Gulls
by Robert Hewett
State Theatre
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

As State Theatre’s Australian Playhouse staggers to an unceremonious conclusion with the recent announcement that Away has been scratched from the 1997 card, it is something of an irony that Don’s Party and now Gulls have actually given us two very good reasons for reviving works from our national repertoire. Unlike earlier choices such as The Torrents and The Shifting Heart, which held more historical than dramatic interest, Gulls, first performed in Melbourne in 1983, still touches audiences with its wry observation and theatrical flair.

“You see I’m not all here. Simplest way of putting it.” So confides Bill Clements, turned forty but, due to brain injury from a car crash, unable to fend for himself. Aphasic and withdrawn, Bill depends on the constant support of Frances, his long suffering sister who, determined to keep him out of institutional care, has set up house at a beachfront shack. It is there that Bill potters about, watching TV, doing simple tasks, generally vegetating. It is only the gulls which inspire him, those not-very-subtle Jonathan Livingston Symbols of his soaring spirit.

Rodney Fisher has done well to steer this production between the snares of sentimentality and the blooming obvious. The play wobbles sometimes- particularly with the repetitions in Act Two and the contortions of the subplot between Frances and her gentleman caller Dan, also an old friend of Bill’s, as it turns out – and DUI driver of the car on the night of the accident.

But the strength of play is in Bill’s sardonic address to the audience. We are often privileged by asides and soliloquies in the theatre, but in Gulls we are given, so to speak, a ringside seat inside Bill’s head. It is an exhilarating, even miraculous experience. While Frances and Dan and Molly Dwyer, heart-in-the-right-place minder from next door, are confronted by Bill’s indecipherable emotion and only get to hear his impenetrable attempts at speech, he speaks to us as clearly as a bell.

As Bill, Nicholas Eadie is splendid. He gives us the unreachable but intact mind of the character with such verve and wit that we find ourselves enthralled by him . Hewett’s device, to give authority to the apparently least able, is a simple one but it works powerfully. Eadie has an airy confidence and an almost haughty intelligence. When he tosses a candy bar into the audience and casually promises to slash his throat -the line hits us like a fist. But, before we can grasp his meaning, he is off again, mocking the indignities of his incontinence and his own childish antics over kitchen chores.

There is good support from the other actors. Returning to the role she performed for the Stage company in 1983, Barbara West brings to Molly Dwyer a very recognisable mix of neighbourly generosity and manipulative interference. It is a good performance in a part which, in its less effective patches, momentarily recalls the shade of Dorrie Evans. Peter Green is pleasingly understated as Dan, whose constancy is based on contrition and whose longing for Frances is less ardour than a need for forgiveness.

Genevieve Lemon is less comfortable as Frances, strung out to twanging point with looking after Bill, reluctantly dependent on Molly and in a tangle of feelings about the now married-with-baby, Dan. The edgy cheer in the character is captured only intermittently. The performance too readily becomes shrill, as if Lemon, a strong presence as a film actor, has less focus on stage.

Designer Jennie Tate creates a decor like an exploded diagram. Warmly lit by Nick Schlieper, there a cutaway of the house with kitchen and lounge, an adjoining yard with Hills hoist and a foreshore front of stage where Bill watches those gulls- white origami creations controlled by Patrick Duggin and Nicola Tudini, using long rod-like gizmos which reach into the airspace above the stalls. On first sighting, serenaded by Max Lyandvert’s flute arrangements, the gulls are self-consciously intrusive but their use later, amidst less purposefully lyrical soundscape, is unexpectedly powerful.

Gulls is a success for State. Hewett’s play works because of the strength of its theme (which the work of Oliver Sachs and others has only made more interesting) the simple theatrics of the puppetry and some terrific writing for the lead, an opportunity not lost to Nicholas Eadie. Rodney Fisher has created a modest phoenix from the smoking ruin of the Australian Playhouse. It is a reminder that there were some fine new playwrights back in the bad old Eighties – Hewett, Janis Balodis, Alma de Groen, and Michael Gow. After Gulls I’m even sorrier about the one that got Away.

The Adelaide Review, September, 1997.