The Sublime

The Sublime
By Brendan Cowell. Melbourne Theatre Company. Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio. 22 August to 4 October 2014

The lights run across the stadium, the music comes up to deafening – and the game begins.  Three super-charged, stop-at-nothing actors run on.  The Sublime is a confrontational play about sport, violence and celebrity.  Dean is a star AFL player: disciplined, prodigiously skilled – but does he take himself a little too seriously?  His tear-away, high-spirited, crass-but-somehow-charming younger brother Liam is a rising League player in Sydney.  The season’s over and Liam and his team are off to Thailand for some R&R.  At their Mum’s request, Dean’s going along – to keep an eye on Liam.  Meanwhile, Amber is a schoolgirl track and field athlete destined for the Olympic team.  She just loves to run, but she’s ambitious and her Mum and Dad are, like, totally supportive.  Dean meets Amber while both are running.  He’s impressed.  By her stamina and athletic prowess, of course.  She is awed: Dean is a star – and he’s talking to her.  With a necessary but not too credible plot contrivance, Amber’s parents (also awed) suggest Amber could go to Thailand too?  With her BFF Zoe?  Dean agrees – and pays for the tickets.  And off they go: good guy responsible Dean, hyped-up, priapic Liam and his teammates, plus Amber and Zoe… 

You can imagine roughly where this is going.  Rape, video posts to YouTube, media storms, denials and phony reconciliations and relationships are involved.  You’ll recognise a familiar but nicely judged amalgam of a variety of scandals ‘plucked’ (as they say) from the headlines, TV news and ‘current affairs’ shows.  Indeed, the MTC commissioned the play because of the subject’s contemporary buzz and it does pose the question, ‘How do these things happen?’

Brendan Cowell (with dramaturgy by Chris Mead) essentially gives us three interweaving and overlapping monologues as his means of telling his story.  There are moments of what can be called ‘scenes’ in the conventional sense, but most of the time Dean, Amber and Liam address the audience – and sometimes interact with them - with a combination of frank confession, pathos, persuasion, rationalisation, evasion and special pleading.  So we are told, not shown – but there is plenty of subtext.  There is plenty of humour – although, as the story unfolds, laughter comes with a wince.  Nevertheless, via three monologues or not, the story, as a story, holds - and you want to know what happens next.

It’s a layered, entertaining, intelligent but perhaps not particularly profound examination of the phenomena of contemporary sports, media sensationalism, hazy morality and shifting concepts of ‘gender roles’.  Mr Cowell doesn’t moralise.  He is implicitly critical of all three of his characters, but then again, they all have their reasons, don’t they?  Dean, the supposedly ‘decent’ fellow, is also the most self-deceiving and hypocritical.  Amber, the innocent, is not so innocent.  Her gullibility and, later, her punishing isolation allow some complex rationalisations for her choices.  Liam is the most straightforward: essentially a child, he exhibits some appalling (but not at all uncommon) ideas about and behaviour toward women, but in a way so lacking in self-awareness he comes across as almost innocent. 

Much credit then must go to director Sam Strong, who keeps things constantly kinetic and wrings much ambiguity from the text.  And then the cast is excellent.  They are convincing in their physicality as sports people – fit, strong and energetic.  And, so to speak, they look like people, not actors.  Josh McConville is the dour, repressed Dean, Anna Samson the bouncy, naïve and ultimately compromised Amber.  Ben O’Toole, making his MTC debut, is especially impressive in that he remains charming despite his sexism and he convinces as a boy none too bright, easily influenced but with a sharp eye for the main chance.

The story plays out on a simple but evocative set from Dayna Morrissey.  Tiered terraces represent the bleachers of a stadium, suggesting the all-in-public, show business nature of this cautionary tale – an effect aided nicely by Danny Pettingill’s lighting. 

In the end, maybe Mr Cowell bites off more than he can chew in that he attempts to provide answers to the questions the play poses.  Dean goes to a therapist and wonders if his father walking out on him and Liam had an effect.  Well?  Liam has an impassioned speech that challenges the audience, asking how the players can be, are expected to be, violent on the field and ‘nice’ off it.  It’s a fair question, but it avoids another: how did the sport become this?  Was it always so?  Now that sports are big business and the players over-paid, over-cossetted employees, has that changed anything? 

Nevertheless, this is a succinct and engaging eighty minutes that confronts some sad aspects of human behaviour with wry humour and without flinching.  Looking around the audience on opening night, I suspected there were a fair few footy players amongst the crowd.  I wonder what they made of it.

Michael Brindley

Images: Ben O’Toole (Liam) and Josh McConville (Dean) & Ben O’Toole (Liam), Josh McConville (Dean) and Anna Samson (Amber). Photos © Jeff Busby

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