Warning! The protagonist in Geoffrey Atherden’s new play is a creep of a man!
Atherden’s play is a portrait of scruffy, middle-aged artist Barry Smith, painting out his days, living a hermit like existence, in his bush studio.
In his prime, Smith was a leading member of the Sydney Push and had one of his radical exhibitions raided by the Vice Squad.
The play sees him being visited, separately, by two women. First his estranged daughter Alex, after a twenty year absence, turns up to finally get some burning issues out in the open. Alex does this under the guise of being a film documentary maker and has chosen her father as one of her subjects.
Smith is also visited by Daisy, an attractive young woman, an arts student from Swinburne University and a long time admirer of his work, who wants to spend some time with him and find out what makes him tick.
William Zappa, one of Australia’s finest stage performers, plays Barry Smith. He is good, maybe too good! Zappa’s Barry Smith is an egocentric life-long rebel, and a slave and devotee to his art, and to his rampant sexuality. As Alex describes, one of the horrors of her childhood was that he used to attend school speech nights with women not much older than her, wearing the shortest of skirts, and embarrassing the hell out of her!
Atherden’s play continues a long, running dialogue about the importance of separating the artist from the work that he or she creates. Through history there have been many artists who have created important works who have been poor examples of human beings. The world ends up thanking them for their creative works but you sure do feel sorry for their families, partners and friends!
Michelle Doake is excellent as Alex. Doake plays a mature woman who is trying to finally come to some sort of acceptance of her father, after years of shutting him out of her life. Some of the exchanges between father and daughter are explosive. Her sense of frustration with her father echoes and bounces off the theatre walls.
Jessica Sullivan gives a fine performance as the enigmatic Daisy, an intelligent, bold, flirtatious young woman. Smith teases her describing her name as meaning ‘popular weed’. I couldn’t quite figure out whether this was supposed to be a reference to her character. As clever as it may be, the analogy doesn’t sit well.
Steven Butler’s set is awesome, immediately bringing the audience into Smith’s world with its portrait of an out of control artists studio.
This is a night at the theatre that stirs and provokes. Mark Kilmurry’s production of WARNING: EXPLICIT MATERIAL’ opened at the Ensemble Theatre, 78 McDougall street, Kirribilli, on Friday 4th November and runs until Sunday 11th December, 2011.
(c) David Kary
8th November, 2011
Tags: WARNING: EXPLICIT MATERIAL, Geoffrey Atherden, Ensmeble Theatre, Mark Kilmurry, William Zappa, Michelle Doake, Jessica Sullivan, Steven Butler.