2006
Murray Bramwell
Beautiful Words
By Sean Riley
Oddbodies Theatre Company
Higher Ground , Rundle Street, Adelaide.
May 10. Tickets $ 18- 32. bookings BASS 131 246
Thursday to Saturday until May 20.
People don’t like other people. That is the frequently repeated observation in Sean Riley’s splendidly engaging play, Beautiful Words – and its implications, in history and our own communities, are everywhere apparent. We love our own kind, and fear and despise those who are different. Until, of course, we get to know them – then stereotypes and abstract hatreds tend to fall away.
Not only is this Riley’s theme, it also his strategy. His play spans the life of a German boy, Jan, who meets Roman, a gypsy kid in Auschwitz at the very end of World War Two – and it follows an unlikely path to Australia at the turn of the present century and the shipwrecked arrival of Ari, an Afghani boy befriended by locals in Northern Australia and interned in a detention centre.
This is daunting and ambitious stuff and Sean Riley is a match for its pitfalls. With a parade of more than twenty vivid and deftly drawn characters (and several he could reel back in a bit) he explores experiences of displacement – and the strands of culture, those beautiful words, in songs, films and intimate conversation, that so intensely evoke the yearning to return.
Into the wide and shallow stage area of Higher Ground, formerly an Imax cinema and now Adelaide’s newest alternative performance space, designer Dean Hills has created a thrifty decor of textured walls – thick enough to imprison but movable enough to usher change – while Sue Gray Gardner’s lighting nimbly frames the action. Riley has convened an ensemble of nine Oddbodies – regulars and ring-ins – all bringing warmth and definition to his imaginative text.
Gabriel Partington is convincing as the young Jan and the grandson Toby, Tim Morgan is excellent as the urchin Roman, and Ari, mimicking schtick from American movies. Jacqy Phillips’ gypsy singing is haunting, there is comic pathos in Stephen Sheehan’s Ion and Andreas Sobik is memorable as the saturnine Victor. Dennis Olsen is a still and steadying presence as Old Roman and Eliza Lovell, Kim Liotta and Craig Behenna contribute strongly.
As with last year’s Significant Others, Sean Riley has shown, in Beautiful Words, his confidence with big cultural and historical themes. But the delight is in the detail – in the funny, truthful dialogue, or in a scene such as when Old Roman, Mrs Greenburg from New York and Zaynab, a recent migrant, all sit rolling lemons under their tired feet. In these human moments, and in the audacious gratification of our hopes in the resolution of his raveling story lines, Riley shows he can touch our heartstrings without them going out of key.
The Australian May 12, 2006, p.16.