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.
Rachel Edmonds and Aaron Pedersen play characters with a deeply moving connection. Credit: Pia Johnson His estranged wife Ani (Rachel Edmonds) reveals another perspective on need. Rendered quadriplegic after a spinal cord injury, Ani embodies a compressed magnetism.
Emotions leap like quicksilver across her face – spikiness, resentment, stoicism, a determination to assert independence, to quarantine the effect of her disability, and any pity it might inspire, from an intimacy she feels helpless to resist. The scene in which she’s bathed by Eddie portrays a deeply moving connection, and terrifying vulnerability. This mismatched couple finds its counterpoint in John (Oli Pizzey Stratford) – a young, ultrarich postgrad with cerebral palsy who can afford to hand-pick his carers, and Chinese American bartender Jess (Mabel Li), who needs a side hustle.
Jess will perform ablutions for John, too, as part of an arc which dramatically exposes the subjectivity of intimacy, the way money and choice, trust and desire, influence whether a relationship is transactional or not. The chemistry between Li and Stratford is moody and intricate. Jess is at once reluctantly exploitative and herself marginalised.
As “a net” for her family in China, she faces a cost-of-loving crisis, while John’s arrogance and entitlement and naivety about what poverty means complicate daunting challenges faced in his daily life. All four performances boast precise and present characterisation – often with a complex tragicomic gloss – leaving enough unsaid to postpone definitive judgement. They’re human beings, being human, and the more you think about them, the more you’ll wonder.
Rachel Edmonds plays Ani and emotions leap like quicksilver across her face. Credit: Pia Johnson Matilda Woodroofe’s design is monumental and impressively carves out spaces – as psychological as they are architectural – between haves and have-nots, with Richard Vabre and Jethro Woodward using light and sound, respectively, to augment the performances’ emotional charge. On opening night, the revolving stage malfunctioned halfway through, and we talked among ourselves for a few minutes until the show resumed.
It was a neat illustration of what being an audience is – that quality of being present that great theatre inspires – but it also accentuated Williams’ magisterial sense of time, in a world-class production that will leave theatregoers humbled at its power. Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead DANCE Dredge ★★ Femmural, Theatre Works, until September 28 Creating a full-length dance-theatre piece on broad social themes is a daring and risky endeavour because it must suggest familiar images while transforming them into something fresh and arresting. Striking the right balance between the representational and imaginative while avoiding commonplace expressions of distress is notoriously difficult.
A rehearsal image from Dredge. Credit: Iz Zettl So Femmural Productions, with a troupe of recent graduates from the National Drama School in StKilda, must be credited for their courage. Dredge is an ambitious study of the meanness and decadence of modern life.
It’s directed by Brandon Armstrong and led by producer and stand-out performer Rosa Ablett-Johnstone. The work features a prominent blocky structure which holds a sort of bath or fountain full of dirty water. It seems as if the very wellspring of the times has become muddied.
The chorus of seven performers shuffles about this corrupted source, performing obscure rites, which periodically transform into fragmentary scenes of everyday life: dating, working and socialising. The ensemble members bring buckets of enthusiasm, which compensates a little for their technical limitations. Femmural is both earnest and raucous; they have confidence and they have energy.
When they throw themselves into the fountain of mud, spectators in the front row can be seen ducking for cover. There is as much drenching as there is dredging. This enthusiasm drives the show to its climax, where the dancers literally tear at the curtains in a moment of exaggerated angst.
The scene feels overextended with a diluted impact. Dredge , I think, might benefit from a shorter format, perhaps presented alongside other works with contrasting emotional textures. The dismal tone of this prolonged meditation is not entirely dispelled by the finale, which – despite a brighter presentation – has a distinctly funereal quality, with winding sheets and tears from heaven: ah, yes, what a terrible mess we’ve made.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday ..
