Mysteries by Tom Lindstrom, REVIEW, 23 June 1994

Venue unrecorded.

Reviewer: Kate Herbert, 23 June 1994

This review published in The Melbourne Times after 23 June1994

 

Mysteries is an exceptionally funny, twisted view of the world through the psyche of the solitary, desperate and alien Edwin Cowper; a peculiar man who is amazed when others think him peculiar.

 

Tom Lindstrom's latest play, directed by Tom Gutteridge, is based loosely on Knut Hamsun's novel of 1892. The protagonist arrives in a hick country town. Both he and the town are riddled with unsolved mysteries; dislikeable young man has suicided; hunchback dances for money; Cowper's family may be murdered, abandoned or non-existent.

 

David Wicks plays Cowper with a faintly amused, quizzical and almost rapturous quality. He calls himself, cynically, a "professor of moral philosophy". Wicks is an eccentric and absorbing actor. His joyful, dynamic and constantly surprising performance often left me gasping.

 

All Cowper's conversations are somehow perverse but poetic, fascinating but disquieting in their intensity. He is a truth-sayer and a psychic with nothing to lose. Lindstrom's delicate but dense language is moulded by Wicks into some strange other-worldly creature. The two are a hot combo.

 

The comedy is often ribald or grimly amusing. I found myself laughing at farts during a funeral, and then at a gruesome, but disconcertingly hilarious, buggery scene.  Bizarre attempts to cover excruciatingly slow scene changes with mumbling actors dressed in mourning, shattered the atmosphere and drove me to distraction.

 

Minor characters are as eccentric as Cowper (pronounced "Cooper", he insists). Peter, the annoyingly obsequious hunchback (Bob Pavlich), is the butt of the whole town's scorn and was a role with more dramatic potential. A forbidding chamber maid is played with an intense watchfulness by Carole Patullo.

 

Lindstrom's subtle weaving of language, his quirky vision of reality, his portrayal of an existential dilemma, the arresting beauty of his images, all create a captivating theatrical vision.

 

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