Softly Pouting While Walking Into Breezes

Softly Pouting While Walking Into Breezes
By Jake Stewart. A remount of a Monash Uni Student Theatre production. Part of Midsumma Festival at La Mama, Carlton (VIC). 14 January to 1 February 2015.

Eight actors, male and female, of varying shapes and sizes, bounce onto a tiny white dais and announce, one after another, ‘I am Ben.’  Ben is the protagonist; the play is his story.  It’s a risky start if only because it probably reminds half the audience of ‘I am Spartacus’, but the risky joke is characteristic of the show.  It veers from sharp to purple-pretentious to witty to touching to kitsch – but kitsch redeemed by knowing it is and showing up in scenes that are very nicely observed and embarrassingly truthful. 

By assigning bits of Ben’s story, in confessions and flashbacks, to eight actors, male and female, of varying shapes and sizes, the show reminds us that love, loss, pain and loneliness can happen to anyone, gay or straight.  It’s a story of how, after Ben’s oh-so-brief affair with the gorgeous Toby, he is wounded, scarred and scared, but also depressed, lonely, tentatively seeking new love but recoiling and screwing it up.  Will he ever get over Toby?  His friends wish he would, but somehow that golden time won’t let go: it grips tighter than mere nostalgia…

Director Jessica McLaughlin Cafferty choreographs and moves things along with precision, pace and fluidity.  My guess is that she is a major contributor to the style and content as well as the realization.  You don’t get lost and at the end you think that probably this show couldn’t have been done any other way.  Indeed, if it were, it might be impossibly maudlin. 

If the play has a flaw, it is that in the last twenty minutes or so it begins to drag a little.  It isn’t that the cast lets the text down or even that the quality of the writing per se falls off.  It’s the quality of the storytelling.  Because there isn’t, really, much story - it’s Ben’s situation - even otherwise perfect little scenes (for instance, in a late night bar, between Alistair Trapnell and Thomas Little) feel just that bit repetitious – as in, ‘Yes, we know this…’ Not exactly, perhaps, and we do keep hoping for Ben that this time… But no.

The cast is highly adaptable, as they have to be, playing eight Bens plus other random characters as required.  Chris Edwards, the most obviously ‘gay’ and also the most detailed and touching 'Ben', stands out.  As does Ariadne Sgouros, who has that enviable ability to be so relaxed that she looks as if she is not acting at all. 

Don’t ask me what the title means, but don’t let it put you off.  It’s in keeping with the self-conscious, try-hard, almost apologetic Writer’s and Director’s Notes in the program.  They shouldn’t have worried.

This is a great kick-off and contribution to Midsumma: it’s gay heartbreak with a light touch, moving and entertaining and very well realised.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Sarah Walker.

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