Blessed

With weird and unforeseen synchronicity this play opened on the day we learned that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States.  The play’s characters, Maggie (Olivia Monticciolo) and Grey (Matt Hickey) are thwarted, defeated and hope-less, so poisoned by alienation and failure that they can no longer identify or blame the causes – except themselves.  There may be ‘no more exciting time to be Australian’, but not for these two.  They’ve been left behind.  Worse, we sense they always would be. 

Their rage is turned outwards as loud aggression, but they turn on themselves too, excoriating, demeaning, aggressively tearing at what is left of themselves.  Maggie would not be out of place in Patricia Cornelius’ Shit.  Grey has become the underground man in a dim, filthy, stinking room.  There’s a high window through which, climbing on the table, he looked once.   He didn’t like what he saw. 

Maggie comes to see Grey.  It’s taken a hell of a search to find him, but now she has it seems all she can do is berate him.  He tells her to get out, go away, leave him alone.  Each has bitterly disappointed the other.  Gradually – and skilfully revealed by playwright Fleur Kirkpatrick – their story comes out…  their fragile relationship, their uncertain love that was – until it failed.   We don’t quite know why – but it feels inevitable.

Then we slip into the past...  Now Maggie and Grey are kids, teens that still have some shreds of hope, even if Maggie is crippled by a self-doubt that verges on self-hatred, pushing away Grey and pouring scorn on his high-flown poetic language and his belief that she is ‘special’…  And then we come back down to the sordid present, to the bitter dregs of what once looked like hope and a way out.

Olivia Monticciolo is simply terrific as Maggie: a foul-mouthed shrew, a boasting fucker, an attack-is-the-best-defence woman, a roiling pit of anger and resentment who knows she can hurt by hurting herself – but Ms Monticciolo can reveal, like a momentary flash of sunlight through forbidding clouds, a vulnerability, a potential sweetness that points up the terrible waste of this human being.   Matt Hickey is her match, although he plays his Grey on a different level from her spitfire: sullen, beaten down, glowering from under lowered brows – but revealing in the teenage flashbacks a poetic sweetness that is as sad as Maggie’s self-destruction.

Director Danny Delahunty elicits fine but no frills performances.  Both actors manage the transitions back and forward in time with clarity – and nothing at all but Rob Sowinski’s lighting changes and Tom Pitts’ sound design to help them.  Mr Sowinski’s lighting is crucial: from the dingy, dusty light through a high, dirty window to glorious bursts of sunlight – and something more...  while the sound mix ranges from harsh industrial clanging to rolling thunder.

There is some very fine writing here.  In particular the sharply contrasting mix of the lyrical with the profane, the poetic with the obscene.  Even so, there is an eventual sense that Ms Kilpatrick has created a situation and a past for her characters and she keeps coming back to it  – albeit with variations – and attacking it again, as if to beat some meaning out of its despair, but the effect comes to feel like the wheels spinning in emotional repetition. 

The play suddenly does ascend out of that to something surprising (and amusing) – a desperate assertion of hope for something more than mere escape, something that is on another plane.  Does it work?  See this play, with its fine writing and exceptional performances for yourself.

Michael Brindley    

Photographer: Sarah Walker