Sweet Phoebe

Sweet Phoebe
By Michael Gow. Red Stitch. East St Kilda, VIC. 3 February – 3 March 2019

Here’s a story about how a simple friendly gesture – like agreeing to dog-sit for a week – can disrupt two yuppies’ lives, change them, and reveal worlds they never knew existed. 

Michael Gow’s comedy, first produced twenty-five years ago, hasn’t dated at all.  The professions and attendant frustrations of Helen (Olivia Monticciolo) and Frazer (Marcus McKenzie) are just as ‘now’ as they were then.  So also is their determinedly ‘supportive’, structured relationship – they have done a ‘couples’ course’ – so that Frazer backs Helen’s (rather silly) interior design ideas all the way, and Helen is thrilled at Frazer’s elevation to financial manager of a new start-up – its business unspecified.  Laura Jean Hawkins’ set design – a windowless box of what might be black marble – strikes an ominous note from the start – as if where Helen and Frazer run their pre-set conversations, exchange their first world frustrations and even make love – is something to be escaped. 

When Helen – to Frazer’s chagrin – agrees to mind Phoebe, another couple’s dog – so they can do a couples’ course – the differences between Helen and Frazer appear and the cracks open up.

Dog owners – and dog-sitters – in the audience chuckle with recognition – as Phoebe (no, never on stage) beguiles Frazer and both he and Helen begin to enjoy the dog walks to the park and beyond, and the interesting and not so interesting people they meet.  If nothing else, it gives them something to talk about without the forced grins and ‘concern’ of the successful modern couple.  The transition is nicely, sweetly and economically handled by Mr Gow, Mr McKenzie and Ms Monticciolo, but that is only the set-up.  I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say the real meat of the play comes when Phoebe disappears…

Mr McKenzie’s Frazer is frantic and throws himself into the search, but it’s in the nature of the character to do so in a more dutiful than caring spirit.  It’s in the nature of the text that Frazer virtually becomes Helen’s audience.  Now Ms Monticciolo – no doubt with the guidance of director Mark Wilson - comes into her own.  Her Helen is wonderful: varied, meticulously detailed, very funny and vastly entertaining.  She vividly describes, she does voices, she sings, she transforms, she is frightened, she is amazed, she is enthralled.  At times it is as if she goes into a trance.  It is a great performance – and, really, the strength of the play and worth the price of admission.

Helen and Frazer do the usual thing: fliers on lamp posts, ads in the newspapers, but as the search continues (everything else goes on hold), the play moves more and more into the absurd – and even surreal.  Anyone who knows the geography of Sydney will realise that the reported ‘sightings’ of Phoebe are in such widely spread locales that it is impossible that the dog could be there.  And yet Helen goes to every single one – she must be driving miles every day – but it is her account of what she finds and whom she meets that carries the play on… until…  Well, you must see it.      

Michael Brindley

Images: Teresa Noble Photography

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