The Shadow Box

There’s heaps of acting prowess and experience in this cast of eight squeezed onto the tiny stage of this famous Sydney pub theatre. 

The Shadow Box, which won playwright Michael Cristofer the Pulitzer and Tony Award in 1977, is about three people and their carers living in hospice cottages and learning how to face death.

Designer Isabel Hudson further reduces the space by thrusting it forward with a line of young pine trees hanging from the sky, each, symbolically, cut off at the trunk.  It suggests a nicely gardened and carpeted Californian place to ponder death.  An off-stage psychiatrist evenly interviews each of the patients and soon, as loved ones arrive, their stories are played out around a few chairs. 

The action and reach of each scene may be cramped but director Kim Hardwick is blessed with actors who can focus on playing fine detail in small spaces.

Mark Lee is the blue-collared farmer now questioning why he struggled to build so many things. His visiting wife (Jeanette Cronin) won’t even go inside his cottage and has told nothing to their son (Simon Thomson).

Tim McGarry is a garrulous gay academic now impossibly cramming his final weeks with creative projects and thrilled to see his saucy ex-wife (Kate Raison), much to the resentment of his serious carer and boyfriend (Anthony Gooley). 

The third patient is a spiteful, half demented battler in a wheelchair (Fiona Press) sustained by fictions spun by her grim spinster daughter (Ella Prince).

With such uniformly excellent actors, all are engaging characters even if their folksy thoughts on death are often earnestly sentimental and – like death itself perhaps – benal.   And we’ve been spoilt since this play by other more hard-hitting, socially incisive dramas around death.

The real force of The Shadow Box comes at the end when the cast unites across the stage in a chorus of abstraction about … living in the moment.  Yes, sounds obvious but its very moving.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Robert Catto.