Future Tense
Magpie 2
Queen’s Theatre
Adelaide

The Magpie has landed. Magpie 2, that is. For a long time the theatre-in-education wing of the State Theatre Company, it is has now pitched its energies towards the eighteen to twenty-six age group, not exactly a theatre-friendly demographic. Not exactly a demographic at all. So, newly appointed artistic director Benedict Andrews has nailed his doubloon to the mast with a program to his own liking – a double feature of contemporary European works which are as challenging as they are stylish.

Mercedes by Thomas Brasch, a German playwright and film maker, uses the central image of the Mercedes Benz convertible to create a disturbing, ambiguous narrative of crime and self-punishment. Presented as a sequence of sixteen “experiments” prefaced with pseudo-clinical titles which has take us nowhere, Brasch taunts our wish to formulate and explain by writing a crime plot with no clear plot.

The central figures are Sakko and Oi, a couple of losers- from a David Lynch movie perhaps, or a Jim Thompson pulp. Except that the use of the Mercedes adds a distinctly European anti-bourgeois theme. Sakko used to work for Mercedes until he was laid off and took to standing on street corners counting their cars in the traffic.

Now he appears to have stolen one for himself- I say appears, because nothing is confirmed or verified. He and his associate Oi, a street smart young woman who likes a man in Mercedes, especially if he’s nicked it, are also somehow involved in a kidnapping that has gone horribly wrong.

Designer Imogen Thomas has used the cavernous space of the ancient Queen’s Theatre to powerful effect. Ironically one of the nation’s oldest theatres has been used for undercover parking in recent times so it is almost unsurprising to find her set littered with the hulks of cars. Her decor is cineramic and disconcerting. A Merc convertible is conspicuously central, amongst cattle bones and desert scrub and an incongruous blue telephone. The lighting, designed by Geoff Cobham and Mark Pennington, sprays from the sides of the stage, intensifying the agitation of the piece.

As Sakko and Oi, Nathan Page and Rebecca Havey, have a chilling detachment. Speaking an unreal mix of Aussie slang and cheap movie sentiment, they both torment and console each other. Preoccupied with image, they glimpse there is more. They are not Natural Born Killers, but they do have, what court-appointed psychiatrists might call, a lack of affect. When they drive nails into their victim, played with frightening understatement by Frank Whitten, the effect is what someone once called pity and terror.

The second work, In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes is a dialogue between two strangers, called only the Client and the Dealer. The effect of their excruciatingly extended verbal duel is unsettling but also strangely meditative. Koltes writing is poetic – there of echoes of Beckett, and in the menace expressed, Pinter or David Mamet. Using voice mikes, as in the previous work, actors Frank Whitten ( brilliantly mesmeric as the Dealer) and Nathan Page are able to move in the huge expanse of the stage, stalking each other, evading, probing, rebutting without so much as raising their voices. Tom Heuzenroeder’s soundtrack niggles elegantly just at the perimeter of our attention.

Benedict Andrews has brought together two works of distinction. They are disturbing but rewarding pieces presented with lucid intelligence and admirable self-possession. His theatre company is well-named. Magpie is now building its nest from that mix of postmodern text, film, techno and new media where the most creative work is taking place. Andrews knows this turf, he’s part of it himself. After the show the audience heads for The Bunker, a rave event run by the esteemed Dirty House and Mistress Sirena, whom Andrews has brought in to share the Magpie season.

The Australian, Arts on Friday May 28, 1997.