Broken River

It begins in traditional style: in the dead of night, two men – brothers - carry an eviscerated corpse wrapped in black plastic.  Their mother has ordered them to dump it in a mine shaft.  They don’t; they bury it in a shallow hole at Broken River.  We know the body will be found and somebody, besides this pair, will be in big trouble… 

Playwright Tony Reck calls his play a ‘neo-noir thriller’.  Arguments swirl around the term ‘noir’ and indeed it is an elastic genre.  Mr Reck’s reference points are some dire Hollywood B-pix – Raw Deal, Bad Blonde, Private Hell 36 – and the violent classic Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich 1955) – and there are numerous film noir tropes and references in Broken River.  We have two corrupt cops, Rowstone (Adrian Mulraney) and Cheeseman (Adam Cass), the former smarter and dominant, but both sadistic and amoral.  We have a crime family – those two brothers, Ace (Edward McCullough) and Bubs (Jackson Trickett) – and the hard-as-nails matriarch Marlene (Carole Patullo).  We have the victim/McGuffin, torch singer/sex worker Junie Patel (George Munro), who, being dead, appears in flashbacks.  Later, we have a corrupt prosecutor, Long (Nicholas Stribakos), and a corrupt (and kinky) judge (Allen Laverty).  Kris Chainey’s lighting is suitably high key cross-light Expressionist, and Raya Slavin provides ominous melodramatic music.

Unfortunately, however, it’s not too clear whose story all this is, or what specifically motivates them.  As a post-modernist writing a neo-noir piece, Mr Reck is not constrained by old noir conventions.  Thus the jeopardy necessary for a thriller and for audience engagement is diffuse, despite there being a great deal of explanatory and philosophical dialogue, particularly from Detective Rowstone.  (The show runs two hours and badly needs an edit to bring it down to a tight, punchy one, which might convey the story just as well.)  If there’s a femme fatale, it must be Junie, but for whom she is fatale is tenuous (probably the hapless Bubs).  What this story has to say is that the world is a thoroughly horrid place, in which the inhabitants are either evil or the victims of evil. 

There is some real talent among the cast here, weighed down by the text.  Mr Mulraney is effectively cool and menacing; Mr McCullough and Mr Trickett have presence and (almost) engage our interest.  Ms Patullo is perhaps one note, but that’s as written, and Mr Stribakos makes the ridiculous prosecutor close to plausible.

What is most puzzling about the enterprise is that Richard Murphet – a director of great talent – wanted to realise this verbose, unfocussed play.  It’s interesting (and perhaps ironic) that in 2015 he wrote and directed Quick Death and Slow Love at La Mama, two short, sharp, witty pieces, satirising a certain kind of cliché cinema, and directed with visual and dramatic flair.  Obviously, Mr Murphet saw far more in Broken River than I did.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jackie Mates