional relationships portrayed, and the cast perform it with aplomb.

On A Clear Day You Can See Forever is an exuberant reminder to look beyond the mundane and be open to the surprise of joy.

Paul Gilchrist

On a Clear Day You Can See Forever by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, revised and adapted by Jay James-Moody

presented by Squabbalogic and Seymour Centre

until 15 April

seymourcentre.com

Image by David Hooley

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CAMP

22 Feb

I love a good piece of history. I love stories that model change.

I’ve noticed in this year’s Pride Festival an interest in history; an awareness that, while change is still required, much has been achieved.

Because it has duration, drama is a perfect artform to explore change. When the house lights finally come up at the end of the performance, where the characters are – and where you are – is usually a long way from where you all began.

I suspect another reason that artists exploring the queer experience are currently interested in history is that the generation who began the public fight for rights are, if they’re still with us …of a certain age. Stonewall was in 1969. The first Sydney Mardi Gras in 1978. It’s a good time to honour and celebrate their achievements.

(I also suspect an older generation of activists might tire of an attitude sometimes expressed by those newer to the fight, an attitude of ‘Why isn’t the world the way I want it to be? What have you people been doing?’ It’s an attitude whose close cousin is the complaining ‘Karen’, she who’s always demanding to see the manager, whose sense of entitlement blandly assumes the automatic existence of structures that have to be both built and maintained.)

Elias Jamieson Brown’s CAMP presents the exploits of the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, a group of activists who in 1971 were the first in Australia to hold a public gathering of gay women and men.

The play presents their struggles to build awareness and achieve justice, and the personal challenges they faced. Particularly precious is the focus on the lesbian experience (maybe I should get out more, but it’s still a representation that gladdens my soul the rare times I see it). I’m not sure if the characters are fictional or if they’re based on specific historical individuals, but they’re fully and richly human, a glorious mix of failings and flaws, passion and determination. Petty jealousies vie with noble dreams (the surest test of human reality) and for these beautiful portraits of living souls we have to thank Jamieson Brown’s script, Kate Gaul’s direction and the gifted cast.

Our focus is on Krissy (Jane Phegan), Jo (Tamara Natt) and Tracy (Lou McInnes) as they navigate the tension between private needs and group goals. (It’s great to see these tensions represented on stage. It’s the romanticisation of political engagement that so often robs us of agency; a portrait of activism as utterly exciting only enervates us when we find it merely necessary.)

In wonderfully realised transitions and tableaux, Gaul powerfully presents a world of action, where the co-existence of the political and the personal is made manifest.  

Juxtaposed with scenes set in the 1970’s, Jamieson Brown shows us the women as they are now, played respectively by Anni Finsterer,  Genevieve Mooy and Sandie Eldridge. It’s over forty years later, and much has been gained, and much has …changed. It’s an intriguing device, an invitation to consider time, that great gift, the one which always goes, whether we use it or not.

How should we use it?

This is big, bold, inspiring theatre, with a very human heart.

Paul Gilchrist

CAMP by Elias Jamieson Brown

presented by Siren Theatre Co and Seymour Centre in association with Sydney WorldPride

at Seymour Centre until 4 March

www.seymourcentre.com/event/worldpride-2023-camp/

Image by Alex Vaugh

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Gay Sydney: A Memoir

20 Feb

We often make statements that follow this formula: ‘So-and-So made History by doing Such-and-Such’. (It’s indicative of the naïve inadequacy of such a formula that So-and-So is often a cricketer and the Such-and-Such is the scoring of a century.)

But history is made in the telling; or more precisely, it is the telling. And someone needs to do it. Someone needs to tell us what happened and how it all strings together. In regard to gay experience in this city, William Yang is in the perfect position to make history: he was there, and he took beautiful pictures.

In Gay Sydney: A Memoir, with his stunning photographs and his gentle wise voice, Yang creates a story that is both deeply moving and deeply inspiring. It doesn’t feel like a performance, but rather a generous sharing.

With personal anecdote and eye witness authority, Yang speaks of events from 1969, when he first came to Sydney, to the present day: the birth of Mardi Gras, the flowering of the Darlinghurst “gay ghetto”, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, the success of the marriage equality movement…

Such histories are invaluable because they give voice to queer stories. But histories also matter because intrinsic to them is the concept of change. A trend we currently suffer is the privileging of ways of seeing the world that unconsciously deny change. These ways of seeing, theories if you like, recognise injustice but offer little insight into the processes by which it might be overcome. (An example of a theory unconsciously wedded to the status quo might be one that asserts an individual’s life experience, and their understanding of that experience, is determined solely by demographic factors: race, sexuality, age….) One cure to the childlike infatuation with this sort of disheartening theory is a good dose of actual history – which Yang provides. (Though he wastes no time on philosophical nonsense, as I do.)

Accompanied by evocative music created and performed by Timothy Fairless, Yang’s memoir is simple, powerful, and most of all, uplifting –  a wonderful celebration of a way forward.

Paul Gilchrist

Gay Sydney: A Memoir by William Yang

at Seymour Centre until Feb 23

presented by Seymour Centre in association with World Pride

www.seymourcentre.com/event/worldpride-2023-gay-sydney-a-memoir/

Image by William Yang

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Art + Information

24 Nov

We live in an age of specialist knowledge. The woman sitting across from you in the bus might be a world expert on continental drift. The man ahead of you in the supermarket queue may know more about the venom of the Eastern brown snake than has ever any living soul. The person sitting dully in the park at lunch might not be dreaming of the holidays that will eventually free them from the tyranny of deadlines; they might be musing on the evolution of grass.

The more we know, the more difficult it is to share; especially with those who have no grounding in our speciality. And the sharing is crucial, because knowledge is a communal thing. Much of its value comes from its ability to enrich the community, and much of its pursuit is only possible through the support of that community.

So how can the rest of us come to appreciate what the specialist does?

This set of performance lectures, directed by Kate Gaul, is a magnificent sharing of deep knowledge.

A person (not an actor!) holds the stage and, with evocative light and projection (Morgan Moroney) and sound (Zac Saric), we’re invited into a particular corner of reality.

Beth Yahp, creative writing lecturer at U Syd, tells us of Small Pleasures. In limpid poetic language, she muses on several simple objects – a Christmas beetle, a remnant of cloth, a physio’s “hammer” – reminding us that when we focus solely on the extraordinary we blind ourselves to the value of the everyday. In giving all our attention to the mining disaster, we ignore the riches that come from the routine mining itself.

Tara Murphy, professor of astrophysicist at U Syd, shares a story of Exploding Stars. Exquisitely balanced between the minutiae of working in a lab and the gargantuan event of the collision of two neutron stars, Murphy’s tale is one of truth and awe. She also considers the evolution of the great scientific project; long a practice based on sharing, science has now become such that the ‘hive mind’ is crucial, as no individual alone can make sense of the universe. (Perhaps as it should be, for if there’s any insight the lay person like myself can offer, it’s that the universe is bigger than me.)

Mitchell Gibbs tells us about The Humble Oyster. A PhD in Marine Biology/Biochemistry and a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Geosciences at U Syd, Mitchell is also a Dunghutti man. With moving personal anecdotes, he tells of researching and writing his thesis, his deep dive into speciality, while maintaining close connection with family. He quotes his father, who asserted that if you really understand something, you should be able to explain it to anyone. He speaks with inspiring optimism of his desire to bring indigenous insights into Western academia, for the benefit of all and our fragile environment.

This is not conventional theatre; it’s part of an exciting movement to challenge what we might expect to see on stage. It does, however, share with drama, and fiction in general, one crucial aspect: the focus on the particular, the assumption that this certain corner of reality repays close inspection.

It’s an entertaining night, and a tantalising one, because corners have a way of dissolving, unfolding, and offering extraordinary vistas.

Paul Gilchrist

Art + Information

Seymour Centre until Nov 26

www.seymourcentre.com/event/art-information-2022/

Image by Jacquie Manning

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Albion

7 Aug

Mike Bartlett’s Albion is a piece of theatre on a grand scale: nearly three hours of stage time and a plethora of well-drawn characters.

This level of ambition is thrilling.

No prize for guessing where a play called Albion is set. It’s a foreign play; a state-of-the-nation play where the nation portrayed is not ours. This is Britain post-Brexit: a wealthy woman buys a rural property with the intention of redeveloping it’s once famous garden. (In the first draft, were they raising a bulldog?) The villagers (yes, that’s what they’re called) are disappointed that the new owner won’t fulfil her customary role; she won’t host their festivals in her garden. The woman’s family are divided about the London they’ve left behind: has it become a temple of mammon, or is it a life-giving alternative to a country grave?

And it’s all a very conscious homage to Chekhov. Yes, it’s a garden, not a cherry orchard – but there is a Firs, the old servant lost amongst the flux ( This Firs is called Matthew, and is played with moving poignancy by Mark Langham.) And, like The Seagull, those on the rural estate are visited by a famous writer who causes mayhem among those with artistic ambitions but less success.

State-of-the-nation plays are an odd genre; though grounded in realism, they reach to the symbolic. And what odd things symbols are: invested with meaning by who, for who, for how long? Once, I asked a young person what a lion might symbolise – and was told paddle pops.

So, what about the performances? Excellent. Director Lucy Clements gives us inspiring depth and breadth. Joanna Briant as Audrey, the matriarch, is a masterclass in glib superiority; a thought-provoking posing of the tragic question at the core of materialist societies: must success murder empathy? The visiting writer ….. and there are a lot of writers in these sort of plays: three in this one, out of a cast of eleven; a rather inflated sample, considering writers usually fill the same percentile of the population as serial killers ….. the visiting writer is played by Deborah Jones with a gorgeously warm charisma, providing her with ample space to growl when the going gets tough. Rhiaan Marquez as Zara, Audrey’s daughter, beautifully balances youthful exuberance with youthful naivete.  Jane Angharad’s Anna grieves for her lover, Audrey’s son, with powerful truthfulness. (The dead son, too, becomes a sort of symbol: a lost England to dispute over, under a very English heaven.) James Smithers as Gabriel offers a superb character arc, like a piece of lost space junk that ultimately burns with a searing white heat when it drifts into the orbit of a more imposing body. Charles Mayer as Paul, Audrey’s husband, gives a performance of gentle intelligence. Paul maintains his safe orbit, as all things do, by allowing change to be dictated by that more imposing body.

Due to popular demand, this season has been extended. (Gardens have a way of growing.)

Paul Gilchrist

Albion by Mike Bartlett

Seymour Centre until Aug 20 https://www.seymourcentre.com/

Image by Clare Hawley

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