Theatre: Boy Gets Girl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Rebecca Gilman

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ben Collins

Featuring James Hagan, Ben O’Toole, Myles Pollard, Whitney Richards, Helen Searle, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until September 30

Alison van Reeken and Myles Pollard

 The opening tableaux of the American playwright Rebecca Gilman’s gripping, malevolent Boy Gets Girl is a striking display of the strengths of director Adam Mitchell’s production.

We find Theresa Bedell (Alison van Reeken), a New York City magazine feature writer, in a set (superbly designed by Fiona Bruce) that is an abstract exercise in perspective, diminishing up a raked stage and down lines of massive re-enforced concrete sections towards a vanishing point obscured in shadows. There’s music, and traffic, but somewhere, close by, Theresa thinks she hears a noise, senses a presence; and we do too. She walks warily upstage towards the darkness, peering into it for the intruder. The stage fades to black. Welcome to her nightmare.

Theatre: Ruben Guthrie

By Brendan Cowell

Directed by Andrew Lewis

Set and costume designer Jessica Glaser

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year Acting students Ben O’Toole, Lara Schwerdt, Griffin Blumer, Ryan Jones, Jessica Clarke, Kali Hulme and Josh Brennan

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

June 17 - 23, 2011

Brendan Cowell’s high-style morality play, Ruben Guthrie, is a gift for any company of actors, and it certainly is for this cast drawn from the graduating class of the WA Academy of Performing Arts acting course.

I must confess to being a little wary of the piece. There’s a bit too much bender glamour here, and while the hot-shot creative genius ad guy who can only function on a cocktail of booze and coke is almost a stock character on the stage and screen, it’s a far cry from the miserable truth of abuse and addiction that ruins real lives in the real world. Any play that attempts, as director Andrew Lewis somewhat disingenuously asserts in his notes, to “hilariously tackle the territory of alcoholism and substance abuse” needs to be approached with considerable caution.

Kali Hulme and Ben O'Toole (pic: Jon Green)

Having said that, I suspect Cowell’s purpose is more allegorical – the lure of power and control expressed through the pitfalls of substance abuse and addiction – than realistic. He writes with great verve and creates some memorable characters around his  protagonist, Ruben Guthrie (Ben O’Toole).

Like John Bunyan’s beleagured Christian, Guthrie is centre-stage throughout the play, while his family, friends and lovers swirl around him like birds of carrion. His Czech model girlfriend, Zoya (Lara Schwerdt), flies back to Prague, soon to be replaced by the control freak, Virginia (Jessica Clarke), he meets at the addiction program he books into. His account manager, Ray (Griffin Blumer), though, wants him back on the booze to rekindle his creative spark, as do, for reasons more related to their own issues than any concern for their son, his estranged parents (Ryan Jones and Kali Hulme).

Things only get worse when Ruben’s outrageous gay friend, Damien (Josh Brennnan), returns from an abortive sojourn in New York and desperately wants to party. When Zoya also reappears after some late night phone pleading from Ruben to find Virginia in her apartment, and her T-shirt, Ruben hits the bottle, the pills, the blow and whatever else he can lay his hands on.