The Way Out

Helen (Brigid Gallacher) runs a decrepit pub in the middle of a nowhere that was once maybe a somewhere – before the civil war, before the country was divided and poisoned by chemical weapons so that nothing grows, before the totalitarian government with its draconian laws took over.  Somehow Helen maintains a sense of humour and some optimism, maybe because she thinks there’s a way out…  Meanwhile, she and her bitter, one-armed war veteran father, Stewart (Dion Mills), sell illegal and probably lethal hooch brewed up by Claire (Olga Makeeva), a fiercely independent woman with iron in her soul.  Law and order is the business of the Big Brother type government, but the token cop in these parts is Ryan (Kevin Hofbauer), resigned to knowing his position is nominal and a joke. 

Charlotte Lane’s precisely expressive set and Claire Springett’s and Michael Robinson’s lighting keys us into this barren future immediately: the glass panels in the pub door are caked with red dust and it’s as if the whole room is coated with it.  When the doors swing open we glimpse a fine haze drifting above a baking plain.  The costumes are grubby, utilitarian, with pockets for survival tools.  Everyone needs a breathing apparatus to go outside.  A nice touch: you automatically hang your mask on special hooks when you come in.  The routine, albeit necessary, suggests acceptance and defeat.

This then is Helen’s world, but Helen has found a patch of unpolluted ground and nurtures a tiny, secret plant.  When she produces it from under the bar, it gleams like a little green jewel in all that ochre, brown and grey.  The monotony is interrupted – or disrupted – by the arrival of black marketeer Harry (Sahil Saluja) with his disparate collection of tawdry good for sale – and Fyfe (Rory Kelly), a government inspector in a white safari suit and a foppish, glittering grin…  The latter, of course, has the power of life and death over all the others.  Mr Kelly’s government inspector is a curious piece of casting and direction by Penny Harpham.  Fyfe is supposedly a dangerous man with the power of life and death and yet Mr Kelly (so brilliant in Trevor) plays him as a rather ineffectual clown, a boy who got the job because he’s someone’s son-in-law.  Or is that the point?       

There have been by this been so many depictions of a dystopian future – whether as a warning or just because we enjoy a frisson of fear – that it is difficult to say or show much that is new.  The difficulty is compounded on stage, where the dystopian world outside must be conveyed in words and perhaps adapted costumes – and since that is the case here, a lot of words (i.e. exposition or ‘explaining’) are needed to fill us in on where we’re at and how things work.  Playwright Josephine Collins tries to make her dystopian world different from other dystopian worlds we’ve seen (1984, Blade Runner, Mad Max in all its iterations.)  Sometimes she succeeds (she doesn’t fall back on good old ‘climate change’) and at other times she’s stuck with all-too-familiar tropes that are by now, unfortunately clichés.  The need to explain is a central problem with The Way Out because it is at times complicated and hard to follow, and a great deal of the running time is devoted to explaining.  We become impatient for something to happen and the emotional heart of the play starts to slip away.  The Red Stitch cast breathes life into the play, but I think I’m more likely to remember them than the play itself.

It’s had a long gestation period and has been developed for some of that through the Red Stitch INK program.  That program per se is an excellent and generous idea, assisting emerging writers with their craft and ideas, but in a (rather gushy) program note Ms Harpham lists nineteen actors that have had a hand in the play’s realisation – plus three dramaturgs, the current cast and Ms Harpham herself.  That may well be part of the problem: too many voices, too much piecemeal input over too long a time for an inexperienced playwright.  As the great screenwriter Frank Pierson remarked, ‘development is like being nibbled to death by ducks’.  The Way Out is certainly well-intentioned (and here, well-acted), but its ideas - and its leading idea - are overcome by inadequate craft this time round.  Onto the next one, Josephine Collins.

Michael Brindley