Like giants astride the world the audience gingerly crosses the stage to their seats past a circle of little houses.
Beautifully rendered, these tiny white boxes of ticky tacky are artfully arranged and lit from inside. Yet the circle seems to have a gap. After sitting, it is obvious to the viewer that the object of desire is on the other side of the stage, on a plinth, alone and dark and waiting approval for placement. It will complete the circle and another of the suburban LITTLE BORDERS will be fully ringed.
Elle and Steve are upwardly mobile and uptight. They are being interviewed for admission to a gated community. From the first winning smile, this couple are on a mission to get away from the otherness which is invading their current situation. Neighbours with other families and dogs praying and singing and working on their cars in different languages, at different times and with … too much difference … are all around this harassed couple.
There is another giant in the room at Old 505 in Newtown. The playwright Phillip Kavanagh won the Patrick White Playwrights’ Award for Little Borders in 2012 and this World Premiere production five years later has prompted a respected Sydney arts journalist to ask why it has taken so long. And why so many similarly prestigiously awarded plays never see a stage. I add my voice to that call because this production proves that witty, insightful, relevant Australian work can entertain and disturb in equal measure ! Just what I want really.
Brain and funny bone are engaged in this, its first fully fleshed incarnation. LITTLE BORDERS is birthed and blessed with a gifted production team and terrific actors. Lucy Goleby and Brandon McClelland are really good individually, and it is a play which requires very expert monologists, but their rapport and ease with each other is a real highlight. It is such fun to see these two work a room.
Goleby is the owner of the previously mentioned smile. Her Elle is perky, insistent and winning. She is aware of the power of style and image and knows a united front is an absolute requirement. Her belief in rules and her craving of steady normalcy are evident immediately. She often lays her hand across Steve’s heart to make her point. It’s a couple thing. A way of presenting to the world and these pair have their act down cold.
McClelland’s Steve is a ‘we can make this work’ kind of guy. A frustrated advertising auteur whose work is diminished and compromised, Steve is happy to be guided by a hand to the chest and prompts from Elle. McClelland endows Steve with an endearing guileless, a macho puppyness. He wants what Elle wants with no sense that he is browbeaten or easily led. Elle and Steve have fears in common.
In Kavanagh’s deceptively simple text, their fears seem based on a casual racism of ethnicity and class that cuts across gender lines and gendered responses. It doesn’t take much for this couple to perceive a threat to their stability and each will deal with it differently. However, their desire for the safety of a home that they know resonated with the audience. The implications of the reported violence in the play are the realities of any modern media user but Elle and Steve don’t scale their responses, they are giants after all.
Which is where the manipulation of the little houses exemplifies in this simple and highly effective production. Charlie Edward Davis’ set design is stark and white, the wave of the backdrop a foil to the architectural lines of his little houses. It is a set replete with subtlety. There are many rooms in this play house. There is a panic room, a bedroom etc. and Davis’ design grounds each place for the audience but elevates it as well. For a confessional scene, one chair for the man with the beer might do, but Davis places two chairs there and we are gently transported to a psychologist’s’ couch.
His iconic little white houses are wirelessly lit from inside and there is probably a Master’s Thesis in the complexities of Emma Lockhardt-Wilson’s use of those interior illuminations. Including the clever climatic event of the play. There are some technical limitations in the venue and the side lighting might translate to further productions but does sometimes disturb the immersion in the story.
Clemence Williams has created a redolent soundtrack for the piece with eerie whistles evoking down-home dog walking, distant train tracks or the foreign communications which prompt Elle and Steve to escape. The Rachmaninoff echoes both aspiration and desperation both.
Director Dominic Mercer’s vision is coherent and complex yet he allows his cast the simplicity of standing still and speaking out to explain events, propel the plot or clarify behaviour. Textually, the script’s comic elements can drop an audience suddenly into the dark before bouncing them back out like a backyard trampoline. Mercer treads these moments with a lightness that doesn’t pull away from the story or one’s engagement with the characters and the production is a fluid 60 minutes. Sometimes though, the extraneous pauses which are designed to enable costume changes do jar somewhat.
But don’t let the brevity of the show diminish its weight. This week alone, I have sat uncomfortably through several ponderous and dated two and three hour shows. This LITTLE BORDERS doesn’t pontificate or belabour. It’s a quick, funny, dark and thought provoking and a credit to its playwright.
LITTLE BORDERS continues at Old 505 Theatre Newtown until 15 July.
https://old505theatre.com/shows/the-little-red-suitcase-1480214047.html