1997

Rules of Thumb

by Daniel Keene and Alison Croggan

Red Shed Company

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Red Shed’s association with Melbourne playwright Daniel Keene has been hugely productive. Collaboration in the best sense, it has created a trust between playwright and directors, designers and actors which has resulted in a series of successful commissions. All Souls was first, then award-winner, Because You Are Mine and last year, the film noir-ish spine-chiller, Terminus.

Rules of Thumb is a rather different venture. A commission for two short plays has resulted in a quartet, two by Keene and two by the poet and journalist, Alison Croggan. It is a more difficult venture, although Keene’s play Sleeping Partner, presented by David Field and Syd Brisbane in one of the Shed’s rehearsed readings several years ago, is clear indication of Keene’s flair for the short odds.

The Prisoner and His Keeper has familiar Keene tropes. The brutality is etched as if in stone. The Prisoner and Keeper are two faces of the same captivity. The violence is random and lethal, the obscene verbal abuse ravages any sense of self-respect. This cat and mouse stuff is familiar from the Bosnian setting of Because You Are Mine and the sadistic predations of the trainline serial killer in Terminus. But here it has a more abstract inference. It is not entirely to praise it that I say it is ultra-nasty Pinter with a dollop of Kafka. There is even an echo of Pozzo and the pitifully misnamed Lucky.

The Red Shed, as ever, has had a total makeover for this production. The roof and walls are black, the performance space, designed by Imogen Thomas, is a sort of raised granite cat walk, a plinth with roughcast sides separating the two tiers of audience seats. The ubiquitous Geoff Cobham has created yet more excellent lighting effects, rich in detail, bringing the performers into cinematic clarity.

The cruelty of the Prisoner/Keeper exchange is relentless but eventually  unaffecting despite excellent performances. The Keeper, in a loose cut military suit cut from grey blanket material, is indicative of thugs anywhere, but Peter Finlay gives the character a distinctive local vernacular and a hearty viciousness which in a kind of reverse osmosis begins to give strength of advantage to the Prisoner, dressed in a tatty version of the same costume and played with abject defiance by Juan Crosby.

This work is interrupted by Croggin’s Samarkand, seemingly a variant of the Tamerlane story. Erif, a painter, is captured by the despotic Timur and ordered to paint an heroic frieze in his honour. Her children murdered, degraded and stripped of even her clothing,  she waits her moment for vengeance.  She paints a bitter caricature as curse. Timur, dressed in Tartar trimmings and played with skilful gravity by Edwin Hodgeman, orders that the mural be removed by mutes, and Erif is summarily sentenced to execution. Poetically expressed, Samarkand is at times overwritten -particularly in the closing speech. As Erif, Eliza Lovell, is memorable, particularly since- in what is a serious setback to the Red Shed season- the original actor in the role, Annabel Giles, has been forced due to illness, to withdraw mid-way through the season. Lovell, only two nights in, is still working from the book.

The Prisoner and His Keeper then concludes with a grim, if somewhat predictable irony and the show goes to interval. A third section, Famine, also by Alison Croggin, is cancelled because of the sudden casting change and the production closes with a final short two-hander, Custody. Two cops, in Hector Crawford get-up, are sitting in a pub, planning to fake-up the police cell murder of an Aboriginal as a suicide. Again, Peter Finlay, gives a strong performance, a creepy mix of ebullience and sadism. Juan Crosby, repeats some of the plaintive tone of his Prisoner, but Custody has an alarming directness in its writing, sharply drawn by both actors.

Rules of Thumb shows the usual Red Shed production values- artful lighting and design, crisp direction from Tim Maddock, and discreetly unsettling music from Jeremy Rowney performed by John Menhennett. But, even allowing for the unfortunate amputation of a quarter of the production, there is a sense of repetition here.

It is part of the charter of companies like the Shed to bring us news we don’t want to hear. But this time Keene and Groggan have brought us a kind of generic pessimism we can do little with. Famine, the missing link, may have offset that. Custody certainly works better for being located in a recognisable milieu. But overall, Rules of Thumb doesn’t take us close to ourselves as Terminus did. It doesn’t so much shake its fist as give everything the finger. These are urgent times and theatre must take its audiences forward. In this production the company is marking time. The Red Shed needs to find more variation for its considerable talents.

The Adelaide Review, No.167, August, 1997, pp.33-4.