Little Borders

Adelaide’s Philip Kavanagh won the Patrick White Award in 2011 for this, his first full length play, which in Sydney is finally getting its first production.  Little Borders traces the chasms of anxiety dividing a privileged middle class couple from their neighbours.

Elle is on an online jeweller whose accommodating brightness borders on hysteria; while behind his bland affability, Steve in advertising harbours a casual violence. Lucy Goleby and Brandon McClelland give excellently pitched performances of contemporary paranoia, a terror of the other whether Muslim or bogans.  Together, beginning with their witty joint interview to join a gated community, they are precise and well-matched.

In Kavanagh’s soliloquies they address us separately about fearful dashes beyond the gates, jogging obsessions, Mohammed next door or the wife bashing, Monaro driver further down.  While these have a literary expansiveness, generalising an angst now so familiar today, the real nature of their fears is unexplored. 

This makes for amusing farce but our empathy is stretched as Elle and Steve risk being dismissed as lost in a surreal, finally murderous nightmare.

But it’s still an evocative one hour of theatre, with high production standards from director Dominic Mercer and team.  Against a clean cyclorama fronted with miniature models of safe suburbia, designers Jeremy Allan and Charlie Edward Davis nicely frame the couple, who are costumed in tasteful affluence by Isobel Hudson.

Martin Portus