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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