Tag Archives: Tiny Dog Productions

Monster

12 Mar

Why are there so many violent children?

What do we do about them?

And how do we stop the problem arising in the first place?

Our culture assumes there must be simple answers to questions such as these. We’re certain of the destination, so there must be a path. Perhaps this attitude is a product of our hubris, or a result of the current fashion for self-righteousness. Or maybe it’s a consequence of something closer to universal, the spell of language: if you can formulate a question, then there must be an answer.

In Duncan Macmillan’s beautifully wise play there are no simple answers.

Fourteen year old Darryl is obsessed with violence. School staff member Tom doesn’t know how to help. And Rita, Darryl’s only remaining family member, desperately wants to pretend he’s just a normal teenager.

There’s a brilliant piece of dialogue between Tom and his partner, Jodi. (I’m probably paraphrasing, but this is its core)

Jodi: Who’s to blame?

Tom: No–one.

Jodi: Then what hope do we have?

Darryl also refers to this blame game.

Counter-intuitively, blame bestows hope. Blame assumes powerful dangerous forces could have been controlled, if only we’d done what was right. (As though perfection were possible in this sub-lunar world, as though we could return to Paradise after the Fall.)

Director Kim Hardwick’s production is excellent; aided by designer Victor Kalka and a splendid cast, there’s a pared back simplicity that lays bare the complexity of the human heart. (There is one simplicity – but more on that later.)

Campbell Parsons as Darryl is magnificent. Macmillan gives Darryl an incendiary idiolect – a hilarious, frightening language sourced from English working class slang and American gansta rap – and Parsons has utter command of this explosive mix. His portrayal of the troubled, piteous Darryl is an utterly fascinating and moving combination of a bouncy-youthful energy, a cynical- saddening understanding of power, and a heart-breaking innocence and self-doubt.

Having just jumped into the role a few days ago, Tony J. Black as Tom does great work, capturing the character’s struggle for patience, his bubbling frustration, and the terrifyingly all-consuming nature of the task of helping Darryl.

Romney Hamilton as Jodi gives a superb portrait of a beautifully imperfect human soul. Though creating a silly woman – one who too easily believes emotional outbursts are Truth –  Hamilton still finds space to evocatively manifest the woman’s real need for companionship and security, and to express both her crushing fear and its all-too-common companion, anger.

Linda Nicholls-Gidley as Rita gives a gloriously rich performance. Confronted about Darryl, she’s defiant, even to obtusity, but also sharply loyal. And after a family loss, Rita has rediscovered her faith. It might be easy to dismiss this as mere rationalisation, and its manifestation – a fascination with angels – is cringey …. but its emphasis on Love is not. It’s the very heart of the piece. (Even Jodi, pondering the possibility that their first child might turn out another monster, asserts We will just love them more.)

So is Love the solution?

Once again, the same habit: a question expects an answer.

But, in the dark middle of the brutal wilderness that is Life, perhaps our chosen path is all the destination we can know.

Paul Gilchrist

Monster by Duncan Macmillan

presented by Tiny Dog Productions, in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre Co,

at KXT until 21 March

kingsxtheatre.com

Image by Abraham de Souza

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The Children’s Hour

17 Feb

This is a superb production of a magnificent play.

First written and produced in 1934, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour still has the power to thrill an audience.

Karen and Martha run a boarding school for girls. A disgruntled student makes accusations regarding the nature of the relationship between the two teachers.

The play is a masterclass in construction, powerfully building tension and suspense. (I’m not the first person to suggest Arthur Miller must have been a student at Hellman’s feet.)

And Kim Hardwick, the director of this production, handles the material brilliantly. Her entire cast is splendid. Jess Bell’s Martha is excellent, tough and purposeful, fraught and vulnerable, understanding the dangers more clearly than she understands herself. Romney Hamilton dazzles as Karen, displaying an extraordinary range, contented confidence giving way to dismayed fear, genuine warmth striving with helpless resignation. The presentation of the women’s relationship is gloriously honest, beautiful in its unaffected vision of two individuals sharing the walk through time, invigoratingly ambiguous in its prolonged refusal to reduce to any moral pigeonhole.

Mike Booth, as Karen’s fiancé, delivers a terrific portrait of intelligent, good-hearted determination doing its best to brush off the ubiquitous spider webs of rumour and doubt. Deborah Jones’ Aunt Lily, a down-on-her-luck thespian, creates hilarity through her self-importance, and deep poignancy through the heartbreaking imbalance between her insight and her courage. Kim Clifton as Mary Tilford, the accusing student, gives an utterly mesmerising portrait of manipulation and self-interest. Sarah Ballantyne as Rosalie, one of the students who suffers from Mary’s bullying, movingly portrays the descent from resistance to terror. Annie Byron as Mary’s grandmother effectively combines dignified concern with its bastard half-sister, self-righteousness.

Disrupting heteronormative assumptions, the play met both praise and derision on its first outings. One of the charms of this current production is that it evokes so strongly the theatrical (and filmic) style of the mid-thirties. This is achieved through performance choices, but also through set design by Emelia Simcox and costume design by Hannah Yardley. A translucent backdrop, painted scenery – a supposedly static world we know to be a façade, one that hides competing visions, and one that facilitates the pretence of the privileged to Truth.

On the simplest level, contemporary audiences will read the play as a passionate plea for open-mindedness (not a message that’ll get stale any time soon.) But produced in 2025, the play raises other questions of particular relevance.

In frustration at a system we fear doesn’t guarantee justice, we now often assert Believe the victim. But that’s a tragic (though understandable) begging of the question. And it so readily slips into that perilous territory Miller warned of in The Crucible: “Is the accuser always holy now?” Hellman’s characterisation of Mary Tilford is a forthright challenge to any hope that justice comes easily.

But the play’s killer blow to moral naivety comes in the portrait of Mrs Tilford. Karen asserts that granddaughter and grandmother are of the same stock, and she means not biology, but the close kinship between self-interested deceit and self-righteousness. Both are revealed as expressions of the lust for control. In The Children’s Hour, Truth maybe fragile, but Goodness is fatally flawed. (Or, at least, Goodness with a capital G.) It’s a radical indictment of assumptions of moral superiority, and a gentle endorsement of humility and kindness. (And one of particular value in our current era in which many of us are tempted to Goodness, to that oversimplification whereby we confidently cast ourselves as warriors against evil, positing enemies where there are just people, people with the very same access to Truth as ourselves.)   

The Children’s Hour is an absolutely gripping tale, and a deeply humane encouragement to moral maturity.

Paul Gilchrist

The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

Presented by Tiny Dog Productions and Dead Fly Productions

at the Old Fitz until March 1

oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher

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