Babyteeth by Rita Kalnejais. Directed by Eamon Flack for Belvoir at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, February 11 – March 8, 2012
Reviewed by Frank McKone
February 25
It
scares the life out of me to see a play that can so emotionally shake
me, written by such a young person. Then I look back in history and
realise that William Shakespeare was about the same age as Rita
Kalnejais when his first plays began to be noticed. Babyteeth is her second.
I
remembered that Shakespeare died when he was 20 years younger than I am
now and ten years older than I was when I made my only serious attempt
to write a play (which got no further than a professional reading).
But, looking back again, I did try to persuade Broken Hill Repertory to
put on the legendary beginning of kitchen sink drama: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger
(1956). They thought it was too radical and risqué for 1964 (Alison
wears her petticoat while she does the ironing), so I directed Arthur
Miller’s All My Sons instead.
Why all this reminiscing? Because Babyteeth
is literally a kitchen sink play, and because it is so good to see a
new play with all the strengths of the best of its tradition.
In fact I reckon Rita has done better than William did in plays like Two Gentlemen of Verona. There’s more guts here (I’ll explain later) as well as a similar wild sense of humour. Babyteeth is, in a modern way, even more succinct than The Taming of the Shrew concerning falling in love and maintaining a marriage, and deals with these matters with more depth than Look Back in Anger.
Kalnejais’ parents (Anna played by Helen Buday, and Henry played by
Greg Stone) show more complexity in response to the death of their
daughter (Milla, played by Sara West) than Miller’s parents do to the
death of their son. And where Shakespeare could have written about the
Black Death but never did, she dares to write about the inevitability of
death – a teenager dying of cancer.
That’s where guts
and vomiting come into the picture. It took all of the 40 minutes in
first gear crawling from Belvoir Street along Cleveland Street and South
Dowling Street before my palpitations slowed as the traffic at last
sped up.
The structure of the play is a twist on a
fairly common device. The end is played at the beginning, which morphs
into the past and leads to the end we thought we had already seen.
Except that only then do we learn what really happened. Then there is a
coda – a quite lengthy positive musical note, which is a surprise at
first but completes the narrative and eases us out of the harsh reality
of sex and death. Yet, as I found out while driving home, even this
resolution cannot assuage the hidden feelings.
To the
production: it’s clear from the author’s and director’s notes that the
play on stage is a cooperative creation of writer, director, actors and
designers – just as good plays have always been. Not only is the play
good, but all the work of these practitioners is top quality. Kathryn
Beck – you’ll remember her eyes and a fascinating
going-in-all-directions quality on tv in East of Everything –
makes pregnant Toby and her dog the lively comic foil exactly as needed
for the tragedy besetting Milla, her unlikely boyfriend Moses (archly
played by Eamon Farren), her psychologist father and distraught mother,
whose relationship with Milla’s violin teacher (Gidon, played
extravagantly by Russel Dykstra) and his small boy student (Thuong –
David Carreon or Sean Chu according to the day) is unexpected, quite
remarkable, and finally crucial to her coming to grips with death.
To
top it all, I drove home towards brilliant dramatic blood-red sunset
clouds against a fragile teal blue sky, a wonderful reminder of the
cloud Milla sees, of her tragic death, and of a beautiful play.
When
you buy the program you have the traditional Currency Press publication
of this new Australian playscript. It’s this total collaboration of
author, production team, actors and publisher that makes the best of
Belvoir about as good as you can get in theatre today.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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