All Souls
by Daniel Keene
Red Shed Company
Cardwell Street

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

All Souls continues the productive relationship between Daniel Keene and the Red Shed Company. Last year’s Low, a grim underclass tragedy featuring Ulli Birve and Syd Brisbane, drew admiring, often young, audiences to Cardwell Street. With All Souls, a Red Shed commission, Keene has extended his writing- sometimes over-extended it- but the result is a new work of considerable distinction.

All Souls is a dream play narrated by Phillipa, a deranged old woman who speaks in the voice of a blighted child. It is she who puts a candle in the window summoning the souls to come in and rest for a while. She speaks in skeins of language, riddling, regressive, but also familiar. She is locked in a closed world of psychic pain – half-remembered sexual abuse from her father, a child taken from her for adoption, estrangement from a lover. Her imagery is drawn from the elements, from the sea. When Keene is less careful she sounds like T.S.Eliot.

But like vignettes from The Waste Land, All Souls is a gathering of the lost. Gina and Frank struggle in a marriage that has become sexually indifferent and dead behind the eyes. Joe, a working man is trying to keep things together while his wife Rosie languishes in hospital. An old woman has just died in the ward, the unspeakable fear is that Rosie will be next. Nikki is a tattooist who meets Angela. As they hit the vodka they try to articulate inscriptions not of the skin but of the self. Two junkies in a basement gradually realise that a third is overdosing. Sylvia is moved to comfort her, Tom the pragmatic user wants to be gone.

Among them wanders Phillipa threading her own narrative as a counterpoint to the tableaux vivants and partly-vivant. Eileen Darley gives her speeches a fluting quality, dreamy, perplexed and filled with grief and terrors. It is difficult material, Keene is often pushing the writing into self-consciousness. He also doesn’t realise when it has already achieved its purpose. I saw the show half way into the season and quite a lot had been pruned since first night. Probably another fifteen minutes could also go. It is clear in performance that Keene can trust a sparer text to carry his purpose.

Besides Darley, others also distinguish themselves. Syd Brisbane and Joey Kennedy find a minimalist clarity in the hospital scenes while Gina Zoia and Andrew Donovan find complexity in the estrangement of Frank and Gina. Ulli Birve doesn’t find her groove as Nikki the tattooist – Keene’s dialogue lets her down I suspect- but is memorable as Sylvia, the young junkie clinging to the last glimpse of ties that bind.

Designer Tim Maddock has placed the audience around the perimeter of the theatre space looking down into the steeply raked and starkly pale acting area. It like a grey inferno or a lime pit. The characters cling to a scattering of props and- when they can- one another. Karen Norris’s unobtrusive lighting effectively particularises the action and Ian McDonald’s near-subliminal music also shows creditable restraint.

Cath McKinnon, the Red Shed’s most accomplished director, has produced her best work since Sweetown. It has built on the intimate energy of Low, gained assurance from the discontinuous narration of Carthaginians and given Daniel Keene’s strong text focus and theatrical clarity. But, as the stage images sharpen, she can afford to draw back the language somewhat. Keene has ideas to burn. So tightening and compression might well turn a good play into a very fine one.

The Adelaide Review, No.116, July 1993, p.32.