Straight

Straight
Written by DC Moore. Directed by Dean Bryant. Red Stitch Theatre (Vic). August 30th – Sept 28th, 2013. Australian Premiere.

Red Stitch has a perfect track record for choosing plays that are exciting and edgy, but without enough commercial appeal to prompt mainstage companies to mount productions. All of which plays into our – the audience’s – hands. We get to see great plays with terrific acting and innovative direction in the best possible production. Straight is no exception. Moore’s play about an urban couple, fallen on hard times and trying to build the domestic dream in a studio flat, is very very funny. But it’s also confronting, particularly when a harmless drunken wager leads to a homosexual encounter with the potential to damage a marriage.

Lewis (Ryan Gibson) and Morgan (Rosie Lockhart) are the young twenty-somethings – trying to keep thirty from the door – who are stuck in a rut, from which the only escape might be a rutt on the side. While they talk in sickly sweet cliches loaded with profanities about their love, and their desire to have a baby (who could sleep in the kitchen, possibly the oven,  since they don’t even have a bedroom) we sense their unwillingness to face the truth that they are going nowhere. When Waldorf (Ben Prendergast) announces his arrival by sticking his naked dick through the letterbox, you know things are going to change rapidly. (Ignore the reality that a studio in a block of flats would hardly have a letterbox! Sometimes you just need a writer’s device.) The play is extremely funny, full of coarse language and four overdrawn characters. But once the subtext, lurking in the relationship between Lewis and Waldorf, is brought to the fore, the laughter is more of the awkward variety, coupled with some squirming. For at the heart of this play are serious questions about sexuality and how it affects your life. Steph (Christina O’Neill) seems to exist as a character only to raise the question of amateur porn…her description of it as “bespoke” and “holistic” is hilarious, but biting enough to send the men off on their own trajectory. Homosexual sex for two heterosexual friends…. how hard could that be…especially if they film it?

What was interesting to me…but seemingly un-noticed by most other critics, is the changing dynamic between Lewis and Waldorf. Both appear “straight’, yet Lewis has never mentioned his best friend from Uni to his wife and claims to have forgotten him, only to remember every detail when he is with Waldorf himself. Shades of a supressed desire. It’s Lewis who is curious, Lewis who books and pays for the hotel (which he can ill afford) Lewis who steers the event, all the while protesting, and Lewis who goes through with it but decides not to film it, despite that being the sole purpose of the exercise. Waldorf will walk away unchanged, but Lewis’s life may be changed forever. There’s plenty gay, but not much happy, in Lewis’s curiosity.

The four actors are impeccable, with faultless timing in their overlapping dialogue. Christina O’Neill gives Steph a spaced out Amy Winehouse persona and is both hilarious and poignant. It’s a marvellous performance of what could be a devicive character. Rosie Lockhart (Morgan) proves yet again that beauty and talent do co-exist, though her accent tended to drift; but it’s the two males who hold the play together. Ryan Gibson as Lewis is beautifully rounded, showing all the elements of weakness and vulnerability that stop him from standing up to the world or even his wife. Ben Prendegast is charismatic, warm and definitely dangerous as Waldorf, the friend who has no boundaries. Dean Bryant has directed the play superbly, including all costume and set changes happening in full view in half light. But it’s his work with the actors in bringing the four characters to life which is most impressive, and somehow making them people we care about in spite of the overuse of the most obscene swear words. Owen Phillips claustrophobic shoe box set works brilliantly, and the change to a lush hotel room is inspired. This is all excellent theatre. I seem to be always using superlatives about Red Stitch; but it’s not my fault they are always so damn good.

Coral Drouyn

Images: Ryan Gibson and Rosie Lockhart & Ben Prendergast, Ryan Gibson and Rosie Lockhart. Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson

Subscribe to our E-Newsletter, buy our latest print edition or find a Performing Arts book at Book Nook.