Cosi by Louis Nowra

Cosi by Louis Nowra.  Free-Rain Theatre Company at Currong Theatre, Gorman House, Thurs - Sat April 30 - May 9, 1998.

    Nowra's play works at many different levels, emphasising the humanity of mentally ill people against the background of the inhumanity of warfare.  Anne Somes' production, with a young company, of this often funny but terribly ironic drama is competent and effective, though without the subtlety which a fully professional company would bring to it.

    The play (rather than the film version) is well worth seeing for tight interweaving of characters and themes.  Somes has formed a strong ensemble of actors who, although differing in degrees of experience, each create a clearly delineated character.  The result is a definite sense of purpose.  The humour and the issues in the script come through.

    This production is part of the New EreKtions program in which The Jigsaw Company supports the work of young companies.  Director Lynnette Wallis sees the program as a natural extension of Jigsaw's educational drama work in schools, providing a continuing development opportunity for our young adults.  This production of Cosi demonstrates the value, and success, of Jigsaw's aims.

    Cosi is confronting, as the young Lewis (immediately called "Jerry" by his cast) attempts to direct a theatre production with inhabitants of a Melbourne mental institution in 1971.  Sexual and destructive motivations are expressed with few inhibitions; violent mood swings take place in an institutional space which includes us, the audience.  And Somes added large projections of those horrifying television news images which turned people in the US and here against the war in Vietnam.  It really is disturbing to see these again, so explicit and uncompromising, and unavoidable.

    My personal response was that presenting these images in between the Nowra scenes became a distraction from the central focus of Lewis's coming to recognise how feeling for each other is more important than what we feel about, or against, each other.  Julie, drug addict and potential sexual partner for Lewis, mentions the boredom of watching TV in the institutional lounge room.  Maybe, for me, a representation of this lounge, with the TV news from Vietnam playing continuously, mostly silently, in the background, might have clarified the symbolic nature of the play and have had a more subtle effect.

© Frank McKone, Canberra