Predictability is not always a bad thing in storytelling. Tragedies routinely rely on it for their sense of, well, tragic inevitability.
But knowing how a story is going to end means the process by which one reaches that denouement necessarily becomes all-important. Shakespeare’s witches peddled conclusions, not fully developed plots.
Savage River, a new play by Steve Rodgers, tells the story of a father and son who live in the Tasmanian wilderness and whose lives are turned upside down with the arrival of an outsider.
That the outsider is a woman, Jude (Peta Sergeant), only makes matters worse, as both the man, Kingsley (Ian Bliss), and his unworldly Aboriginal son, Tiger (Travis Cardona), desire her in equal measure.
When Jude urges Tiger to escape his domineering old man, whose reasons for isolating the boy are more noble than not, the scene is set for a tale in which, well, you can probably guess.
Rodgers’s characters sail close to cliche: the naive teenager on the cusp of manhood, the father trying to do the right things in all the wrong ways (with the requisite inability to communicate and barely suppressed capacity for violence), the fugitive ex-stripper with a heart of gold.
Tiger’s Aboriginality is presumably meant to charge these cliches with meaning, but while it certainly helps to situate the piece geographically, it changes nothing of how the story plays out or the choices the characters make.
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Sergeant gives a solid turn as Jude and imbues the character with more than superficialities.
As Kingsley, Bliss is neither convincingly threatening or well-meaning, although his final scene is well-judged.
Cardona has the hardest task of reconciling his character’s physical development with his emotional immaturity: he appears to be playing a character much younger than he is. But this is as much a problem with the role as with his interpretation of it.
Director Peter Evans’s production tends towards overstatement. Daniel Zika’s lighting lacks subtlety. Jed Kurzel’s music swells overwhelmingly in the more self-consciously dramatic moments, but the sound design by Kelly Ryall is unobtrusive and nuanced.
Stephen Curtis’s set seems ill-suited to the small Stables Theatre. Situating the facade of the characters’ shanty against the theatre’s right wall ensures that anyone sitting on that side of the room will miss crucial visual information, especially in the second act.
The Australian, 23 June 2009
