1989

Road

by Jim Cartwright

Red Shed Company

Adelaide

With their latest production, Road, the Red Shed Company further consolidate their claim as Adelaide’s pre-eminent alternative theatre group. In little more than three years they have produced a creditable range of works – some devised by company members, others, like their current production, intelligent choices from the progressive repertoire.

First performed at the Royal Court in London in 1986, Jim Cartwright’s Road played widely in the provinces and has now reached the colonies. Sometimes described as a sort of no-  future Under Milk Wood, the play is similarly one for voices, this time not Welsh but the pudding-gy accents of Lancashire. The first lines tell all as Scullery,(played by Nick Hope), the unhinged narrator of this dark work, points to the jagged remains of a signpost reduced to the generic `road’-“It’s been broken,” he tells us. And, at the  last stop before the slag heaps, so have the inhabitants. Moving from house to house the play reveals the night secrets and night terrors of the young and old, the living and partly living. As Eliot would say – I think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones.

But unlike the neurasthenic hell of Eliot’s Waste Land, in Road, the poverty and self-loathing have less to do with the Fisher King than with an extreme and alienated distance from the means of production. As one character exclaims, “Just think, one day there might be the last job on earth. And everyone will come out to see the man lose it.” This Road is one seldom taken, the low one, beyond the consolations of Marxism. Obsolete, human slag, Cartwright’s characters nestle in torpor, in stupor and pointless nostalgia.”Can we not have before again?” one asks.

Director and designer, Tim Maddock has used the stark environment of the Living Arts Centre’s Wetpack Theatre to good effect, with essentially four acting areas -three of them black slagpiles on which the pitiful domestic tableaux are precariously enacted. It’s like an expressionist version of Milligan’s Bed-Sitting Room.  With the audience milling in promenade fashion amidst the action the experience is intimate and confronting, especially under Martin Smith’s searching and relentless spotlights.

Comfortably inhabiting their Lancashire dialect, the performers seize the opportunities afforded by Cartwright’s writing – declamatory, poetic, verging on the maudlin, even banal- to  create  theatre which is unafraid to risk much to gain even more. There are many memorable characterisations -Ulli Birve as Molly, recalling past conquests in a haze of gin, and Valery full of hatred for a husband she once loved, Sally Hildyard as Helen, serenading a young soldier (Andrew Donovan) too blotto to even recognise her yearning for human contact. Graham Kelleher’s Jerry, pathetic as Sandy Stone, hankers for a time when even cigarettes tasted better while Syd Brisbane as Skin outlines the dharma of ultra-violence. Brisbane also excels as Joey, anorexic with weltschmerz, who goes on the blanket with his girl friend Clare (Joey Kennedy) to expire like Romeo and Juliet, or Sid and Nancy, or countless unreported teenage suicides.

The final vignette, in which the wide boys Brink and Eddie turning their bleary sexual desperation towards two dispirited young women moves from the emotional pits to a pitch of energy. Fuelled by the pathos of Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, the actors conclude with an atavistic chant- “Somehow, a somehow, I might escape.” Tim Maddock’s skilful direction and the sheer focus of the acting make Cartright’s play both chilling and exhilarating. This is the Red Shed Company’s best work to date, their Road is well worth following.

Murray Bramwell

“A Road Worth Following “, The Australian Financial Review, Friday August 4, 1989, p.10.