THEATRE Cost of Living ★★★★★ By Martyna Majok, MTC, until October 19 It’s hardly parochial flag-waving to say that Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Cost of Living would have been impossible without Australia becoming the epicentre of an artistic revolution, led by ensembles of performers with and without disability. The chemistry between Mabel Li and Oli Pizzey Stratford is moody and intricate. Credit: Pia Johnson Such companies have refreshed theatre’s great paradox – which, as Back to Back’s Multiple Bad Things recently reminded us, is that formal unreality can get us closer to consciousness of reality itself.
Not through “suspension of disbelief”, but its opposite. Although this play’s a classical four-hander, Anthea Williams’ transcendent production mainstreams the subversion, inviting you to cast aside whatever you believe you know about disability, about privilege and inequality, and much besides. It considers what it means to be human, framing what’s always already a social question at the intimate, precise yet mysterious level of being.
One essential answer, provided by unemployed truck driver Eddie (Aaron Pedersen), is that to be human is to need other people. Eddie’s need spills out of him as compulsively as the shreds of paper he worries loose from his pocket. Grief, jonesing for alcohol, desperate loneliness – all are pitched at awe-inspiring magnitude, even as they bare the soul of a working-class poet philosopher.
Rac.