Devised and directed by Mark Howett
Devised and dramaturgy by Phil Thompson
Devised and performed by Gavin Webber, Grayson Millwood, Raewyn Hill, Ian Wilkes, Otto Kosok
Music by Mathew de la Hunty and Dale Couper
Designed by Bryan Woltjen
Sound design by Laurie Sinagra
Lighting design by Mark Howett
Subiaco Arts Centre
Until July 30
 |
| Gavin Webber and Raewyn Hill (pic Peter Tea) |
Mark Howett’s story of a man and his family swamped by the devastating effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder needs telling, and this mighty production uses every creative asset that can be brought to the stage, delivered with a skill and commitment of the rarest kind.
It is free of any convention, and refuses to stay on any path. I understand the piece began its life as a regular text, but, over its evolution, words were replaced by movement or audio/visual effects whenever those alternatives more effectively told the story or conveyed the emotion.
This organic process delivers a work of immense sensory and cogitative power, and one with extraordinary narrative and dramatic clarity. It’s a revolutionary achievement.
Frank (Gavin Webber), a Vietnam veteran, lives with his wife Trish (Raewyn Hill) and teenage son Josh (Otto Kosok). But he is only partly, tenuously with them.
He constantly conjures up the ghosts of his army mates, Max (Grayson Millwood) and Mike (Ian Wilkes), both killed in Vietnam, who delight and torment him, and march him away to a broken interior landscape of guilt, pride, irresponsibility and disdain.
(Whether they are real or symbolic and whether Frank needs to feel responsible for their deaths are not explained and don’t need to be. A brief interlude when Max and Mike talk directly with the audience about the rights and wrongs of war and the long resistance of Aboriginal people to the invasion of their land is tangential to the story, but appropriate in its own right.)
Max and Mike’s intrusions are brilliantly realised, but even more powerful is the bewildered terror of Trish and Josh who cannot see what Frank is seeing. The representation of this double reality, these parallel worlds, is completely convincing and often genuinely frightening.
One grim, violent dance, caught in a claustrophobic circle of light, throws the characters, living and dead, against each other like sumo wrestlers – but while Frank, Trish and Josh, grapple and pivot, the ghosts just plough through, inexorable and unforgiving.
There is great ferocity in the choreography throughout the show, from Frank’s early manhandling of his son that threatens to break the boy’s neck to Frank and Trish’s fractured dance in its final scene that starts as reconciliation and ends in smashing catastrophe.
That violence is captured and amplified by Hewett’s shrapnel-shredded lighting design, Laurie Sinagra’s tearing, rumbling sound bed and the jarring music composed and played live by Matthew de la Hunty and Dale Couper.
I’m not sure I can recall a cast better fixed in their characters. Millwood and Wilkes are demon barbers, bush lawyers and bushrangers, sinister and magnetic as Chopper Read.
Co3’s artistic director Raewyn Hill returns to the stage for the first time in a decade, and she gives Trish a battered warrior spirit, her words only terrified mumbled thoughts, her body all determination and courage.
Webber captures all the swirling contradiction of Frank; manly and un-manned, tender, brutal and truly helpless, uncompassed, lost in place and time.
And the seventeen-year-old Kosok is extraordinary as Josh, the boy who will inherit the deep, horrible truth of his parents’ lives. At the end, he spins, skipping rope whipping, sending everyone and everything around him crashing down.
And that’s what Good Little Soldier has to say. When it all comes down to dust, we will all reap the whirlwind.
Ochre have taken a brave calculated gamble extending the season over three weeks. This means there is still time – until the 30th July – for you to see this thrilling, important and utterly unmissable show.
