Love Song by John Kolvenbach. Centrepiece Theatre directed by
Jordan Best at The Q, Queanbyean Performing Arts Centre, October 5-9
and 12-15, 2011.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
My
evening began with a rather boring and certainly unsophisticated
presentation of the Canberra Theatre Centre’s program for 2012. That
doesn’t mean that the program contains no shows of interest. Just the
unfunny ‘humour’ of the on-stage presenters between talking heads videos
was terribly anti-dramatic, in unfortunate contrast, I should say, to
the excellent modern dance item by Charmene Yap and Richard Cilli from
Sydney Dance Company. Even the aria and duet from Don Giovanni, though sung quite well, were not staged or acted to the standard one might expect for this theatre.
The 2012 season is an eclectic and quite varied set of ‘Collected Works’ which you can check out at canberratheatrecentre.com.au/season2012 .
What a relief, then, to dash over to Queanbeyan for Love Song.
Jordan Best’s Centrepiece Theatre have done good work since their
inception six years ago, and have become one of the region’s reliably
worthwhile small independent companies. The Q stage, also small and
worthwhile, with good sightlines and acoustics, was a nice choice of
venue for this production.
Direction and design are
right for this play, and all the actors – Tim Sekuless as Beane, Jenna
Roberts as his sister Joan, Jim Adamik as her husband Harry and Sophie
Benassi as Beane’s ‘lover’ Molly – have captured the absurdity of the
situation, timed the comedy very well and created a genuine sense of
empathy at the right moments.
The tricky thing about
this play is that it can easily appear that Beane represents a realistic
character with a mental illness. Some reviewers of other productions
seem to assume this, but what is his illness? Is it an extreme form of
autism? No, autistic people are normally rational, despite their
problems with making social connections. Is it depression? It certainly
seems bi-polar, but Beane’s kind of fantasy is out of place. Is it
schizophrenia, since Beane seems to have illusions which seem real to
him? Perhaps. But in the end this play is not derived from the
author’s research into actual mental health states.
His
characters are metaphors for types of people. The play is a purely
fictional dramatic construct, designed to make us think about ourselves
in comparison to his characters. It seems a very modern play (first
produced in 2006) but the technology, the language and the jobs
characters have are merely superstructure.
Beane
represents no more than a character who is unable to understand the
world he lives in, and creates a fantasy (Molly) of sexual success.
Only when he comes to recognise what he has done does he begin to come
to terms with reality. This is Hamlet – though Ophelia is real, it is
her role as his fantasy which he has to come to terms with: a tragedy
because she really dies before he reaches understanding. Kolvenbach
plays something of a game with us by making Molly appear to be real to
us, as well as to Beane, and she appears to us to really leave him at
the point of his realisation that she is no more than his fantasy. This
makes for a happy ending – making the play a comedy.
Because
the play is an imaginary construct, the production needs to make that
clear to us. The provenance of this play is more like the absurdism of
Ionesco’s Rhinoceros or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot than even Albee’s The Zoo Story
which at first sight it seems to be similar to. On the other hand all
these authors were much more stringent, and never produced a neat OK
conclusion like Kolvenbach, where Joan and Harry find love while Beane
finds himself. Nor did Shakespeare. Maybe Kolvenbach has not honestly
come to terms with the reality of the human condition.
Yet,
despite Kolvenbach not being quite the great playwright, Jordan Best
and her team have done his script proud. In fact they have made the
play seem better than it is. What that says about coming to terms with
reality, I’ll leave to you, the reader and hopefully the viewer of Love Song at The Q.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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