I like Chapel Off Chapel. I like making my way down there: the train ride to Prahran, walking up Greville Street, wishing I had a booking at Chez Olivier or Fog. Admittedly, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Chapel Street itself, but I nevertheless like crossing it, turning up Princes Close, and meandering down Little Chapel to the theatre with its wonderful foyer and interesting candelabras. I like its foyer and interesting candelabras. And I like two of the shows currently playing there, making the trip even more worthwhile: Anthony Crowley’s Shadow Passion and Sam Strong’s production of Dogs Barking by Richard Zajdlic.
Shadow Passion is a play about the politics of compassion. Catherine (Danielle Carter) and Robert (Andrew Blackman) are a well-to-do couple whose relationship is flatlining in the wake of a terminated pregnancy. Their failed attempts at intimacy have become almost Ballardian in character. Catherine’s terminally ill mother, Margaret (Sue Jones), is calm in the face of death, but her daughter, a leading surgeon, refuses to let her to die with dignity. Both Margaret and Catherine befriend an Iraqi immigrant fresh out of Baxter, Ali (Ali Ammouchi), a cleaner whose visa has been revoked in the wake of what he is told are ‘improving’ situations in Iraq. An advisor to the Minister for Immigration, Robert may be able to extend Ali’s visa, but finds himself torn between private loyalties and public duties. The human face of Australia’s immigration policies is brought into the living room, no longer a bureaucratic abstraction, but a man of flesh and blood in an ill-fitting suit, trying to open a bottle of wine.
Crowley situates this pointed social commentary within a broader thematic framework of loss and suffering, in which compassion is relative and operates in a complex network of competing private and public interests. Depending on which you look at it, an act of compassion is rarely selfless—or, at least, not completely. The play’s two great acts of compassion, which take place in the second act, are themselves motivated, at least in part, by one man’s need to redeem himself and by another’s shame and humiliation. Far from cheapening these acts, however, this impurity, if you like, of motivation and intent more closely mimics the true complexity of compassion as it operates in life.
Crowley’s is a keen theatrical intelligence. Scene transitions are thematically motivated and organic, bleeding into one another and overlapping. The characters in the one unknowingly or uncaringly make decisions which will have serious ramifications for those in the other, even as they share the same theatrical space. Crowley’s set is mutable and dynamic, and Paul Jackson’s lighting design oscillates between alienating coldness and almost reassuring warmth with a certainly subtle fluidity. The performances—particularly that of Sue Jones as Margaret, striking just the right balance between pathos and belligerence—are routinely excellent.
The play is framed as a cautionary fable, told by a father to his son, and the scenes in which Ali, naked, interacts with the bulbous little puppet that is his deceased child are the most moving in the production. Under the patterned veil of Brad Pickens’ video art, Andrew McDougall and Nathan Reardon manipulate the puppet with whimsy and grace. One can’t help but be reminded of Ben Hjorth and Stuart Bowden’s puppetry in the VCA’s recent production of The Perjured City, Or The Awakening of the Furies. In her review of that production, Alison Croggon noted that “I have often pondered the potency of puppets, how their use can release pure feeling in a way impossible for a human performer, but I am no closer to finding out why.” One gets no closer to the answer here, though the effect of the artifice is much the same.
Dogs Barking is a play of volatile personalities engaged in a battle for a common past. Proud, vindictive and acerbic, the characters are nevertheless vulnerable, self-sabotaging and so guarded it’s impossible for anyone to get close enough to make a connection.
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Neil (Grant Cartwright) is the worst among them. A genuinely unlikeable creature who arrives one night at the apartment of his ex-girlfriend, Alex (Melanie Coote), Neil lounges around in his underwear, pisses in an empty wine bottle, and stubbornly refuses to leave until Alex signs the lease over to him. She refuses, and the stalemate is on, with Neil’s craven best friend Ray (Stefan Taylor) and Alex’s icepick-sharp sister Vicky (Edwina Wren) inevitably drawn into the verbal and emotional stoush.
The battle for the apartment becomes tantamount to a battle for the past—who gets to own what the couple once shared?— the same past that so thoroughly poisons their relationships in the present. None of the characters like each other very much and seem to like themselves even less.
Richard Zajdlic’s script zings along and Sam Strong’s direction more or less keeps up with it. As far as heightened, dialogue-driven naturalism goes, despite some hokey writing towards the end of the play and some pretty standard, perhaps boring, blocking throughout, the production dutifully hits its marks. Unfortunately, the climax of the play doesn’t really work. This is partly due to Zajdlic’s script, partly to Strong’s interpretation of it, and partly to Cartwright’s performance, none of which vary enough in tone to effect the kind of slow-burn build up necessary to render events truly horrific. Neil’s actions in the play’s penultimate scene come across as unlikely, unmotivated and dramatically uninteresting.
The production nevertheless has its moments. While most of the scene transitions are overlong and awkward, the blackout which connects the penultimate scene to the last is genuinely frightening, and the scenes in which Vicky and Neil spit verbal acid at each other across the length of the apartment are exhilarating in their ferocity. With the standout exception of Edwina Wren, whose Vicky is complex and multifaceted, the performances are effective but monotonal, though this may have more to do with the writing than it does with the actors themselves.
Shadow Passion still has another week to go and is as close to a must-see as anything going right now. Dogs Barking ended this evening (I actually posted this review yesterday afternoon, but the internet ate it and I had to rewrite it, much to my chagrin). While my review of the latter may have sounded a little harsher than intended, it too was more than worth the trip.
Esoteric Rabbit Blog, 15 September 2007
