Friday 22 November 1996

VCA Theatre Makers 1996 Nov 22, 1996

 Theatre Makers - Two plays
Victorian College of the Arts Drama School
The Great Divide by Tony Reck
 Old People by Alex Green
 VCA Drama School

The aged are often believed to live in their pasts in a non-sexual haze of heart drugs, tea and toast. The two oldies in Alex Green's short work, Old People, are no exception to this myth.

This black-comic masked piece is located in the rough, concrete back space of the Drama School building of VCA. The location provided the perfect setting for a cyclone wire enclosed rubbish dump. Do the old couple live on a tip? Is it a metaphor for their dislocated lives? Either way, the design serves the narrative.

These two, who appear to be Eastern European post-war immigrants who have not done to well financially in the land of milk and honey, pine for their pasts, their secrets, imagined or long-lost friends, their almost forgotten sexuality. They play games, taunt and dress up in giant teddy costumes. The past is a place of joy and sadness. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, "It's rosemary." "That's for remembrance." It seems to be all they have, apart from each other.

Tony Reck's play script was workshopped at the Playwrights' conference this year but it required a full production to realise its predominantly visual and physical emphasis. David Symons, himself a VCA graduate, has scattered the sparse dialogue amidst multi-media imagery provided by multiple slide screens, film projector, soundscape and recorded voice. It is primarily a conceptual piece of theatre, influenced by the abstraction of performance art.

The juxtaposition of imagery is effective at times but most often it remains bewildering or overstated. The hour long piece takes off fifteen minutes in when the actual narrative about a family is clarified to some degree. To suggest that there is a coherent narrative thread is to undermine the style and concept of Reck's work and Symon's direction.

The characters are representative of the family of parents and two sons. The jump-cut physical movement style fragments moments of their lives and the shifts in relationships. The dislocation of people in suburbia is accented and the dysfunction of families in the modern world is heightened by the abstraction.

The work of the VCA Theatremakers (writers, directors and animateurs) is showcased this week in various college venues.

KATE HERBERT

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