Customers by Robert Reid, June 20, 2000

Theatre of Decay

at Hotel Bakpak until July 1, 2000

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

Twice in ten days we have been party to theatre in a bedroom. The Secret Room (IRAA) is one woman's intensely personal revelation performed in her own home. Customers, written by Robert Reid, is played in a bedroom of a real backpackers hotel in the city.

This necessarily constrains the performance space, restricts the audience to about twenty people and confines the design to the realistic.

As in Secret Room, there is a sense of audience as voyeur. We are not invited into the reality of the two characters, Claire (Telia Nevile) and Jerome. (Reid) Rather, we sit awkwardly on the edge of their bleak world which is framed by the four walls of the hotel room and the double bed on which they act out their fraught relationship.

This forty minute play is written and directed by Reid who also performs. It is an intimate investigation of a moment in the shared life of two young prostitutes.

The direction is appropriately simple  and the action happens in real time. Forty minutes is forty minutes in this room. There is no leaping from scene to scene, abstracting time and place.

This is not to say that the style is naturalistic. Reid's text relies heavily on metaphor and poetic dialogue. At times the literary quality of the words becomes cumbersome but most of the time it works.

The performances are relaxed and, most of the time, truthful. With an audience so close, it is difficult to disguise nerves or artifice. Nevile is less comfortable with the poetic text and both are inclined to rush lines at times.

These characters are ruined and ruin each other. They choose to meet daily in this seedy room but they clearly hate each other. We witness mutual punishment, decadence, lost innocence and a craving for affection that can never be satisfied in each other's arms.

The story has a circular, hapless quality that reflects the directionless lives of the pair of hookers. We know that they will do the same thing the next day - and the next - and the next.

Another novelty is the opportunity to get a close-up look inside the backpackers hotel .It exceptionally well appointed with bar, cafe, internet room, travel agency and comfy beds. Kids just don't know how to travel in discomfort these days!

By Kate Herbert