New work is always exciting, and here we have two original, distinct pieces.
Home Country, written by Stephanie Reeves and directed by Glen Hamilton and Romney Hamilton, is a gentle but sophisticated tale about loss and belonging. Dot, played by Reeves, has migrated to Australia from Britain. She feels the distance from the home country and from family members she left physically behind and who seem to have left her emotionally behind. Dot visits Uluru, where she must camp with a stranger, Jane played by Susan Jordan. In the very watchable growth of their friendship, the thematic concerns of loss and belonging are further teased out: the indigenous connection with the land, the evaporation of pride in what it is to be British; the dislocation that results when cultural discourse moves to a certainty that jettisons subtlety; the personal grief of bereavement.
The One, written and directed by Mel Jensen, feels almost like two plays. It begins as a satire on dating via the apps. The female protagonist (Jensen) tells her friend (Emily Shaddick) of the absurd and disgusting behaviour of some of the men she has communicated with or met. An interesting theatrical gimmick is to have the friend play out scenes that the protagonist has already lived; this creates humour but also distance, with focus being on the evaluation of the lived experiences, rather than the actual experiences themselves. (More on this phenomena later.) There are some great one liners delivered by both Jensen and Shaddick, and the male actors (Oliver Harcourt-Ham, Enoch Li and Matthew Van Den Berg) playing the victims of this satire display wonderful comic commitment. There’s a provocative ambiguity to the satire; the female characters are hardly presented as flawless. You’ll struggle to find a play in which both the words “feminist” and “dick” are repeated more often, and said by the same character the logical incoherence is stark. Similarly, there is much talk of “love”, of the I-want-someone-to-love-me or the I-deserve-someone-worthy-of-my-love types; so it all falls into that horrible trap of validation or evaluation (a reminder that romance is the stupidest of the serious things.) One way out of this trap is to focus on the physical mechanics of sex, which is what both the men and women do.
In the last third of the piece we get something much more dark and confronting, with John Michael Narres giving a terrific performance of both vulnerability and frightening volatility. It’s difficult to write about the end without spoilers, but the shift in genre and tone is so very large in the final scenes that I’m not sure the piece doesn’t inadvertently sabotage itself. What I guess is meant to be a warning that dehumanising dating apps and immature, entitled masculinity inevitably culminate in violence ends up potentially implying something rather different, and sinister: that any sensible woman simply should know better than to get herself in such a situation.
But, of course, good theatre often sends you out into the darkness feeling the darkness to be deeper than when you arrived.
Paul Gilchrist
Home Country by Stephanie Reeves
The One by Mel Jensen
at Darlo Drama Studio Theatre as part of the Sydney Fringe
These productions closed on Oct 1
Theatre Red 