Three Dog Night
by Peter Goldsworthy
Adapted by Petra Kalive
Two Blue Cherries
Space Theatre
31 March
Metro Street
by Matthew Robinson
State Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse
April 7
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
We have seen Peter Goldsworthy’s work on stage in brisk succession recently. First, with his own adaptation of Maestro (in collaboration with Anna Goldsworthy) and now with Melbourne company, Two Blue Cherries’ version of Three Dog Night. As the more than quarter of a million readers who bought the book will attest, Maestro is a reflective study of callow youth and regretful old age set against a backdrop of 1940s wartime Europe and Darwin in the 1970s. In their production for State Theatre, the Goldsworthys and director Martin Laud Gray – perhaps to recapture the gusto of their earlier comedy of ideas, Honk if You are Jesus – broadened the work, both in style and story, with only limited success. Heading in the opposite direction in Three Dog Night, adaptor and actor, Petra Kalive has narrowed and sharpened a larger cast of characters to an essential ménage of three.
Like all of Goldsworthy’s writing, which is well-suited, not only to the stage, but (eventually we hope) film as well, Three Dog Night is brim with incident and cultural and ethical challenge as old friends Martin and Felix reunite in the Adelaide Hills to find that one has a new English bride and the other only weeks to live. Old rivalries are re-enacted and new revelations unfold as Felix describes a surgeon’s journey in to Central Desert country where indigenous rites of passage lead to those of retribution and mortal wounding. As for Martin, his young wife becomes a trophy in another kind of test – of marital right and emotional wrong. Under director, Andrew Gray the actors fare well – Tim Spitz as the bewildered Martin, Phillip McInnes as the wild and woolly Felix, and Petra Kalive as Lucy – and the production has a rough, engaging energy as a result. But it is Petra Kalive’s adaptation which is the real strength here – sharp in its edits, and brisk in its dramatic structure and redemptive conclusion.
There are all kinds of unwritten rules about musicals. They need to be hummable, they should either make us Feel Good or Feel (pleasantly) Sad. They are exotic and fanciful – with historical, or fantastical, locations. They are about cats and witches, revolutions and phantoms, drag queens in the desert, or Abba eisteddfods on Mykonos. Matthew Robinson’s excellent new work, Metro Street, is none of these. It is about fractured and fractious families and terminal illness – not the belle dame consumption of Puccini and Verdi, but angry chemotherapy in outer suburban Melbourne.
Director Geordie Brookman has taken Robinson’s realist, you might say middlebrow, musical and, with an often outstanding cast, presented a convincing portrait of a mother and son, Sue and Chris (Debra Byrne and Cameron Goodall) and his grandmother Jo (a spritzy Nancye Hayes). Life for Chris and girlfriend Amy (Jude Henshall) is all possibilities until the news of Sue’s cancer breaks. Then, the repercussions are hard and sometimes people behave badly. Cameron Goodall’s Chris, like his Hamlet, is a fatherless boy all but defeated by circumstance. His mother is raging at her dying light – powerfully evident in Debra Byrne’s chilling solo, Dignity. Steadfastness is the theme and it is Jo and Amy’s neighbour Kerry (Verity Hunt-Ballard) who provide the oomph that the others need.
With strong support from Musical Director, Matthew Carey and his band, yet more inventive lighting from Geoff Cobham, and an imposing set from Victoria Lamb, Geordie Brookman has balanced the accessible melodic score with the show’s considerable dramatic ambitions. Metro Street takes us on more than a musical stroll and, in their precision and detail, these fine performances show there is more to the heart than just its strings.
The Adelaide Review, No.351, May 2009, p.25.