Rules For Living

A superb cast of fine actors manages to breathe life into a predictable farce that hangs by its fingernails on a writer’s device. Take that novelty away, and the play is more Ray Cooney than Alan Ayckbourn.

Some new playwrights make one long for the days of Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and the great Ayckbourn. All of these esteemed playwrights understood that comedy comes from the tragedy of the human condition and is bedded in truth.

When you take a clichéd formula like a dysfunctional family assembling for Christmas, it’s not always easy to discover anything new, let alone true.

There are a lot of laughs but very little truth in Holcroft’s play. She writes broad and shallow, eschewing any foray into emotional depth until the last ten minutes of the play … by which time it’s far too late to care. Devoid of subtlety, and with a lot of “borrowed” one-liners that were overused fifty years ago, Holcroft avoids dealing with subtext by a device, a writer’s conceit and fiction that tells us, the audience, in writing, that each of the characters  has “Rules for Living”.

Fair enough, but there’s no attempt to explore WHY those rules exist; they’re just plonked on a character for the sake of comedic potential as compulsive behaviour. Sophie Woodward has once again provided a marvellous playing space which stretches the tiny theatre to Tardis proportions. The rules appear on the set – written for us to read, and compounded as the play progresses.

Thus, younger son Matthew – wonderfully played by the peripatetic Rory Kelly – must sit (and eat) while he’s telling a lie, while older brother Adam (Mark Dickinson) has to use an accent in order to mock someone - something he does with great skill - but WHY? Every character has a set of rules – very few of them make any sense. This is the conceit which drives the play and takes it out of the ordinary. For a while this is funny, but the joke wears thin even before the interval of this three hour bombardment.

Caroline Lee plays mother Edith with all the finesse and aplomb that colours all of her work. Jessica Clarke is very impressive as Sheena, Adam’s wife, whose marriage has fallen apart and has turned to drink and over-protecting her daughter. Jem Nicholas (as Carrie, Matthew’s girlfriend) and Ian Rooney (as the stroke affected wheelchair bound Patriarch Francis) get the most laughs. But that’s because they are allowed to shout (former) and mug (latter) completely OTT and without even a nod to credibility. The audience laps it up … even the critics close to me were laughing their heads off, so perhaps the fault is in me for expecting something of substance. Yet I can’t help thinking that with a more skilled director there would be more mining of the seams of emotional gold that could possibly lie beneath. We’ll never know. True, Dickinson has one incredible scene where he reveals the hell of his childhood, but he is such a charismatic stage presence that it makes it harder to believe him as the ineffectual ‘loser’ who has given up, in the rest of the play.

I am leaving the state so this may be the last time I ever review Red Stitch. I want to thank them for their many brave decisions, their often-thrilling productions on a shoestring, their edge and their commitment to continuing good theatre. Most of my best nights in theatre in Melbourne have been spent with Red Stitch. I only wish this had been one of them.

Coral Drouyn

Photographer: Teresa Noble