Shrine

Tim Winton’s Shrine is a play about grief.  How grief is experienced differently by different people; how grief can mask guilt or be poisoned by it; how grief can be driven by anger and blame; and how grief can be simply an aching emptiness. 

South-west West Australia.  Adam (Chris Bunworth) and Mary Mansfield (Alexandra Fowler) have lost their son Jack (Christian Taylor) in a car smash.  The two young surfer silvertails, Ben (Keith Brockett) and Will (Nick Clark), who were with him in the car, were badly injured, but they survived.  They’ve set up one of those roadside shrines at the accident site: a cross, flowers, pictures.  In towering fury, Mary blames Ben and Will for the death of her son.  Adam goes to the ‘shrine’ and kicks it down.  His grief is his – his and Mary’s, although a gulf has opened between them – and he’s not sharing it or diluting it with outsiders and their bloody shrine...

Director Marcel Dorney remarks in his program note that Australians have a problem with grief.  I’d say, maybe not.  The flowers at accident sites or left outside grieving homes?   What of the outpourings on social media at the death of pop and movie stars or even acquaintances, letting folks know how much emotion – now permitted – you may feel, manifestations of what Christopher Hitchens called ‘recreational grieving’?  These things suggest that Tim Winton’s character Adam is right.  It is his grief and those who want to horn in, with their ‘shrine’, are phonies.  But, of course, it’s more complex than that.  Adam must admit to himself that he didn’t really know his son, especially when June (Tenielle Thompson), known to some as ‘Bush Pig’, shows up, claiming a special relationship with the dead Jack… 

Chris Bunworth is well cast, strong and convincing.  His Adam is an ex-winemaker, a plain-speaking but inarticulate, salt of the earth bloke.  Alexandra Fowler’s Mary is unfortunately burdened with some ‘poetic’ dialogue, but Ms Fowler exudes her dangerous, burning rage, a lioness, and her last moments as the mother robbed and bereft are heartbreaking.  Christian Taylor is just right as the slightly fey, unassertive Jack.  Nick Clark as one of Jack’s user ‘mates’ gets the tone of entitled rich boy right, but Keith Brockett, a terrific actor, may have just too nice a persona to play the other one.  Also curious casting, at least to me, is Tenielle Thompson, working hard with a lovely simplicity and sincerity, but somehow failing to hide that she is a couple of social classes up from her June – she’s no ‘Bush Pig’.    

But this story – the story of this play – begins when Jack is already dead and that shrine is in place and what we see is primarily Adam learning what really happened up to the moment when his son’s Corolla ploughed into that tree.  In other words, the story is all in the past, all needing to be told so that Adam can learn and June can set him straight.  My reservations about this play arise from Mr Winton’s decision to tell the story in this ‘non-linear’ way.  June becomes a narrator of the past and that involves a great deal of telling, but it also necessitates June telling things she can’t know and interspersing her story with scenes of conflict between Jack’s guilty mates Ben and Will.  June also tells Adam of an horrific night when she was swept out to sea but rescued by Jack – and this becomes a ‘flashback’ scene we see.  It is superbly written, evocative, magic and pure Winton in its near mystic connection with Nature.  Its relevance to the story or its theme is, however, tenuous. 

Leon Salom’s set is highly suggestive: at once a long, strong, weather marked wall, but with a horrible scar where Jack’s car smashed into that tree; in the centre, a rectangle of bricks that is by turns a beach fire, a table and a grave.  But did Mr Salom take into account the fortyfivedownstairs space?  His set divides it in such a way that the seating arrangement – six long rows of bleachers on one side – is the most unwieldy I’ve seen in this space.  Those on the ends will peer sideway, those behind the columns will lose crucial action and those three rows back can only see half the actors’ bodies when they’re downstage.  A crucial scene with Ben, Will and June, as Jack looks helplessly on, is completely masked from anyone not at the front.  The design is an example of a determined and, indeed, imaginative vision per se that does not, in the end, serve the production in terms of audience access.  That aside, the collaboration between set and Kris Chainey’s lighting works beautifully.

Perhaps it is a prejudice of mine, but this mode of dramatic characters telling the story to the audience (here disguised by June telling the story to Adam) becomes wearisome, no matter how lyrical, poetic, musical or contrapuntal with other interwoven tellings.  Am I nostalgic, stick-in-the-mud or denying new possibilities of theatre if I’d prefer to see character interaction and conflict on stage?  In Tom Holloway’s recent Sunshine, for another example, one could feel the audience positively yearning for the assembled monologists to run into each other and talk to each other.  The last five minutes of the play when two of them do, is suddenly riveting.

Mr Winton is a beloved novelist, a beloved story-teller.  That does not, unfortunately, make him a dramatist.  In an interview with the Sunday Age (21 May), he’s quoted as saying, ‘As a playwright, I make a pretty decent novelist.’  This modest statement seems to me accurate.  For all the power of the performances, Shrine is more a novel than a play.  A novel that is, as you’d expect, complex, insightful, immensely sympathetic to its characters, but more a prose work than dramatic text.  

Michael Brindley

Images: Nick Clark; Tenielle Thompson; and Alexandra Fowler. GW Photography.