2007

This Uncharted Hour
By Finegan Kruckemeyer
Brink Productions and
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
February 13. Tickets: $17-$ 50. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until February 24, 2007.

It might be called the Crash method, or the Babel syndrome – to name two recent films which conjure narrative from a series of apparently unconnected events. Finegan Kruckemeyer’s ambitious chamber play, This Uncharted Hour, also uses a kind of butterfly effect to explore a vortex of moments, emotions and consequences within a family. But where Crash examined a city and Babel spanned the globe, Kruckemeyer’s play goes inside time, as it were, as his central character, Luka, sees a lifetime in sixty minutes. It is an uncharted hour and also a very crowded one.

It begins when Luka accidentally runs over a dog, an unexpected derailing of his normal day which triggers memories and feelings and leads him to visit (whether actually or notionally is unclear) his family home, now empty of occupants but turbulent with past events relating to the stillbirth of his older brother Lucas. His mother, Penny (Elena Carapetis) and father, Adam (Paul Blackwell) are seen in youthful courtship, then during the days after the baby’s death, and in their separate and separating grief, which leads the mother to frozen inwardness and the father to an affair. In among these literal scenes, the might-have-been Lucas, known as the Young Man and played with Ariel-like poutiness by Lachlan Mantell, conspires with his mother, and confronts his perplexed sibling.

Brink director Chris Drummond has a challenging task navigating the abstraction and potential archness of this production and he mostly succeeds. On the small Space stage, Gaelle Mellis’s set – a frieze of birches with a wintry, leafless tree and solitary park bench, skilfully lit with inquisitive spots by Geoff Cobham – is shared with pianist Jamie Cock and soprano Emma Horwood, performing Schubert’s Nacht and Traume alongside original night songs (also in German) by Raymond Chapman–Smith and piano interludes from Quentin Grant. Both are well-known composers for Adelaide ensemble, The Firm.

As Luka, Nathan O’Keefe is excellent, with a wry and likeable presence, essential for anchoring the more ethereal inclinations of the piece. Paul Blackwell ably carries the emotionally demanding role of Adam while Elena Carapetis, despite brighter moments, is unduly weighed down by the poetic melancholy of the text. The lively depiction of Sarah, the Other Woman, allows Michaela Cantwell more vernacular directness. Brechtian devices, such as the actors abruptly telling the musicians to shut up, indicate that Drummond and Kruckemeyer know they are on difficult ground with all this Schubert and drang. But even if Luka has had a dog of a day, the place it leads him to makes intriguing and affecting theatre and his uncharted hour lingers like a disconcerting but instructive dream.

“Family secrets unfold as dream” The Australian, February 15, 2007, p.36.