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.

Wheeler Centre forum: Critical Failure, Theatre

I was away for this, so thrilled to see it up on The Wheeler Centre's site.

Last week's forum asked if theatre criticism in Australia failing practitioners and audiences, and Alison Croggon, Julian Meyrick, Cameron Woodhead and Stephen Sewell assess the role of the critic in contemporary Australian theatre.

The Birthday Party

The Birthday Party
Melbourne Theatre Company
24 June 2009
Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre

Once a creator’s name has become an adjective, it’s difficult to approach their work without falling into a pit of cliché or frustrating audiences by avoiding expectations – but MTCs The Birthday Party successfully avoids being Pinteresque, whilst capturing the essence of this unforgettable work.

Some folk don’t like Pinter. I’m not one of them, but I am wary of approaching new productions. With well known, and over-studied plays (from Shakespeare to Brecht to Miller), it’s rare to see a production that doesn’t try so hard to re-interpret, over analyse or completely re-think the intent and purpose of its writing that it gets lost in it’s own quest for originality.

As this Party has re-located from generic-UK to generic-NSW coast, there is a degree of Australianising and tweaking of Pinter’s script, which includes The Canberra Times (an odd, but quite funny choice for a seaside community to read), wonderful souvenir tea towels, town names changed, the inclusion of an Indigenous language poem and an Australian cast.

There are new layers explored and revealed, but its gift to us is its simplicity. Without obvious over work and comparison, this Birthday Party feels like no one else has done it before. Julian Meyrick’s direction masters a pace and tempo that feels natural, but is always under his precise control, allowing him to create the all-important sense of unease.

The cast show us their characters if they were written just for them. Their on stage relationships are intimate and complex, their world is real and we care about every one of them. Gregory Fryer and Pauline Whyman bring an often missed likeability to Petey and Meg – I could have watched these two talk about breakfast for hours. As Goldberg and McCann, Marshall Napier and Glenn Shea balance humour and mystery with menace and threat, and Jada Albert's (Lulu) is on her way to being one of our best performers. Which leaves Stanley. Isaac Drandic’s performance is good but, compared to the rest of the cast, it felt too “acted” and too controlled. Stanley kept jolting us back to the play and away from the story.

The uniqueness of this production brings a freshness to Pinter’s work, without losing the truth that lies in its confusion. It’s a wonderful introduction to one of the most influential western playwrights of the late twentieth century, a production you dare not miss if you love the work, and one that may even convince detractors to re-think their opinion.



This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.