Singled Out

Credit to director Augusta Supple and the Seymour Centre for developing such a great idea – pulling together a dozen short “playlettes” about living a single life today in Sydney.  The opening tableau of each character snapped alone at home promised an inventive theatrical tapestry.

Emma Magenta, for example, wittily charts two singles battling through the wall to out-noise each other, between venting on social media and sexing up fantasies of themselves.  Sick and naked on the loo, Alex Bryant-Smith gives us an artfully hallucinogenic rave on power and love which, like in much of the writing, Tim Spencer doesn’t bring to dramatic conclusion. An exception is Wishbone by Vanessa Bates. Amber McMahon is both creepy and snappily ordinary as she makes chicken sandwiches for her murdered husband.  

Some of the playlettes leap nicely into surrealism, like the toy diver in the fish bowl ruminating on his role surrounded by a trio of puppet fishes. Again though, writer Alli Sebastian-Wolf doesn’t fully bring home the wit and touching possibilities about single life entrapped in a fishbowl.  She’s more successful in a simpler second piece about a dying lighthouse keeper soothing a puppet cat worried for its own feline future. The other writers are Grace De Morgan, Wayne Blair, Luke Carson and Sarah Carradine. 

Apparently within a decade a third of all households in Sydney will be solo ones. I wanted more sociological grit about this domestic reality, even given the wise intention not to make all singles all lonely.  And while a greater ethnic and demographic variety would be welcome, some theatrically unifying device to all eight playlettes was also needed. The voiced experience of Sydney would be a good start. Without it, Supple was left with mismatched vignettes which together lacked cohesion and the chance of a greater shared theatrical invention. The final fine song, Never Alone, like the opening tableau, held that promise.

Martin Portus 

Images: Josipa Draisma & (l-r) Bali Padda and Rosie Lourde. Photographer: Marnya Rothe.