The Architect

The Architect
By Aidan Fennessy. Melbourne Theatre Company. Southbank Theatre, The Sumner. 27 September – 31 October 2018

Aidan Fennessy’s The Architect is a comedy drama about dying – and dying with dignity - but it’s also, almost as much, about class.  Helen (Linda Cropper), a retired literature teacher, and her lawyer partner John (Nicholas Bell), both in their sixties, live in a spacious, open plan house in a leafy suburb.  But Helen has inoperable brain tumours.  John wants to go to an event in England but of course doesn’t want to leave her alone.  She’ll need a carer and if the right one can’t be found, he won’t go. 

After a series of unsatisfactory or suspicious applicants, there’s one more, a tradie bloke recommended by Helen’s sister.  Helen is vehement: she said, no men!  Too late: Lennie (Johnny Carr) shows up.  Mullet haircut, paint-stained shorts, sunnies in the baseball cap, scuffed Blundstones – and an open, no bullshit manner.  Ever polite, John goes through the motions of ‘interviewing’ him, but really, he’s not suitable – and shows him the door.  But something’s happened.  Helen’s sensed something in Lennie – and he gets the job. 

In its way, it’s a familiar story: the afflicted and the rescuer, even – if it’s not stretching the analogy too far – Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother.  Helen even gets to go to the ball - for a moment, anyway – one of the most touching moments of the evening.  It’s a moment we know couldn’t happen with John.  Mr Bell plays him with a finely judged diffidence and a constant anxiety, a man so thoroughly decent that he’s inhibited and just that little bit dull.  Meanwhile, Linda Cropper’s usual vitality is held in check – which makes her Helen an even sadder character.  Dying, Helen is naturally self-absorbed, tetchy and peremptorily matter of fact.  Ms Cropper really make us feel for and with someone so desperately ill: the brief bursts of energy, followed by debilitating fatigue, the reminiscences followed by regret and Helen’s constant awareness that she will die and that all she is will be gone. 

Director Peter Houghton elicits detailed truth from his cast – and uses the big set with skill and energy, particularly in the spaces between the characters and their movements toward and away from each other.

Despite Helen’s comfortable, bickering relationship with John, with its awkwardly articulated but genuine love, Lennie is what she needs at this point in her inevitable decline.  Johnny Carr keeps his Lennie this side of ‘ocker’ and certainly no bogan.  For most of the first act, he energises the play: it bubbles along and his clashes with Helen keep the audience laughing.  Lennie is easy, ‘honest’ – meaning sometimes tactless – caring and insightful, but Mr Carr nicely lays in hints in his performance of Lennie’s dark and troubled backstory – which gradually – and crucially emerges. 

That backstory makes credible Lennie’s insight and kindness, but when it comes out, we are right back to class and in a particularly nasty way with the intervention of Jeremy (Stephen Phillips).  He’s Helen’s virtually estranged son from her marriage to her long ago divorced husband.  Mr Phillips’ Jeremy is by that point the much-needed antagonist: he’s snide to his dying mother and the way he, also a lawyer, says the word ‘tradie’ is redolent with sneering class prejudice.  For privileged Jeremy, this Lennie guy must be dumb – but also untrustworthy and opportunist as well. 

We, of course, know better.  In fact, on reflection, we might wonder if Lennie is perhaps just a little too good to be true: yes, a homeless tradie who lives usually in his car, but a good tradie, and a skilled gardener, a gourmet cook, curious and appreciative about classical music, and intuitively respectful of Helen’s real needs.  He’s so ‘good’, we might wonder if he’ll be revealed as something else.  Class differences melt away and soon Helen is telling Lennie things she can’t tell John – and certainly not Jeremy. 

The entire play takes place in Helen and John’s living-dining-kitchen area and Christina Smith’s design suggests an airy, open space with a lawn and towering eucalypts seen through the floor to ceiling glass.  Matt Scott’s lighting supplies the passage of time and different times of day – the latter particularly effective with a sense of dusk and a chilly dawn.  Suburban calm is emphasised in J David Franzke’s sound design of birds and distant traffic – such a contrast to the emotions on display – and his music is supportive without being intrusive.

The Architect is a skilful play in that it is, for most of its length, very entertaining, engaging, funny and moving – skilful enough in its variations on familiar story patterns to disguise its slight predictability and sentimentality.  Interestingly, the audience began their end of first act applause a scene before the actual end of the act – a sign that the rhythm of the piece may be a little misjudged there – or in need of an edit. 

And there’s a related problem, at least for me.  There is a terrific, highly charged and totally credible scene towards the end of the second act – a scene that has the quality of a horrible, ironic finality and feels absolutely like the climax. 

And yet Mr Fennessy has other fish to fry – another major point to make.  It’s how he gets there that is the problem: a drawn-out scene in which the writing becomes self-conscious and even maudlin and mawkish.  Selfish Jeremy’s very real faults are buried in sentiment and, otherwise, there are heartfelt speeches that do little other than tell us what we already know.  The playwright’s intent is clear – and it’s not just to reveal emotions – and the real end is difficult to watch.  Even so, we are all familiar with that feeling of, ‘It’s over…”  It’s disappointing.  So much so that I could almost be annoyed with Mr Fennessy for his misjudgement at the end of this tight, funny and thought-provoking play, so well directed and performed.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jeff Busby

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