Review: Dead Centre & Sea Wall

Dead Centre & Sea Wall
Red Stitch Actors Thearte
18 July 2015
Red Stitch
to 15 August
redstitch.net

Ben Photo by Jodie Hutchinson

Dead Centre is a new piece by Tom Holloway that reflects on and adds a new dimension to the 2008 work Sea Wall by Simon Stephens. Both are solo short plays told from the hurt of emptiness, and this combination of new/local writing with a known-but-not-seen-here work has created an exceptional piece of compelling and affecting theatre.

In this style of monologue, the character's connection to the audience is intimate. There's no fourth  wall as the audience are the person – friend, doctor, priest, judge or stranger – being confessed to. As the characters reveal more and get closer to, or run from, the moment they have to face, the audience becomes an integral character in the story, because without our willing listening there'd be no need for the character to talk.

Australia's Tom Holloway was commissioned to write a companion piece to the UK's Simon Stephens  Sea Wall, written in 2008. With works like Pornography, about the 2005 London bombings, and Birdland, about the destruction of fame (and just finished at MTC), Stephens has become one of the best known and in-demand contemporary theatrical voices – and his adaption of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has won Oilver awards and most recently a Tony Award for its Broadway production.

Sea Wall is based on Stephens's family and experiences and comes from a fictional "what if?" that leaves 30-something Alex (Ben Prendergast) trying to describe how he saw the life he knew end in a careless and blameless moment, and how this led to the act he's most ashamed of.

Holloway's Dead Centre starts with this story but is told first. Here 30-something Helen (Rosie Lockhart) tells us about leaving the UK for Australia and the lead up to her breakdown as the sun rises at Uluru and her world becomes red. The style's a step more distant that Stephens's, but the distance makes her final breaking more personal, as the audience imagine what left such pain.

With some background action and a digital projection (by Katie Cavanah onto Matthew Adey's design), Julian Meyrick's direction asks and answers more questions than are directly addressed in the text, while he lets the actors find the exposing balance between self and character that makes Alex and Helen far more then Prendergast and Lockhart. 

There's room to hold back more, as the on-stage extras create breathing space away from the stories, but the space is welcome and could be the comfort that creates the only hope that they'll not fall so far.

And it is hope that drives these stories; hope that their story isn't what we imagine because Helen and Alex have chosen us to confess to and, willingly or unwillingly, become our friends.

This was on aussietheatre.com.

Review: Midsummer

Midsummer
Red Stitch Actors Theatre
16 November
Red Stitch
to 15 December
redstitch.net

It's a tale about 30-something angst with accents, so it has to be in the Red Stitch season – but Midsummer is as welcome and gorgeous as a warm turquoise day under a shady tree with a shamelessly expensive picnic basket with your best friends, and your favourite musician turns up with a guitar.

In 2008 UK writer David Greig and composer Gordon Mcintyre created a play with songs that sells out every time it's produced. And, if the outpouring of love from opening night was anything to go by, Red Stitch's production will have to extend. Book now. Just do it. It's pure outrageous joy that will leave the most cynical and single of us a little less cynical.

Mid-30s Helena and Bob meet in a wine bar. They're so not each other's type, but there's far too much wine and ... we've all been there. It's a text-book rom-com structure but filled with such vivid life and unexpected situations that it feels like Grieg invented the genre. This is writing that can soar with hope because it welcomes the chance to embarrass the hell out of its characters and put them in the worst situations – and then add vomit, miscalculated bondage and being chased by a petty crim called Big Tiny Tam.

Ella Caldwell and Ben Prendergast's performances are touching and real, and so very funny. They perform like it was written for them, like the writer knew their strengths and the emotional secrets that drive their acting. But it wasn't, it was created with and for the original cast.

Trying to understand why this writing connects so strongly and feels so fresh, I found this article in The Guardian by Greig. He talks about watching actor Michael Gambon do something perfect that wasn't in the script and how the part was written (by Caryl Churchill) in way that gave the actor everything he needed and nothing that he didn't. It was "like a piece of music for the actor to play".

"I suddenly, really viscerally understood that the 'wright' at the end of 'playwright' is indicative of the fact that a craftsperson's job is to fashion vehicles, just like a cartwright or wheelwright, which an actor can inhabit and travel in. It really was fundamental and thereafter I have been much more aware that when writing, my job is to leave space for the actor."

I finally understand what I mean when I say something is over written; it feels false because it's so caught up in being exactly what the writer imagines that there's no room for the other creators to make it their story. Shakespeare got this. Write an exquisite story, but let the performers and creators decide how to tell it.

And director John Kachoyan and designer Peter Mumford make Midsummer even better by leaving space for the audience to make the story theirs. It's two people in a small room with guitars and cheap stuff stuck on the walls, but I deny anyone to not describe in detail the city they saw and how much the story was "just like me".

This is theatre that gets into your heart and leaves you happy, and if you're trying to tell someone that you fancy them, this might be the perfect date show.

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Photo by Jodie Hutchinson