Truth and Brutality, June 21, 2000

by Jessica Lockhart

at La Mama until July 2, 2000

Reviewer: Kate Herbert

The first thing one notices about Truth and Brutality is the elegant and beautifully designed set by Meredith Rogers. Second is the detailed  and compelling direction by Neil Pigot which allows the play to open mysteriously in silence.

The silence is followed by a live trombone playing in our ears in the midst of the audience. It is all surprising and immediately engaging.

Pigot takes Jessica Lockhart's rather standard duologue and weaves several layers of theatrical fabric through it. The result is like looking through a prism at the two characters. (John Sheedy, Kim Denman)

Without this imaginative direction, the play would remain cryptic and patchy. Lockhart's narrative is based on the premise that conflict creates drama. Hence, the entire interaction is angry, abusive, manipulative and barbed which pall eventually.

Lockhart uses plenty of literary allusions and writes some very witty and entertaining repartee, often focused on observations about gender differences. The woman is vain, staring into a mirror continually. She demeans the man's romance novel writing, belittles him and threatens to leave him.

At moments they read passages from his Mills and Boon novel which he pulls from the typewriter. Pigot, in his directorial debut, theatricalises the entire relationship, dragging it away from television naturalism into a peculiar and abstract isolated world in which these two are incarcerated.

Denman has an engaging, perky and provocative style while Sheedy maintains a nervous energy that works most of the time for this cowed lover.

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The pair have a 'real' relationship in which they taunt and seduce each other, communicate by phone while in the same room and plan to go out to drink with friends.

They have a 'play-acting' relationship in which the woman pretends to be an acerbic and witty Dorothy Parker doppelganger and the man a working novelist. Finally they have a violent and deadly relationship in which one of them must die.

The journey of the characters begins when the actual physical danger kicks in. A glass is broken and one's nerve ending start screaming. Someone is going to get hurt. Sit in the back rows. The text gets more interesting now.

The look and style of this production make the script look better than it actually is. But, hey, theatre is a collaboration.

By Kate Herbert