Adrift

Adrift is cross section of contemporary life with all its debilitating doubts, dangerous certainties, embedded anxieties, niggling frustrations, necessary evasions and misplaced rage.  Or, as Freud put it, ‘civilisation and its discontents’.  In snapshot grabs, the characters are locked in combat.  Most demand that others change – for their own good.  The conflicts are absurd – but not that absurd. 

A homeless man (David Kambouris) just wants some change for a Diet Coke.  Instead do-gooder Lou (Lauren Bailey) buys him an expensive water bottle – with filter… Homeowner Joe (Steve Gome) insists that only he can park in front of his house because he pays rates – and renter Jay (Luke Mason) opposite must move his car…  Later, Joe gets witches’ hats for his park space.  Why do he and wife Ada (Kelly Nash) have no friends?  Nowhere to park.  Max (Omar Dabash) buys a tent for partner Jack (Luke Mason) for his birthday, but Jack refuses even to try it because he can’t stand upright in a tent and anyway; he asked for an iPad and socks.  Later, Zoë (Annabelle Tudor) buys the tent, but partner Gus (David Kambouris) doesn’t want it either: sleeping outdoors is dangerous!  

Tom (Scott Gooding) finally keeps his promise to take teenage son Ben (Luke Mason) to the footy, even buys him a scarf, but Ben never looks up from his phone – which, earlier, Tom and mother Zoë (Lauren Bailey) have claimed is the problem of Ben’s teacher (Annabelle Tudor) – can’t she teach?  Three mourners (Marissa O’Reilly, Kelly Nash and Lauren Bailey) at a funeral aren’t sure that the man in the coffin is actually the man they’ve come to mourn… Tom and Lou have a concession movie ticket for son Ben, but he’s not there and teen usher Leia (Annabelle Tudor) refuses to admit both until full price is paid because trying to get something for nothing is the beginning of the end… 

There’s more, but perhaps saddest of all (but still funny) is the thread of Liv (Marissa O’Reilly), a supermarket manager with a fear of death, but who can’t get advice on what to do from therapist Max (Omar Dabash).  She’s time poor but is having loveless sex with Tom… And she finally confronts the crisis she’s always feared – or is it what she wanted?   

A cast of nine – playing eighteen different characters – could be a stretch for the very small La Mama HQ space.  Director Beng Oh solves the problem by putting them all on stage at once, on a two-tier bleacher, so they can leap on stage for their turn, while the others provide a footy crowd, a Chorus, sound effects and bursts of music.  This doesn’t perhaps always run smoothly with the transitions between the twenty-seven scenes, but such is the pace Beng Oh keeps up and our impatience to see what will happen next, that it doesn’t matter.  Nor does it matter that the doubling up of characters isn’t always as clear as it might be.  The very funny Kelly Nash, for instance, is the same character even when she’s not.  Luke Mason has to be a sulky, silent teen and a rational adult.  Conversely, Annabelle Tudor wears glasses and has a different voice for Leia, the cinema usher – and that works.

If you wanted to be sour, you might say that Adrift is ‘just’ sketch comedy, but it is a lot more than that.  Its eighteen characters and their issues occur and recur so that those twenty-seven scenes weave into a coherent whole.  The characters are not just ‘funny’, they are sharply and economically observed, comically stubborn to the point of ridiculous – and there is a rhythm to the dialogue that reflect the obstinacy of perverse and rigid positions and beliefs.  The constant clashes between the rational and irrational are very much of our time. 

The bizarre encounters are delivered with such wit that the audience gets the point every time and is rocking with laughter throughout. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill