2007
Theatre
Adelaide
Talk to Me like the Rain and Let Me Listen
By Tennessee Williams
Hot Fudge
By Caryl Churchill
Central Park West
By Woody Allen
State Theatre Company
Of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse
Adelaide Festival Centre
July 10, 2007 Until July 28.
Tickets $17 – $55. Bookings BASS 131 246
In theatre parlance a triple threat is someone who can dance and sing as well as act. But with this winter program on the mainstage of the Dunstan Playhouse, State Theatre artistic director Adam Cook has another trifecta in mind. Confronting the perpetual dilemma of having too much available talent and too few programming opportunities, he has trebled his options with a triple bill of one-act plays – performed by a company of six, directed by three up-and-coming directors, lit by Mark Pennington, and designed to the nines by the deft hand of Mary Moore.
Talk to me like the rain and let me listen is an ethereal dialogue written by Tennessee Williams in 1945. Set in a New York slum, but given crumbling classical trimmings with Moore’s imposing masonry, this is a dream play for disconnected voices. A dissipated young man returns desperately to his girlfriend. As rain sheets down the window frame, they talk in alternating torrents of hope and despair. Director Netta Yashchin works diligently to capture all this febrile yearning but actors Nathan O’Keefe and Kate Box cannot sufficiently master Williams’ tendril-like Southern cadence (as they must, to justify the piece) or quite persuade us of the unspoken bond that contradicts their repeated declarations to break free.
Caryl Churchill’s Hot Fudge, from 1989, is often served with the short play Ice Cream, but Geordie Brookman has gone straight for the sauce in this densely packed study of petty grifters, identity fraudsters, spin merchants and pathological liars. Distancing herself from the family credit card scam, Ruby (touchingly played by Elena Carapetis) poses as a travel agent to impress Colin (Brendan Rock) who turns out to be a counterfeit himself. Brookman takes his gang of six briskly through Churchill’s sharply-observed, if unsurprising, homily on the self-defeat of deceit.
“This is not the cosmos, this is Central Park West,” quips one of Woody Allen’s characters – and unfortunately it is a little too true. Director Hannah Allert brings a raucous energy to this mid-Nineties New York boulevarde farce – stuffed full of one-liners, but with Woody’s stage mechanics audibly grinding. Mary Moore’s set, in etched deco glass, pastel trim and martini chrome, is a fine foil to the not very discreet charms of Phyllis and Sam Riggs (the excellent Carmel Johnson and Rob McPherson) whose George and Martha feud is Allen’s version of Albee-to-go. With Elena Carapetis, trapped in a heavy Noo Joysey accent and Brendon Rock mugging hilariously as her luckless husband there are plenty of laughs for a winter night here. But, after two more thoughtful predecessors, the triple threat ends less with a bang than a whimsy.
“Cook’s three course a tad underdone” The Australian, July 13, 2007, p.12.