Theatre: A Number

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Caryl Churchill

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Designer Bruce McKiven

Lighting designer Jon Buswell

Sound designer Peter Dawson

Featuring Kym Gyngell and Brent Hill

STC Studio until April 27

Kym Gyngell

There’s plenty of science fiction out there. In the Netherlands, in a re-created Palaeolithic ecosystem, scientists are reverse breeding to bring back extinct species like the auroch, the almost elephant-sized progenitor of modern cattle. From genetically modified harvests and barnyard clones to dinosaur DNA in glaciers, we are playing Dr Frankenstein with the matter that makes us. It seems more and more likely that the absurdly impossible is very possible indeed.

In Caryl Churchill’s A Number (first performed at the Royal Court in 2002 with Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig, and here revived by the Perth Theatre Company with Kym Gyngell and Brent Hill), a man approaching middle age discovers that he’s not alone in the world, that there are a number of hims out there.

A Number isn’t about the mechanics of cloning, or even its ethics per se, but the expectations parents and children have for each other, individual identity, the importance of trust for love and the mayhem that can erupt when it is shattered.

Be warned; this is no comedy, even of the blackest kind. A Number is a tough, testing story, made all the more confronting and thought provoking by the quality of its telling in this fine production. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian. My favourite reviewer in the whole world has also chimed in on A Number; link here and scroll down to page 64 for her take. 

Theatre: Blackbird

Perth Theatre Company

Written by David Harrower

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Featuring Humphrey Bower and Anna Houston

STC Studio until March 24

Put two people in a room, turn on the heat and stir. It’s an exciting, but hazardous, recipe for theatre; when there are so few ingredients they have to be painstakingly matched and carefully prepared, or things can go badly wrong.

On a whim, maybe a hunch, I read David Harrower’s play a couple of days before seeing Melissa Cantwell’s production at the STC Studio. What I found was a long dramatic poem, often powerfully reminiscent of Philip Larkin and, especially, T.S. Eliot. Dialogue is broken into shards of thought, repeated and sharpened like a pencil to breaking point, heightened, nerve-stretched, and reductive in the best possible way. It’s a brilliant script on the page. It also seemed to me a daunting piece to convincingly bring to the stage.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Tender Napalm

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Philip Ridley

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Featuring Joshua Brennan and Anna Houston

The prodigious British playwright, novelist and artist Philip Ridley divides his output fairly equally between works for children and adults. Ridley’s ability to explore the imaginary worlds of young people, their cruelties, courage and capacity for love is a vital strength of Perth Theatre Company’s Australian premiere production of Tender Napalm.

While this is most decidedly a play for adults (all the usual warnings apply), it has the bravery of youth. Its two, un-named, characters (Joshua Brennan and Ann Houston) inhabit a non-specific place and time and more often than not speak in parables and fantasies. Somehow, through stories of tsunamis and armies of monkeys, we get glimpses of something terrible that has happened to these people that has unhinged them and their relationship.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian