Written by Joanna
Murray-Smith
Directed by Peter Houghton
Set and costume design by Tracy
Grant Lord
Lighting designer Matthew
Marshall
with Jacob Allan, Humphrey
Bower, Matt Dyktynski, Michelle Fornasier, Roz Hammond and Claire Lovering
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until June 30
Black
Swan’s 2013 season has found its feet with a high-spirited, handsome production
of Joanna Murray-Smith’s screwball bedroom farce Day One, A Hotel, Evening.
After
suffering through her diabolical Ninety, also for Black Swan, in 2011, and last
year’s lazily penned MTC production of Songs for Nobodies, I couldn’t be
accused of wearing an I Heart Joanna button on my lapel. I’m happy to say that
Day One is a major improvement on both of them.
Spoiler
alert rules forbid me telling you more than that pretty much everyone in the
play is shagging pretty much everyone else in it, and it’s all got to end
badly; but while the plot is dizzyingly convoluted and rolls out at breakneck
speed, director Peter Houghton and designer Tracy Grant Lord have shaped it brilliantly.
It’s
hard to imagine a set of greater assistance to the telling of a story – not
just its themes, or its moods, but the narrative itself – than Grant Lord’s
massive, complex revolve of bedrooms and lounge rooms, corridors and cafés that
spins through the play’s 90-odd minutes. Its curves and surfaces – all clad in
those thin, glossy, mission brown bricks much used in motels of a certain
vintage and purpose – are a godsend for lighting designer Matthew Marshall, and
he goes to town on them, creating a genuinely witty, mock noir feel for the
show. Meanwhile, Houghton manoeuvres his hard-working cast through the orbiting
set with the deliberate precision of a Ross Lyon defence. One long conversation
was like those iconic walk and talk scenes in The West Wing; it was remarkable to
see it realised so convincingly on stage.
Murray-Smith’s
writing can be improbable (a switched-on young actress inexplicably writes a
letter to her older lover and sends it to his family home; a hit man returns to
Australia – and presumably through airport security – with a small arsenal in
his walk-on luggage) and inconsistent (a character is gleefully complicit in
his wife’s affair, but furious when he finds out who she’s having it with). There’s
also her recalcitrant habit of giving characters her own voice, her own
language and her own, somewhat self-reverential, cultural literacy. No doubt
there are rough-as-guts Aussie real estate developers who suddenly quote Goethe
out there, but I suspect they’d take some finding.
Mercifully, this disembodied pontificating, which is about all
that happens in Ninety, only occasionally erupts here, and is quickly forgotten
among the plot’s entertaining twists and turns and the script’s verbal fun and
games.
Some of those funnies are of
the Skinner Box variety (why does the mere mention of internet porn invariably
produce helpless laughter), but there are passages of genuine wit, and the
tightening of the story’s screws and unveiling of its portents of impending
disaster, while perhaps not as deft as, say, Ayckbourn’s, are maliciously
entertaining.
The
performances are all strong, with Humphrey Bower’s unintentionally hilarious
developer Sam and Claire Lovering’s provocative Rose particularly striking.
Matt Dyktynski, as Sam’s hopelessly randy
junior partner Tom, and Michelle Fornasier as his lover – and Sam’s wife –
Madeleine have great moments, as does Roz Hammond, who’s wide-eyed, clairvoyant
Stella is the only character who deserves a better hand than she’s been dealt,
and resolves to do something about it. Rose’s mysterious husband Ray, he of the
unlikely cabin baggage, is rather less developed than the other characters, but
Jacob Allan skilfully gives him both hard and soft sides.
An average production of Day
One, a Hotel, Evening would struggle to stay afloat. Done as well as this,
though, it’s absolutely worth your seeing.
This review appeared in The West Australian 22.6.13
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