State Theatre Company, Belvoir and Malthouse Theatre in association with Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty's Theatre. 26 Feb 2016
David Greig is a fulsomely credentialed and amazingly prolific Scottish playwright and dramatist, with works commissioned and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre of Scotland. So why did The Events just leave me feeling glum?
The Events premiered in Edinburgh in 2013 and is set in a small Scottish town, although you will find little of Scotland in the play and it could have been set anywhere. The work is Greig's response to the Norwegian mass murder of two years before. Claire, an Anglican minister, is leading a choir in a plainly staged rehearsal space. Played by Catherine McClements, she is impossibly cheery, chatty and friendly. The choir sings and the energy level is right up there. Claire coaxes a young man - or as the programme refers to him, The Boy - up onto the stage to participate. Thanks to Johnny Carr's performance, the energy evaporates and never really recovers. Besides you know who, Carr is also charged with playing multiple roles - father, friend, politician - who are associated with the gunman, and as Claire interviews all who the gunman knew, she sees the gunman. There he is again as Claire's partner, Katrina, and her counselor. I just see Carr struggling to differentiate these characters, or maybe he wasn't supposed to - I don't know what director Clare Watson required, it's not clear.
Claire is searching for answers, but we already know there aren't any that satisfy. Peter Shaffer provided this exploration much more effectively in Equus in a time when we weren't inundated with mass murders. Bob Geldof wrote about it in I Don't Like Mondays. So the play plods on with a metronomic evenness. A rare bright spot is a scene demonstrating how Claire's obsession is out of control with partner Katrina.
A consistent theme of Greig's work is to foster a connectedness between the characters in spite of huge gulfs. The choir is different every performance but that didn't mean much to me as I'm only seeing the show once, and that was one time too many. Chorus members weren't even given the script until just before walking onstage, so we could have their genuine reactions, but this was a failed device because their wasn't terribly much to react to, and if it was worth watching, I wasn't looking at the choir. The few lines chorus members had were woodenly read as they just got the script and they're not actors anyways. Unlike a Greek chorus.
After seeing Go Down, Moses the night before, the production values were utterly plain. Mostly lit by the bright lights one would find in a gym, Claire was busy putting chairs out and restacking them for no dramatic worth. The Boy annoyingly kept returning to the coffee urn set stage left.
In the end, evil is banal, like this play and production.
David Grybowski
When: 25 Feb to 5 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
