Gasworks Theatre, Feb 14 to March 2, 2003
Reviewer: Kate
Herbert
The cavernous space
of the Gasworks Theatre is unforgiving. It needs to be filled. Snapshots, written
by Peter Hardman and directed by Susan Pilbeam makes a valiant attempt to fill the space but it still
remains huge and hollow.
Hardman's play is constructed
in a series of short scenes about seven people and their various and nefarious
relationships. Their connections
are sometimes shady business, unromantic love triangles, the meeting of artistic
desires or just plain platonic.
Ben (Alan King) is an ambitious land
developer who wants to build 'eco-lodges' into the hills overlooking the
glorious ocean views of an isolated and dying coastal town. His offer is
accepted by the owner of the land ( Reg Gorman) but he meets resistance from the town cop ( Robert Kelty) and
Kerry, (Peter Stratford) a wealthy businessman who wants to build
a hotel.
A stroppy, pretty
young woman (Venta Rutkauskas) complicates the narrative by seducing all the
men. Hardman's two
stories sit uncomfortably together. The graft and corruption around the coastal
property is at odds with the various sexual peccadilloes of the characters.
In order to represent
the numerous locations for these relationships, Pilbeam moves the action around
the nearly empty stage.
One potentially
interesting device is that the design is not actually constructed on the stage.
Location and atmosphere are created by slides of landscape, people or paintings
on two huge screens. These are evocative
initially. However, the slides lose much of their fascination and effectiveness
by Act Two.
Scene changes are
too slow. With so many truncated scenes and several narrative threads and
styles running simultaneously, the movement between stories and locations needs
to be swifter and more efficient. Even music covering some of the slower
silent changes could assist the mood and pace.
There are some good performances
from Stratford and Gorman but the quality of the acting is uneven and the pace
unvaried. The characters are two-dimensional and their relationships are
predictable and under-developed. In the end we do not have any sympathy for any
of the characters. We do not care about them.
By Kate Herbert
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