Credentials

Credentials is a kind of parable about how the world works.  It tells the story of two young women, one born into poverty, the other into privilege, and how each finds a place in the world.  Chrissie (Kayla Hamill) is a committed paramedic who got her job with fake credentials: she never finished high school and certainly didn’t attend any university.  But how else could she get into the ambulance service?  Sprung by her doctor boss, Stephen (Geoff Paine), she tries to explain herself and pleads with him not to sack her…  She’s from a country town underclass – a deadbeat single parent Dad, left school at Year 10, supermarket shelf-stacker, fell in with a not-so-bright drug dealer Rick (Zachary Giles-Pidd) … Chrissie’s life has been pretty much sh*t until the ambulance service.  Now she loves it, she’s a great team member, and it’s all in jeopardy…  Meanwhile, her boss Stephen has a daughter, Jessica (Yvette Turner), about Chrissie’s age, who in sharp contrast has had it all – private school, every whim indulged and every choice without consequence…

Credentials is a new play by David Williamson; it’s his generous participation in La Mama Theatre’s 50^th birthday celebrations.  Mr Williamson began his forty-five-year career at La Mama in 1970 with The Coming of Stork, followed by the award winning The Removalists and then Don’s Party in 1970.  He hasn’t looked back, as we know. 

If Credentials isn’t quite the outright comedy some people have come to expect from this playwright, and if there are sequences where an edit might have sharpened the impact, the writing is bold in form.  There’s the framing device of Chrissie telling her story, but her ‘telling’ is not lazy monologues; it consists only of link speeches that bridge into dramatized scenes.  She tells her story to her boss, played by Mr Paige, who ironically also doubles as ‘Bruce’, Chrissie’s bottom feeder Dad.  With the parallel story strands of Chrissie’s life and Jessica’s life, another interesting touch is that ‘Jessica’s story’ is in fact her father Stephen’s story – that is, it’s his powerless point of view.  The authority figure in Chrissie’s life in the present – her boss, who can take away the career she loves - has no authority in his private life.  His wife Rosy (Nell Feeney) and daughter Jessica constantly over-ride him. It’s a familiar public/private contrast and not unrelated to the theme: who nowadays has the ‘credentials’, on paper or otherwise, recognised or otherwise, to be an ‘authority’?

The Stephen/Jessica/Rosy scenes, moreover, are comic, providing some relief from the Chrissie strand, which is not comic, involving drug dependency, prostitution and serial abuse.  But Stephen’s struggles with his daughter Jessica have a tone that is characteristic Williamson: gently satiric mockery of current self-serving cant, irrationalities and delusion – and, in this case, the decay of ‘authority’.  Jessica’s erratic progress in the world ends with a blackly ironic development about which her father can only feel deeply if silently ambivalent.

Director Tom Gutteridge handles these complexities with ease.  As the naturalistic text involves many short sharp scenes and it is essential that they be swiftly juxtaposed, Mr Gutteridge wisely employs an almost bare stage and relies on the audience’s imagination and the power of his cast.  There are a row of plastic chairs, a couple of single chairs and a light box that can be a desk or a table.  The austere design is by Anastassia Poppenberg and the lighting design by Jason Crick.  Scene changes and time jumps are signalled by a momentary flicker of a line of high mounted fluoroes and smooth rearrangements of the props by the cast.  

Kayla Hamill is perfect as Chrissie – a reflection of the random young woman Mr Williamson saw in the street and who inspired this play: ‘a determined look on her face…whatever life had done to her up to now, she wasn’t going to be pushed around any longer.’  She has a strength that makes her troubles and her overcoming of them moving.  Zak Giles-Pidd has terrific energy and attack as Chrissie’s loser boyfriend Rick: instantly recognisable as the not-too-bright guy who always has an excuse no matter how implausible.  Geoff Paige keeps his Dr Stephen and his Bruce low key but convincing, playing more to the comedy of the exasperated impotence of the ‘traditional’ father.  Nell Feeney’s Rosy is, it must be said, pretty much a functional character – the irrationally indulgent Mama – but Ms Feeney makes her gratingly believable.  Yvette Turner plays the blinkered, narcissistic Jessica straight down the line with all the hyped up bewildered innocence of a twenty-five-year-old twelve-year-old.  Matt Furlani is quietly, coldly menacing, if a little one note, as drug dealer and pimp Lenny, and Paul Bongiorno is instantly likeable as the cheerful brothel customer who turns out to be a romantic…

Credentials has a lot more story qua story rather than a play that ‘explores the characters’ or delineates a situation.  There is more emphasis on developing events than on ‘character’ per se.  If that means that these characters are more functional than ‘rounded’, it does not diminish our need to know what happens next, or our appreciation of these stories’ final ironic twists.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Rachel Edwards