As We Forgive

Premiered by Tasmanian Performs three years ago, these three beautiful, revelatory monologues by Tom Holloway are welcome visitors to Sydney’s space for new Australian playwriting. It’s madness that such hits in one state rarely cross the border to another.

In these vicious times of shrinking budgets, perhaps this one is on the road because it’s only one actor, a cello and a few chairs.

As We Forgive are billed as three “morality plays for an amoral age”, one from an old man, a victim of a home invasion, celebrating the satisfaction of vengeance; another celebrating the decades he’s lived with hatred for his own abusive father; and a third seeking forgiveness from himself and his wife for an accidental killing.  Yes, it’s tough stuff; without too many gags.

Holloway’s skill is in his nuanced, gradual revelation of each man and their totally plausible, if non-PC, visceral thirst for revenge.  In each case, his writing skips provocatively beyond the actual climatic moment of bloodletting or violence. 

Speaking directly, companionably, to his audience, Tasmanian actor Robert Jarman does not clearly delineate each character – or are they stages in the same very unfortunate man?  Jarman certainly plays them all as isolated pedants, unworldly and with an irritating banality of humour.  Nowadays, we call it Asperger’s.  To the last character at least, the father racked by that accident, he gives a rougher working man’s speech. 

Aside from the empathy lost by this fudging of characters or the same brutalised character across time, Jarman’s performance is compelling and precisely measured.  Directed unobtrusively by Julian Meyrick, the stories are broken only by some shifting chairs and Jack Ward on mournful cello. Lisa Garland’s impressive projections of dark suburban and domestic interior detail also gives a welcome context to these powerful, self-referential monologues.

Martin Portus