The Actor Crack’d

The Actor Crack’d
By Bill Marshall. A Cracked Actors Production. La Mama at Trades Hall, Carlton, VIC. 14 – 23 September 2018.

Young actor Stanley Gold (Nicholas Jaquinot), has had some good reviews, but now he’s making a living from kur-ray-zee radio commercials for cheap electronics.  He’s desperate to play Hamlet.  He auditions.  They’ll let him know.  So, he’s in call-back limbo.  After a random street assault by thug Bruttus [sic] (Aleksander Eeri Laupmaa), he accepts some marijuana from his sister (Kaela Raku) and ends up lost somewhere without his trousers.  Arrested, he’s committed to a psychiatric hospital… and the rest of the story plays out there.

According to director Matthew Richard Walsh’s program note, ‘few Australian playwrights… write with the jocosity, sagacious [sic] and affectability of Bill Marshall.’  This may be true, but it is not difficult to think of several - including those who depart from naturalism - who write better.  That is to say, write plays in which there are such things as credibility, character development, story development from scene to scene and some kind of climax and resolution. 

The Actor Crack’d does none of these things – which places a huge burden on director and cast.  Instead, we have the broadest of broad satire on mental hospitals and their staff, a parade of caricature mental patients and the subjective paranoid experiences and downward spiral of Stanley Gold as an involuntary inmate.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it’s not.

Amongst the cast, Mr Jaquinot stands out: he almost succeeds in making a coherent and sympathetic character out of his Stanley – although even he has to resort to shouting, a sure sign of being marooned in uncertainty.  In a series of scenes that seem increasing repetitious as the play goes on, Stanley is beset by a mean psychiatrist (Graham Murray), various demons (denoted by other cast wearing masks), a hallucinatory Sigmund Freud (Mr Laupmaa again in a silly beard), an attractive, sympathetic but unhelpful psychologist (Katie Allison), a schizophrenic, Duncan (Mr Laupmaa yet again), and a sex addict Gloria (Simone Bergamin) and more.  As to Gloria, her relationship with Stanley might have engaged our emotions, but she is introduced far too late.  When Stanley succumbs to her - as played by Ms Bergamin - full-on, full-blast - it’s neither funny (though that’s the intention) nor tender (though that’s also the intention later).  

The Actor Crack’d would seem to be a large-scale production in conception.  But Mr Walsh mounts it with a paucity of means.  The ad hoc little theatre in a meeting room at the Trades Hall is a three-sided box draped with blacks.  There’s a big moveable sculpture that represents two halves of a face – the symbolism is clear.  The lighting (here by Chris Keuken) is basic and the many brief scenes are broken up by blackouts, during which the sculpture and some boxes are reconfigured.  In short, attempting to rise above these limitations, Mr Marshall adds heavy snatches of music and opts for extremes of character and performance – not a bad decision per se but one that requires more than this cast and these resources are able to deliver.

Mr Walsh’s understanding of the play seems to be that it might deepen our understanding of and sympathy for ‘pariahs’ who are mentally ill.  In particular, it ‘confronts hilariously the psychological perils inherent in artistic pursuit, where disappointment can severely outweigh expectation.’  I wish I could agree with these claims but, having endured close to an hour and forty minutes of this production, I really can’t.  What Stanley Gold experiences re ‘artistic disappointment’ is perfectly normal for many jobbing actors and the cause and effect connection to his being incarcerated isn’t really dramatized.  Dumping him in a psychiatric hospital seems a willed contrivance, a means for Mr Marshall to plunge into his version of a horrible but none too subtle institution.  Having stuck us there too, for too long, he can’t seem to find a pay-off for his characters and so resorts to a monologue from Stanley, explaining what happened afterwards.  I take no pleasure in panning this production, but I don’t comment on intentions, only on what I see.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Sarah Yeung.

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