Theatre: Strata // Forgiveness
Words by Ivan Bucalo Jankovic
A challenging, dark double-bill from one of Adelaide’s most daring theatres
This review contains minor plot details for Strata // Forgiveness.
Directors: Tiffany Lyndall-Knight (Strata), Anthony Nicola (Forgiveness)
Length: 120 minutes + 15 minute interval
4/5 stars
Since Rumpus Theatre opened its doors in the industrial district of Bowden in 2019, it’s become a model for what theatre should be in the age of entertainment that offers many choices but slim variety: totally and utterly unpredictable.
Rumpus puts on works-in-progress, works that haven’t made a lot of progress in a while, and works that have just hit their stride and are ready to be shown to the world. There’s the sort of theatre we like because it runs like a well-greased machine. Then there’s the sheer chaotic pleasure of seeing how far a rickety old engine can take you until you just stop in the middle of nowhere. Rumpus is in the second category, and embraces it with productions that tackle the big themes — gender, power, sexuality, mental health — in an intimate warehouse setting where you can practically feel the actors’ breaths on your neck.
The two one-act plays of this double bill, Strata and Forgiveness, are a perfect marriage in hindsight. Though very different, both are about what happens when we violate things that are considered eternally sacred.
Strata (written by Peter Beaglehole) is about the relationship between a yuppy entrepreneur, Brodie (Max Garcia Underwood), his sister, Robyn (Caithlin O’Loghlen), and her husband, Phil (Ben Tamba), who is also Brodie’s business partner in environmentally dubious hotel venture. The play opens with the furious Robyn whittling a plank from the hull of their family yacht, on a lean, versatile set designed by Meg Wilson that could function just as well as a hotel room, a beach, or a farmstead, but keeps the actors enclosed like zoo animals. Robyn has more to be angry about than just her brother’s less-than-green politics, and over the course of the hour, we find out why in excruciating detail.
It’s the product of a writer that is turning over a lot in their head, according to Beaglehole: “Strata is made from compelling images, objects, and ideas,” he writes in the program, listing them off: “The Plastiglomerate, a term that describes stones made of sediment and hardened molten plastic, markers of the Anthropocene… Ghassan Haighe’s writing on whiteness… Walter Benjamin’s pessimistic Angel of History, who stares into the brokenness of progress…” Our duty to protect the environment is still a theme artists have not figured out a way to represent properly. Beaglehole shrewdly takes the approach not of a preacher, but an observer who sees a reflection of what Freud called the death drive — our inexplicable ability as a species to destroy ourselves knowingly — in the human race’s callous treatment of the environment.
However, the thing about a play like this is that it lives or dies by the measure of its actors, because it’s not until the very end you can step back and see the full picture what Strata is really about. You need to trust the actors enough to take their hands on this journey. And as fine as these performers are, one gets the impression that either because they are over-rehearsed or under-rehearsed, they’ve not inhabited their characters in the flesh and blood. But I can’t fault them for trying to fill some pretty big boots.
Piri Eddy’s Forgiveness tackles a big theme of its own: the desperation of those who want to escape, whether it be their fates, their homes, or their lives altogether. For teenaged Sophie (Kathryn Adams), trapped in regional Australia, it’s all three. Her father, Jack (Sam Calleja), is not well in the head, and her mother, Jane (Lucy Lehmann), can’t do much about it except try to protect her daughter the best she can. Things only get worse once a boy comes into Sophie’s life, but this is a play underscored by tenderness and humour, even in its darkest moments. It’s a quintessentially Australian play in the vein of Andrew Bovell’s work, in that the characters can laugh at themselves even as their world is being torn apart.
Forgiveness is the meatier script with fine performances all-round. Calleja especially deserves praise for playing the unhinged Jack with enough of that larrikin touch that I felt he was a creature to be pitied more than despised. But Forgiveness is a play full of those sorts of creatures, and watching them is like being a child and peering into your neighbours’ window when you hear them fighting.
Strata and Forgiveness echo a recurring theme in Rumpus’ programming: they are about things which we can’t bear to see, but can’t turn away from when they’re put right in front of us. Adelaide needs a home for these things, and it’s certainly found one in Rumpus Theatre. Long may it live.
Strata // Forgiveness runs for three more nights on Feb 19th to 21st — 7PM (Tix available through FringeTix).
