Falling Apples

Lene Therese Teigen’s play, Falling Apples, comes from Norway.  A certain tinge or feel of Ibsen is present, but in purely formal terms, Ms Teigen is more expansive, more adventurous, more modern.  She presents a community – with some catalytic outsiders – in which her thirteen – yes, thirteen - characters are trapped in society’s structures and strictures, or disappointed or thwarted by false expectations, in interlocking, overlapping and parallel story strands and situations.  

There is a family, on the brink of a new business venture, when the parents are involved in a car smash on the freeway, exacerbating their children’s incipient disarray – the alcoholic son, the closet gay son and their sister who rushes off and marries a stranger.  There is the guilty young woman who believes she caused the crash.  There is the feckless couple whose relationship starts to crumble when the first flush of lust begins to fade.  There is the adopted young man crippled by his belief that his ‘real’ parents rejected him.  There is the Russian single mother who mistakes an offer of employment for an offer of marriage.  There are two sisters, victims of their father’s abuse, waiting until the younger turns eighteen so that they can escape – but she is already in love there in their community…  There is also a surreal touch: a nineteen-year-old woman steps out of a 19^th century painting to observe and – with her 19^th century values – attempt to counsel these troubled souls.  No one questions her presence or mode of dress.

All this and more could perhaps have done with an edit; at two hours and ten minutes Falling Apples is at times emotionally repetitious and over-written, thus proving that a Masters degree in Dramaturgy and additional experience in screen and radio writing are no guarantee of perfection.

The above storylines are, I confess, only partly understood by me.  Perhaps that disqualifies me from comment, but my partial grasp of the play is due, quite frankly, to directorial decisions by Peta Hanrahan that actively diffuse or blur focus, and work against clarity and communication.  For a director of her wealth of experience, this is both surprising and dismaying.

I am not the first to note, for instance, that due to the acoustics of the Kensington Town Hall ballroom, and the way Ms Hanrahan uses the space, that as much as half the dialogue is inaudible, or, at least, indecipherable.  The ballroom is a long, high-ceilinged rectangle.  Ms Hanrahan chooses to stage in ‘landscape’ mode.  That is, she spreads her characters across the entire length of the ballroom and lines up the audience on one side to face them.  Thus key moments are played out sometimes in the centre, sometimes at either end of this stretched playing space.  What you can hear depends where you’re sitting.  With the very high ceiling and the hard surfaces of floor and walls, speech becomes noise tinged with emotion.  When an actor chooses to express strong emotion by shouting, the words echo and reverberate.  As a result, two thirds of the audience is constantly leaning forward, not just to see but to hear.

In short, audience members hear what they need to hear only from cast playing their scene almost directly in front of them, and speaking in a conversational tone.  Did not Ms Hanrahan notice this in rehearsal?  Or did stubborn adherence to the ‘concept’ take precedence? 

Another aspect of the concept is to keep all cast not involved in any scene at that moment constantly on the move – walking from one end of the space to the other, running from one end to another, walking but making sharp right hand turns, walking as if searching – but not finding, throwing themselves on couches, walking and dragging a cello and so on.  Obviously this pulls focus from the scene in play and is distracting (and puzzling) in the extreme. 

As a consequence of the staging and the acoustics, it is difficult to gauge the actors’ skills.  Some, as recent graduates of Verve Studios, appear to be inexperienced; others seem to have the presence and conviction that can grip an audience – that is, when the audience can hear them and see them without other cast cruising or blurring in front of them.

The sad part about the ‘concept’ is that the intention is clear and, in its way, admirable.  Ms Hanrahan seeks to achieve simultaneity – something a linear medium such as theatre rarely achieves.  (And perhaps only cinema does.)  She seeks to achieve a sense that the multiple story strands and situations are not developing one after another, but all at once.  While some characters are arguing, other characters are running to the station, or searching, or moving about in restless despair, or changing direction in an evasive manner…  And this simultaneity is suggested too by the figures strung out across the landscape.  The even sadder part about the ‘concept’ is that it doesn’t work.  (Much the same staging in the same sort of venue was tried by others last year, in a sort of mash-up of two Tennessee Williams’ plays; it didn’t work there either and for the same reasons.)

Finally, for her very last scene, Ms Hanrahan has her entire cast in black costume – but the women in black negligees – why, I don’t know, as this feels entirely arbitrary or misleadingly suggestive.  She then has all thirteen of them in one long line, seated on chairs, to deliver their perorations direct to the audience.  The same sightline and auditory problems pertain.  Perhaps that is how it is written, but one might have thought that the characters could speak from the toils of their situations rather than abstracting them - and us - from them.

I don’t know what Lene Therese Teigen would think of this production.  Perhaps she would approve of the concept since, in a way, it is appropriate to what she wants to achieve, but to see and hear her characters pushed out of reach by intellectual infelicities means, really, the waste of what could be a most engaging and poignant play.

Michael Brindley