A new play is
always an exciting occasion, a debut play even more so. Kylie Coolwell’s Battle
of Waterloo is a contemporary study of life in the James Cook tower in Waterloo’s housing
commission estate. Begun in 2012 as part of Playwriting Australia’s Redfern
Playwriting Salon, Coolwell’s play depicts the life of a family over the course
of a week, in all its bloodsweatandtears, and shows just how important – how beautiful
– the sense of community is in one of these residential towers.
Produced by Sydney Theatre Company in their Wharf
1 theatre, the space is filled with Renée
Mulder’s ingenious set. Reminiscent of Bob
Crowley’s set for the recent revival of David Hare’s Skylight, it manages to convey an intimate interior and towering
exterior all at once, and seems to be a physical evocation of a line from C.S.
Lewis – “there is an extraordinary charm in other people’s domesticities. Every
lighted house, seen from the road, is magical: every pram or lawn-mower in
someone else’s garden: all smells or stirs of cookery from the windows of alien
kitchens.” While we see Cassie and her family in their little flat, marked out on
a series of low platforms with walls and doors – complete with balcony – around
them, we see the little strip of grass down below, the neighbours on their
balconies smoking or breathing in the night air, little pockets of light in the
dark theatre, and it is beautiful.
In his writer’s
note titled, appropriately enough, ‘Grappling with Gorky,’ Andrew Upton talks about the optimism
of Russian writers. “But not blind optimism, an optimism despite the obvious
impossibility of salvation.” You can see it the work of Tolstoy, Pasternak,
Chekhov, Gorky. Not just optimism but a need to tell stories, to examine and
investigate the dynamics of human interactions and the world they find
themselves caught up in. Earlier in the year, I had the good fortune to see State Theatre Company of South
Australia’s production of The
Seagull in Adelaide,
and between that production and Sydney
Theatre Company’s Children
of the Sun, there is a precious kind of alchemy at work, a resonance in
style, a conversation between plays and ideas which is beautiful to behold.
A new play is
always something to look forward to. Griffin Theatre Company knows this, and
has made it their mission to be Australia’s new writing theatre. Back in
1986, Griffin produced Michael Gow’s (third)
play Away; a critical and
popular success, it quickly became Australia’s most produced play as well as a mainstay
of English syllabuses across the country. Now, twenty-eight years later, Eamon
Flack is directing Gow’s latest play, Once In
Royal David’s City for Belvoir.
Billed as “eloquent,
playful, big-thinking, tender and fierce … an astonishing act of theatrical
invention,” it sounds like it should be the next Babyteeth
(also directed by Flack for Belvoir). But a strange thing happens to Gow’s
play, when it is taken off the page and put on its feet, when it is spoken and
acted. On the page, it is very dialogue-heavy which all theatre is by default.
But on its feet, it is very much the Will Drummond show, almost an
uninterrupted one-hundred-minute monologue, in which the other characters
(actors?) are merely pawns in his chess game, tools to help him tell his story.
