Can't Leave Tomorrow Alone by Vanessa Rowell, directed by Emma Valente.
Hoist Theatre @ Theatreworks, until February 25. One Way Street by David
Grieg, directed by Chris Bendall. With Simon Kingsley Hall. Theatre@Risk at
45 Downstairs.
The revenge tragedy, as exemplified in the Jacobean plays of John Webster or
John Ford, is a place of fabulous excess. These works excavate sexual
passions and political intrigue from the darkest corners of the human
psyche, and play them out remorselessly in a dystopian reality that permits
no redemption. In the world of the revenge tragedy, there is no such thing
as innocence: everyone is implicated in the carnal realities of this fallen
world, and the price for the ecstatic revulsion that its base materiality
evokes is always blood.
It is a theatre of extremity and, crucially, a poetic theatre: a forerunner
of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Howard Barker's Theatre of Catastrophe,
or of plays like Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade or Sarah Kane's Blasted . Which is
to say that Vanessa Rowell's Can't Leave Tomorrow Alone can't be faulted on
its ambition. A contemporary inflection on revenge tragedy, it brings to its
portrayal of middle-class suburbia the erotic darkness of sexual cruelty and
exploitation.
The set-up - which swiftly reveals that Jason (Jasper Bagg) is having a
passionately obsessive affair with his adopted Asian daughter Chantel (Ma-an
Adriano) - made me wonder fleetingly if this was an "issue" play about sex
slavery. Then, when the sado-masochistic nature of Jason's relationship with
his wife Abigail (Alexis Beebe) unfolds, and Chantel runs off and is
imprisoned by an inscrutably asexual lover, there is the issue of male
violence. But thankfully, the play never pretends to portray documentary
realities: the language is heightened and poetic, unafraid of attempting
almost Elizabethan flourishes or of pushing beyond the tragic to a black,
ironic vision of absurdity.
Read more at http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
All the best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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