The B Sharp production of American playwright Adam Rapp’s ‘Nocturne’ has been one of my theatrical highlights of the year.
The play features a scenario that theatre regularly transverses. It captures a soul journeying back from the edge of darkness to some sort of stasis.
In ‘Nocturne’ the soul is a young man who experiences a terrible tragedy. Inebriated after a drunken University party he makes it all the way home in his car only to run over his sister in the driveway of his family home.
Rapp presents the tortured journey as a one hander with young Perth performer Gibson Nolte playing the role.
The drama starts with the young man, with his back to the audience, writing on the back theatre wall, ‘on such and such a day I ran over and killed my sister’. This confronting beginning sets the tone for night.
Production elements were strong with good lighting effects and appropriate sound design. Nolte’s performance is strong, intimate and sustained
‘Nocturne’ had some strong moments. The guy has set himself up in a big city flat, determined to live an independent life.
The largest feature of his apartment is the huge number of books, intellectual in nature, that he has accumulated. His passion in life is reading.
His life seems to pick up when he befriends a woman at a café, and it seems that he will have some romance in his life again. He beds the lady down and finds he is impotent. He can’t bear to see her again.
He comes home, and in one of the play’s most explosive moments he kicks all the books onto the floor from their makeshift shelves. One can see what he is feeling, what do books matter, what does anything matter, when life is so painful?!
There’s another moment, kind of encapsulating this man’s life, when he talks about how he can’t play the piano anymore. He had ambitions of being a concert pianist and would train for many hours. Now he can’t touch the piano. It’s too sorrowful. The sounds emanating from the piano go right through him.
Like a piano, ‘Nocturne’ is the kind of play that cuts through one’s defences, and provides a powerful dramatic experience.