Surprise Party with Jem and Dead Max

Here’s a show that kicks off with balloons, party poppers and a big sign saying ‘Happy 21^st Birthday’.  Jem (Anna Kennedy) is giving a surprise party for Max (Christian Taylor) and the audience is included as guests.  When Max arrives, we all shout ‘Happy Birthday, Max!’  And he’s surprised to see us.  But he is thrilled that Jem is throwing him a party.  What is a little unusual about this is that Max is dead, killed in a motorcycle ‘accident, (so that he has some token streaks of blood on his face).  That’s the central (rather muddled) conceit of Georgia Symons’ play. 

What follows is a series of party ‘activities’ in which dead Max searches the stage for souvenirs Jem has hidden of his and her shared past.  As he finds each souvenir, it triggers a reminiscence of a party, or a night at the movies, or trips somewhere, and so on, evidence of a close friendship between the pair.  Unfortunately, these reminiscences are just a little banal and, as Max hunts for yet another item, the audience begins to hope that the next bit of the past will be more interesting than the last.  The significance of these linked scenes isn’t helped by much of the dialogue being garbled or mumbled, particularly by Mr Taylor, or just not loud enough.  (‘Am I just going deaf?’ I wondered.  No, in the last play I saw at the La Mama Courthouse, Williamson’s Credentials, I could hear every word.)  We gather, however, that Max would have liked the nature of the relationship to change to something more sexual… but Jem liked things very much as they were… 

Dead Max-in-the-present isn’t a ghost.  If he haunts anything or anywhere, it is Jem’s memory.  He is the construct of her memory.  Logically, this means that all Max-in-the-past’s words and actions are only what Jem remembers him saying and doing, and her Max-in-the-present can only say what she thinks he would say.  The ‘surprise party’ (an ambush) is her rather elaborate and bizarre way of coming to terms with their past.  After its bright, fun beginning and its happy, playful memories, the play turns dark - and Jem cannot ever really know what alive-Max thought or believed because now he is dead.

The episodic nature of the narrative thus constructed appears to box director Iris Gaillard into sending her actors scurrying from place to place – from movie theatre seats to toy tent to car back seat to couch – to re-enact each memory - with Shane Grant’s lighting scrambling to catch up.

There is something of real substance underneath this poorly conceived and constructed play with its jumbled direction, but it takes almost an hour to get to the real issue Jem longs to resolve – and it’s an issue, once we do get to it, with which many women will identify.  Perhaps the intention is to ‘by misdirection find direction out’, but there is too much here for its own sake and the ‘surprise party’ ends up as forgotten gimmick – a set-up that cannot pay off.  The fatal irony is that it can’t: Max is dead. 

Michael Brindley