Which child
doesn’t, at some point or another, dream of reaching the stars? It’s an idea
that’s been floating around the place lately, for perhaps a year or two, at
least noticeably since ‘the man on the moon’ Neil Armstrong passed away in
2012. In Paul Gilchrist’s play Rocket Man playing at
Darlinghurst’s TAP Gallery theatre, the idea of reaching for the stars is spun
into another cosmos, a personal intimate universe of relationships,
storytelling, the nature of playing and the theatre.
In a nutshell,
Gilchrist’s play orbits around Neil and Veronica, who met at a party the night
before. Veronica is an actor with an audition for a role at the STC. Neil tells
girls he’s an astronaut. Before she can leave, she has to get rid of the rocket
man. Set against this main plot, is another orbiting around Claudia, a casualty
nurse, and her boyfriend Justin, a house painter. As both stories’ orbits
collide, as the moment of launch is reached, we are given a fleeting glimpse of
the private fears and passions at the heart of each character’s world.
Set in Veronica’s
bedroom – designed with particular attention to detail by Rachel Scane – it is
in many respects a bitter play: bitter and defensive, but there is also a
yearning, a passion to dream, a desire to try to get someone else to see the
world from your shoes. As with many plays about theatre and theatrical habits,
Chekhov and Hamlet are discussed,
obliquely and directly. Rather than being merely exercises in name-dropping,
their inclusion and reference serves to cement the play’s central thesis within
the grounds of a much larger (and perhaps more undefinable) one – the question
of ‘why play? Why make theatre?’ It is also quite self-deprecating and
meta-referential but it takes a palpable hit at the current proliferation of
‘Australianised’ productions of The Classics, proposing new productions of
Chekhov’s four main plays in The Cherry
Ripe, Uncle Vineyard, The Seagull. And Another One. And Another
One, and The Three Sisters.
Launching off Neil and Veronica’s extended (and, at times, quite heated)
discussion about theatre and the process of storytelling, Claudia and Justin’s
interrogates the idea of the personal stories we tell, those of the things we
see and experience, the ones we overhear and relate to others, the ones we find
ourselves caught up in against our wishes, the ones we are powerless to stop
regardless of whether we could’ve or not. While the main discussion is
certainly passionate and forceful, I found Claudia and Justin’s final moments
to be only the beginning of their conversation, and would’ve liked for it to
have continued longer than it did.
The cast were all
strong, though Justin’s character seemed weaker and more defeatist than he
needed to be; regardless of Neil’s overbearing nature, Justin’s comment – “Someone
needs to be wrong. I can be that person” – seemed to negate any kind of authority
and strength he may have previously held. Veronica’s dignified and unwavering defence of her profession and passion in the face of Neil’s vehement denial of
its worth was credible, as was the brief glimpse into Claudia’s inability to
cope with the traumas she sees night after night in the casualty department.
Ultimately, while I don’t doubt the veracity and the
passion of Gilchrist’s writing, I found Neil’s loathing and belittling of
Veronica’s occupation to be too unwavering and self-destructive to be realistic
or credible. While we certainly saw his character change, it seemed that the
sustained barrage of his attack undermined any of the (sexual) attraction that
was present between him and Veronica at the beginning.
For all the build-up and the countdown, the desired moment of
lift-off was buried too deep in a cloud of noxious gas and fire to be
ultimately transcendent.
Theatre
playlist: 18. Astral
Boy, Killing Heidi
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