M/C Reviews: Review of 'Small Mercies'

	Review of 'Small Mercies' Bill Hatherall
	La Boite presents Daniel Keene's Small Mercies	06 Nov. 01

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Bit 1		La Boite has lived up to its long-established reputation as the home of innovative theatre in Brisbane with Small Mercies, an enthralling evening of language, movement and sound that develops five short texts by Daniel Keene. The pieces, employing a total of only five speaking actors with choreographed silent support from QUT drama students, explore themes of memory, loneliness, and separation through monologues and duologues often set against the background of ‘crowd’ scenes and tableaux vivantes. In the psychological intensity of the narratives, the often poetic indirection of Keene’s language, and the stylised choreography of the La Boite production (the pieces separately directed by Fraser Corfield and Nadine McDonald), this is a welcome departure from the gregarious realism of much mainstream Australian theatre. Indeed, at moments you could almost imagine you were watching a contemporary Irish piece that developed the poetic and non-realist tradition of writers like Beckett and Singe.
Bit 2		Various images and dramatic structures resonated through the pieces - the device of a letter that linked the actor to an absent other person or time; the recurring images of water, trains, rain and sunlight; the oppositions between the individual and the crowd, and between society and nature, that were rendered through the choreography and the evocative musical score. Such connections made the evening more than the succession of the five short plays, intense and beautifully crafted as each was. The production also developed interesting variations in the use of the speaking actors - from the opening piece, ‘The Violin’, where three members of a family spoke of the past in a series of static (but interconnecting) individual addresses to the audience, to the highly developed monologues of ‘Untitled Monologue’ and ‘The Rain’, to the intense father-son and mother-daughter duologues of (respectively) ‘To Whom It May Concern’ and ‘Neither Lost Nor Found’. The use of the supporting actors in constantly varying roles and configurations also provided a rich counterpoint to the work of the speaking actors. Even the absence of the ‘crowd’ in the penultimate piece works as a variation that offers a new focus for the audience.
Bit 3		The interaction between individual actor and supporting ensemble was indeed perhaps the most powerful part of this production, lifting Keene’s poetic (but perhaps somewhat spare) texts into an ensemble piece with some of the interactive complexity of a great concerto. This meeting of the individual and the crowd was nowhere more successful than in ‘Untitled Monologue’, where the story of an isolated young man’s slide into violence was played out against the backdrop of crowd scenes that symbolise the social world into which his ego dangerously tread. The piece alternated between the character’s increasingly forlorn letters to his father (recited with a spotlight drawing him out from the crowd) and his interior monologues (where he almost became a part of the crowd) that charted the outcome of his meeting with a woman in a bar. The beautifully choreographed crowd scenes portrayed a world often starkly divided by gender, hinting at the sexual violence in which the piece ends. The juxtaposition of the two worlds, rendered through increasingly jaunty transitions as the piece progressed, worked brilliantly in almost violently tearing the audience between sympathy for the man’s loneliness and horror at the (never completely explicit) violence. In the final piece, ‘The Rain’, the crowd gave texture to an old woman’s reminiscence of experience and loss, constructed around a seemingly comic list of objects - ‘jars of ashes’, ‘brown paper packages’, and ‘the rain’. As the tangibility of the objects faded and the memory was transferred to the people who gave them, the crowd poignantly left the stage in ones or two, until finally the woman was left with the memory of the boy who gave ‘the rain’.
Bit 4		In a fine cast, the performers of the two monologues, Hayden Spencer and Bev Longford, stood out for their ability to walk a fine line between tragedy and comedy, the poetic and the banal, and for the imposing physical presence that, in very different ways, they brought to their solo roles. The work of movement coordinator Marie Dumont and sound designer Campbell Misfeld also deserve mention for creating absorbing visual and aural textures that in lesser hands could easily have fallen into cliché.
Bit 5		In an otherwise triumphant evening, the one disappointing note was the program, which failed to provide the audience with a clear roadmap for the five pieces. The failure to identify the order or the themes of the pieces was a silly omission in a program otherwise filled with biographical information and the generalised musings of the directors about the production. The brief commentaries on each piece (presumably written by one of the directors) on the La Boite website were the kind of thing that should have been in the program. However all in all, Daniel Keene has given us a powerful set of stories and words that in the hands of the La Boite team becomes a rich gesamtkunstwerk.

Bit 6		Details La Boite presents Daniel Keene's Small Mercies Writer: Daniel Keene Director: Fraser Corfield and Nadine McDonald Movement: Marie Dumont Sound Design: Campbell Misfeld Cast: Michael Forde, Beverley Langford, Monette Lee, Yasmin Quemard, Hayden Spencer. QUT BA Drama students: Benjamin Knight, Judy Hainsworth, Danielle Reinbott, Jane Churchward, Kate McNaughton, Verena Curr, Samid Suliman, Nic Dorward, Sharnee Cronan, Jez Veal, Corinne Davies, Amanda Hardwick, Lauren Douglas, Steven Wright, Saskia Levy, Bron Nolan, Pauline Maudy, Carolyn Morton

Bit 7		Citation reference for this article MLA style: Bill Hatherall. "Review of Small Mercies" M/C Reviews 06 Nov. 01. [your date of access] <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/events/smallmercies.html>. Chicago style: Bill Hatherall, "Review of Small Mercies" M/C Reviews 06 Nov. 01, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/events/smallmercies.html> ([your date of access]). APA style: Bill Hatherall. (2001) Review of Small Mercies. M/C Reviews 06 Nov. 01. <http://www.media-culture.org.au/reviews/events/smallmercies.html> ([your date of access]).

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