Asylum

Asylum

Kit Lazaroo

At La Mama

Until March 8

Reviewers are often charged that they have the power to make or break a play. That a bad review from Boydy or Croggon can sink a show with the potential audience. Danny tends to think this opinion is a romantic hang over from an imagined fifties Broadway that never even existed in Australia. But even were this so, there is little chance of a bad review from me having any affect on Asylum as it may already be sold out. After all, when you’re on the VCE list as a certain lighting designer told me, every night is schools night. Ah the surest way to the sweet success each of us strives for - cartloads of disaffected and disinterested teenagers who will sit mostly quietly through an evening at the theatre.

Perhaps this audience is the reason for the simplicity of the ideas contained within.

You may recall that Danny interviewed Ms Lazaroo way back when Asylum won her the Wal Cherry Play of the year. She told me back then that the play was based on the real life experiences of a woman she herself had met and we had a long discussion about the politics of asylum seekers in Australia at the time.

Well, the woman has gone from our shores as has the government that denied her right to be here, but the guilt lingers on in the fashionably left of left Melbourne theatre.

Though the play text itself is far from the worst thing I’ve seen this year, I can’t say I’m convinced it’s worthy of the proverbial swag of awards it’s collected on it’s way to stage. The characters are for my liking drawn too shallowly in favor of presenting the politics of the piece, which would be excusable to a certain extent if it weren’t the politics of the bleeding obvious. Asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Australia if they want to cause the countries they’ve come from probably are pretty nasty. Wow, phew, thanks for setting me straight there with those cartoon sketches of bureaucracy you substituted for characters.

Not much more can be said of the direction either. Encouraging a kind of vaudevillian mugging from the actors doesn’t do the script any favors and though the transformative element of the set and the use of puppets were engaging to begin with, it rapidly becomes a sterling example of how quickly overuse of a good idea turns it into a bad one.

But what does Danny know, oh reasonable reader. You may perhaps like your politics served over easy with a side of ham, the rest of Australia certainly does. For mine however, I fear that I prefer complex issues to be presented with the complexity and seriousness they deserve. Be you left or right wing after all, over simplification of an issue is a sure way to fascism.

Danny Episode

The Mercy Seat

The Mercy Seat
Neil LaBute
Red Stitch
Until March 8

Neil LaBute is one of those playwrights that everyone freaking raves about right now. Along with David Harrower, Howard Barker and Martin Crimp he’s one of the top names to throw into pretentious foyer conversation for a short cut to contemporary theatre aficionado cred. These are the names you see on the marquees at the flagships and so these are the names that you see at Red Stitch.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Red Stitch, I really do. Those guys have been going hard core all year every year since 2001 and you just gotta give it up for that. They’re some of the most talented young actors in town and the times they’ve done it right; by Christ they’ve done it right.

Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat however aint one of those times.

I doubt it’s giving away a great deal to note that its set in New York a day or two after the September 11 attacks. In a loft apartment a young executive agonizes over a decision to use the tragedy as a cover under which he can disappear, leaving his family for his boss who he’s been having a three year affair with.

Leaving aside the plays gross misappropriation of the murder of 3000 people to tell a turgid love triangle story, The Mercy Seat is far from imaginatively new ground. I mean, cheating on the wife with the boss? YAWN.

LaBute writes with that choppy, cut off half sentence style that the leading Australian theatre companies seem to think represents good writing these days – provided the writer has an American or English accent. So here’s Doc Episode’s regular whinge of the review: if an Australian playwright wrote this play it would be subjected to three dramaturgical workshops and a staged reading before being told that there was no room in the season for new Australian work. There are any number of Australian writers who can write as well as this so why don’t we stage them.

You could say ol’ Danny’s being parochial when he’d rather see new Australian writers being developed on the big stages, but Danny says it’s the Cultural Cringe and wonders when Australian Theatre is gonna grow the f*** up and take itself seriously.

Danny Episode