State Theatre Company. The Space Theatre. 20 Aug 2013
The dying child is a grim theme. The thought does not woo one to the theatre. But, as depicted through the thoughtful expertise of director Chris Drummond and the State team, playwright Rita Kalnejais has lifted it into a strangely beautiful and hauntingly memorable experience.
‘Babyteeth’ is a meditation on loss - from both the perspective of flailing, panic-stricken parents and from her, the teen on her lonely path to impending mortality.
There is no justice. It's a godless play. Yet it uplifts. It finds heroes in the darkness. And, it has a shimmering edge of humour.
Mundanity and bumbling domesticity clank with human absurdity and, with the same extraordinary skill which took ‘When the Rain Stopped Falling’ to such unforgettable heights, Drummond seems almost to suspend the play in time. The clock is ticking in all directions. Indeed, the play starts at the end. The grief is born before the journey. And yet the days are long and complex.
For ‘Babyteeth’, The Space takes on proscenium character, the stage boxed-high. Unpolished wooden louvres ventilate an airy, open-plan house. With gentle irony, the moveable expanse of slatted walls and doors suggest a Queenslander paradise location. There's a fig tree outside. The sky is a glorious blue. It is a certainty and a comfort that all can share.
Through the play's changing days and between the settings of home, the music teacher's house, the clinic and even the train station, the louvred panels, with impeccably evocative lighting from Geoff Cobham, deliver not only a potent sense of place but always aspects of striking aesthetic. And, they deliver recognition that designer Wendy Todd, among whose credits is Barrio, now is a risen force in theatre art.
Pivotal to the success of this play are the dimensions of its characters. Each is a stereotype but not a cliché. These are people for whom one cares; even Gidon, the lonely, quirky, hospitable old music teacher with his thick European accent and his generosity with boiled eggs. Paul Blackwell gives him a living heart and we all understand him. There is a solitary Asian boy, sometimes at the railway station or in the street. His lines are few but his role has philosophic oomph in this world of the living and the dying. Then there is the girl with the dog next door...
Focal, however, is the doomed Millar, the terminal teen still with one milk tooth. Danielle Catanzariti embodies the final cruel phase of her life with nigh clinical acuity. It is a give-all performance in which there are moments that sear into memory.
Millar is freed of dependence upon her anxious, protective parents when she meets Moses, the junkie. He is both predator and saviour and Matt Crook delivers him with scrawniness and transformational soul. It's a champion performance. Claire Jones as Anna, poignantly represents the fear and fret of mothers all. She is attempting normality in a living nightmare. She's doling out drugs to the patient while her psychiatrist husband, Henry, doles them out to her. You never saw so many pills. Chris Pitman's performance as Henry is bravura of the subtlest kind. He creates a tragi-comic man desperate to make it all right for everyone, to be the anchor of his floundering family.
The play is not perfect. But it is so succinct that one forgives it the odd awkward metaphor.
One is just happy to revel in theatre of this quality.
It's about death and it's heavenly.
Samela Harris
When: 16 Aug to 7 Sep
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
